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

The report on the question of the historic course from the 23rd ICC Congress, which we are publishing here, confirms a significant change of analysis in relation to the one elaborated in a basic ICC text from 1978 entitled “The historic course” (International Review 18).

Briefly, this change in analysis flows directly from the modification of the world situation that followed the fall of the eastern imperialist bloc, which led in turn to the disintegration of the western bloc. In this new situation, which marked the definite entry of the world into capitalism’s period of decomposition, it was necessary to analyse the consequently significant change in the evolution of the balance of forces between the classes; in particular the fact that the alternative between revolution and the destruction of humanity through world war was no longer posed in the same terms, given that, with the disappearance of the imperialist blocs, world war was no longer on the agenda. 

By making the necessary change in our analysis, we were adopting the method of Marx and the marxist movement since its inception, which consists of changing positions, analyses and even the programme as a whole as soon as it no longer corresponds to the march of history; this is fully in line with the goals of marxism as a revolutionary theory. The most celebrated example of this is the important modifications which Marx and Engels made to the Communist Manifesto itself, summarised in the later prefaces they added to this fundamental text, in the light of the historic changes that had taken place.

 “Marxism is a revolutionary world outlook which must always strive for new discoveries, which completely despises rigidity in once-valid theses, and whose living force is best preserved in the intellectual clash of self-criticism and the rough and tumble of history” (Rosa Luxemburg, An Anti-critique)

Rosa’s insistence, in this period, on the necessity to reconsider prior analyses in order to remain faithful to the nature and method of marxism as a revolutionary theory was directly linked to the profound significance of the First World War. The 1914-18 war marked a turning point in capitalism as a mode of production, its passage from a period of ascent and progress to a new period of decadence and collapse which fundamentally changed the conditions and the programme of the workers’ movement. But only the left wing of the Second International began to recognise that the previous period had definitely ended and that the proletariat was now entering into the “epoch of wars and revolution” as the Third International was to call it. The opportunist right of Social Democracy had falsely claimed that the first inter-imperialist war was a war of national defence like the limited, minor wars of the 19th century – and thus joined forces with the imperialist bourgeoisie – while the centrist wing argued that the war was just a temporary aberration and that things would go back to normal after the cessation of hostilities. The representatives of these two currents ended up fighting against the revolutionary proletarian wave which put an end to the First World War, whereas the leading figures of these proletarian uprisings such as Rosa, Lenin and Trotsky, in the newly formed Communist parties, preserved the “honour of international socialism” by setting aside the outmoded formulae of social democracy, which were now being used to justify the counter-revolution.

The unprecedented changes marked by the end of the Cold War in 1989 were not of the same breadth of those of 1914. But they did mark a significant step in the development of capitalist decadence, coinciding with the emergence of its final phase, the phase of social decomposition. While the turning point of 1989 did not change the programme of the working class, which retains its validity throughout the decadence of capitalism, it did imply a major change with regard to the conditions within which the class struggle had evolved up until then, in the seven decades between 1914 and 1989. The report we are publishing here is a contribution to the critical effort to develop a marxist analysis of this major turning point in world history.

In 1989, at the time of these world-shaking events, the ICC was already analysing, in various texts, the very important changes taking place. In the Theses on Decomposition (IR 62, 1990) and the text “Militarism and Decomposition” (IR 64, 1991), the ICC predicted that the ensuing period would be dominated by an accelerated putrefaction, the descent into chaos of a dying system, still suffering the violent and destructive contradictions of capitalist decadence but in a new form and context. The resurgence of the proletarian class struggle, which had begun in 1968 and which had prevented a third world war from being unleashed, would now come up against new difficulties and a long period of retreat and disorientation, even though the aggravation of the world economic crisis would in the future push the proletariat to take up the struggle again.

Furthermore, the collapse of the eastern bloc had put an end, perhaps definitively, to the division of the world into two armed camps, which had been the principal way that the world imperialism had operated in its decadent phase. The first and second world wars, as well as the events that preceded and followed them, showed that capitalism could no longer evolve thanks to colonial expansion as in the 19th century, and that what remained for the rival imperialisms was to attempt to carry out a new division of the world market to their own advantage, through the massacre of war. And this attempt was articulated through a tendency towards the grouping of various countries behind the two most powerful gangsters, a process fully confirmed after 1945. After the 1914-89 period dominated by the division of the world into two rival imperialist blocs, the tendency towards the formation of blocs ceased to be the dominant one in inter-imperialist relations, and each power would from now on follow its own blood-soaked path in a world of “every man for himself”.

The report examines and reaffirms this analysis following the modifications after 1989. But it extends it further.

In 2015, the 21st ICC Congress launched a long-term project of reviewing 40 years of its existence, of “making as lucid an examination as possible of our strengths and weaknesses; of what was valid in our analyses and what errors we have made in order to arm ourselves to overcome them”. (“40 years after the foundation of the ICC”, IR 156)

The report on the question of the historic course from the 23rd Congress is a consequence of this specific effort and pushes forward the analysis already contained in the texts produced 30 years ago, re-examining point by point the original text on the historic course from 1978. In doing so, it concludes that the very term “historic course” can no longer be considered as adequate for covering the conditions pertaining to all historical periods of the class struggle. It applies to the period from Sarajevo in 1914 to the collapse of the USSR in 1989, but not to the periods before and after this. In drawing this conclusion, the report underlines a very important distinction between two different concepts:

• On the one hand, the concept of the historic course, applicable to the period from Sarajevo to the fall of the Berlin wall (including its different phases) and which concerns the dynamic of society during this period, indissolubly linked but not identical to the balance of forces between the classes
• On the other hand, the concept of the balance of forces between the classes, which is applicable to all periods of the class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat.

These two concepts - historic course and balance of forces between the classes – are thus neither identical nor synonymous, but the 1978 text doesn’t clearly make this distinction.

We are a happy to say that, prior to its publication, the report has already stimulated a public debate (a number of contributions to our online forum on the question since July[1]), since its main conclusions already figured in the Resolution on the International Situation from the 23rd Congress which had already been published. This is not the time to make a balance sheet of this debate which is only just beginning. But it needs to develop. Critical debate is an essential part of the marxist effort to develop a new understanding as we negotiate the “rough and tumble of history”.

According to the materialist conception of history developed by Marx, the contradictions of the capitalist system lead to a historic alternative: socialism or barbarism; either a struggle leading to the overthrow of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat or the mutual ruin of these contending classes and society itself.

Understanding the development of the class struggle within capitalism – its different historical stages, its advances and retreats, the changing relative strengths of the adversaries – has therefore been of decisive importance for the analyses of the communist vanguard of the proletariat and an intrinsic aspect of the application of the marxist method.

The major changes in the parameters of the world situation in 1989, brought about by the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the entry of decadent capitalism into its final phase of social decomposition, led the organisation to take into account the growing difficulties of the proletariat in this new situation, and to modify its analyses of the dynamic of society in relation to the balance of forces between the classes. In point of fact, this analysis, contained in the text on the Historic Course (HC78) from the 3rd Congress of the ICC in 1978[1] was no longer entirely appropriate to a post-1989 world where imperialist rivalries would no longer be channeled into the confrontation of two imperialist blocs and where the resulting capitalist response of another imperialist world war was removed from the historical agenda for the foreseeable future. The texts produced by the ICC immediately after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc such as on “Militarism and Decomposition” (IR64,1991), the “Theses on Decomposition” (IR62, 1990), the article “After the collapse of the Eastern bloc, destabilisation and chaos”, (IR61, 1990), already clearly framed the scenario of the world balance of class forces in a different way to the paradigm of the HC78 text.

In the intervening two decades the ICC has elaborated this change of analysis of the balance of class forces, and of what this implies for the dynamic of society, in many texts and articles, particularly in published reports and resolutions on the class struggle for its International Congresses, confirming in particular the increased difficulties and threats to the proletariat created by the period of the social decomposition of capitalism.

In this regard for example, we can point to the report on the class struggle for the ICC 13th Congress in 1999 (IR99) or the report on the class struggle for the 14th Congress in 2001 (IR107) which was subtitled “The concept of the historic course in the revolutionary movement”.

Other articles dealing with the problem of the balance of class forces in the period of decomposition should also be taken into account, such as “Why the proletariat has not yet overthrown capitalism” (IR 103 and 104), and the articles “Understanding the decomposition of capitalism”, that of IR 117 in particular.[2]

However, despite having developed the main theoretical elements to understand what has changed in the balance of class forces the organisation up to now has carried out no specific re-examination of the HC78 text. Obviously a rectification of this anomaly – even if belated – is required if we are to be scrupulously true to our historical method of not only amending or changing our analysis and argumentation in light of major events but also of justifying this change in specific reference to the original analysis. Our political method has never been to abandon previous positions or analyses without publicly settling accounts with what went before, because an ahistorical invariance or monolithism is impossible and a barrier to the clarification of class consciousness. What remains valid in the HC78 text, what has been overtaken by the changed historical context within decadent capitalism, and how the latter has revealed the limitations of the HC78 text must be more explicitly understood and explained, in order that any remaining anachronisms can be revealed and clarified.

A summary of the points of the HC78 text.

Point 1) Revolutionaries need to make predictions. In fact it is a specific capacity and need of human consciousness to predict (cf Marx’s comparison of the instinctive bee with the conscious human architect). Marxism, as a scientific method, like science as a whole,
“by transforming a series of experiences into predictions, and by confronting these predictions with new experiences the researcher can verify (or invalidate) these hypotheses and advance his understanding”[3]

Marxism bases its prediction of the communist revolution on a scientific, materialist analysis of the collapse of capitalism and of the class interests of the revolutionary proletariat.

This general and long term perspective is relatively straightforward for Marxists. The difficulty for revolutionaries comes in making medium term predictions of whether the class struggle is advancing or retreating. In the first place Marxism cannot obviously rely on controlled experiments as laboratory science can.

 Point 2) Moreover the proletarian class struggle is characterised by very different periods of evolution, of extreme troughs and peaks, as a result of the fact that the working class is an exploited class with no power base in the old society and therefore destined for long periods of subjection. The relatively short upsurges of its combat are determined by periods of crisis in capitalism (economic crisis and war).  The proletariat cannot advance from strength to strength as new exploiting classes have been able to do in the past. In fact, the proletariat’s final victory is conditioned by a long series of painful defeats. Hence Marx’s statement in The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon of 1852 about the extremely uneven evolution of the class struggle[4]. The existence of such a jagged development of the class struggle was obvious in the past but the length and depth of the counter revolution between 1923 and 1968 has tended to obscure it.

Point 3) Nevertheless, accurate medium-term predictions by revolutionaries for the evolution of the balance of class forces are essential. The consequences of mistakes in this regard are eloquent: the adventurism of Willich-Schapper after the defeats of the 1848 revolutions; the KAPD’s ‘theory of the offensive’ as the revolutionary wave ebbed in the 1920s, Trotsky’s inauguration of the 4th International in 1938 in the depths of the counter revolution.

In contrast to these examples some predictions have been shown to be perfectly valid: Marx and Engels recognising that after 1849 and 1871 a period of working class retreat was inevitable; Lenin’s prediction in the April Theses of 1917 of the flood tide of the world revolution; the Italian left’s identification of the 30s as a period of decisive defeat.

Points 4/5/11) Predicting the direction of the class struggle indicates whether revolutionaries swim with or against the stream. Mistakes or ignorance about what this direction is can be catastrophic. This has been particularly true in capitalist decadence where the stakes, imperialist war or proletarian revolution, are so much higher than in the period of capitalist ascendancy.

Point 6) The opposition and mutual exclusion of the two terms of the historic alternative, war or revolution. While the crisis of decadent capitalism can result in either of these alternatives, the latter do not develop in unison but antagonistically. This point is addressed particularly to Battaglia Comunista and the CWO who saw, and still see, world war and revolution as equally possible in the period since 1968.

Points 7/8) These points are dedicated to showing that the imperialist world wars of the 20th century and particularly that of 1939-45 could only unfold once the proletariat had been defeated, once its revolutionary attempts were crushed and once it had then been mobilised behind the war ideologies of its respective imperialist masters with the help of the treachery of former workers’ parties which had crossed to the other side of the class line.

Point 9) The situation of the proletariat since 1968 is not the same as it was prior to the previous two world wars. It is undefeated and combative, resistant to the mobilising ideologies of the imperialist blocs, and thus provides a barrier to the unleashing of a third world war.

Point 10) All the military and economic conditions for a new world war already exist, only the adhesion of the proletariat is missing, a point also addressed to Battaglia who had other, implausible, explanations for why world war had not broken out yet.

Commentary on the HC78

What remains true in the text.

The first five points of the HC78 text retain all their relevance to the importance and necessity for revolutionaries to forecast the future evolution of the class struggle: the vindication of the need for such predictions from the point of view of the marxist method; the pertinency of the historical examples which show the critical nature of the forecasts of revolutionaries concerning the class struggle and the serious consequences of mistakes in this regard; the arguments against the indifference or agnosticism of Battaglia and the CWO on this question.

The central argument of the text also retains all its validity for the period 1914-1989. With the onset of the period of the decadence of capitalism the conditions of the evolution of the balance of class forces changed fundamentally from those of the period of ascendance.  The tendency of imperialism in the period of decadence to lead to world-wide conflagrations between rival blocs requiring the mobilisation of the working class en masse as cannon fodder broke out with full force in the First World War.  The outbreak of hostilities depended on a political defeat of the main battalions of the world proletariat. The Social Democratic Parties and the trade unions, putrefied by a long process of opportunist and revisionist degeneration, failed at the critical moment in 1914, and, apart from a few exceptions, abandoned internationalism and joined the war effort of their own national imperialisms, dragging the disoriented working class behind it. The experience of the unprecedented slaughter of workers in uniform in the trenches and the misery on the ‘home front’ however led, after a few years, to the recovery of the weight of the proletariat on the scales of the balance of class forces and opened a world revolutionary wave from 1917-1923, which as a consequence obliged the bourgeoisie to bring the war to an end to forestall the contagion of proletarian revolution.

From the First World War onwards therefore the notion of a historic course in the class struggle toward either war or revolution acquired a profound veracity. In order to impose its military response to the crises of capitalist decadence imperialism required the defeat of the revolutionary aspirations of the proletariat and, when these were crushed, its mobilisation behind the interests of the bourgeoisie. Conversely a resurgent proletariat provided a major obstacle to this endeavour and opened the possibility of the proletariat’s solution: communist revolution.

The defeat of the revolution in Russia and in Germany and elsewhere in the 1920s facilitated the course to a Second World War. Contrary to the period that followed the First World War, the period after the Second did not see a reversal of the course, the proletariat having been defeated not only politically but also physically by the unprecedented brutality  and terror of Stalinism and fascism on the one hand and democratic anti-fascism on the other before, during and immediately after the mass carnage. No revolutionary wave emerged from the ruins of the 1939-45 war as it had from the war of 1914-18. This situation of continued proletarian defeat did not however lead to a third world war after 1945, as revolutionaries at the time thought it would. The 1950s and 60s entailed a long economic reconstruction and a protracted Cold War, with proxy local wars. During this period, the proletariat gradually recovered its strength, and the weight of the war ideologies of the 30s receded. With the outbreak of a new world economic crisis, a new resurgence of class struggle began in 1968 which frustrated another imperialist solution of a third world war. But the working class wasn’t able to move from its defensive struggles to a revolutionary offensive. The collapse of one of the two contending imperialist blocs, the Eastern Bloc, in 1989, effectively put an end to the possibility of world war, although imperialist war itself continued to accelerate in a chaotic form under the impulse of the worsening world economic crisis. 

Where the HC78 text is no longer applicable.

To understand this problem we will first quote extensively from a plenary meeting of our international central organ in January 1990:

 “In the period of capitalist decadence, all states are imperialist, and take the necessary measures to satisfy their appetites: war economy, arms production, etc. We must state clearly that the deepening convulsions of the world economy can only sharpen the opposition between different states, including and increasingly on the military level. The difference, in the coming period, will be that these antagonisms which were previously contained and used by the two great imperialist blocs will now come to the fore. The disappearance of the Russian imperialist gendarme, and that to come of the American gendarme, as far as its one-time "partners" are concerned, opens the door to the unleashing of a whole series of more local rivalries. For the moment, these rivalries and confrontations cannot degenerate into a world war (even supposing that the proletariat were no longer capable of putting up a resistance). However, with the disappearance of the discipline imposed by the two blocs, these conflicts are liable to become more frequent and more violent, especially of course in those areas where the proletariat is weakest…

... the trend towards a new division of the world between two military blocs is thwarted, and may even be definitively compromised, by the increasingly deep and widespread phenomenon of the decomposition of capitalist society as we have already highlighted (see International Review No. 57)

In such a context of loss of control of the situation by the world bourgeoisie, it is not likely that the dominant sectors of the world bourgeoisie are today in a position to implement the organisation and discipline necessary for the reconstitution of military blocs…

…This is why it is fundamental to highlight that, if the solution of the proletariat - communist revolution - is the only one that can oppose the destruction of humanity (which constitutes the only ‘response’ that the bourgeoisie can provide to its crisis), this destruction would not necessarily result from a third world war. It could also result from the continuation, up to its extreme consequences (ecological disasters, epidemics, famines, unleashed local wars, etc.) of this decomposition.

The historical alternative ‘Socialism or Barbarism’, as highlighted by marxism, after having materialised in the form of ‘Socialism or World Imperialist War’ during most of the 20th century, has become more specific in the terrifying form of ‘Socialism or Destruction of Humanity’ during the last decades due to the development of atomic weapons. Today, after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, this perspective remains entirely valid. But it should be emphasised that such destruction may come from generalised imperialist war OR from the decomposition of society. (…)

Even if the world war cannot, at the present time, and perhaps definitively, constitute a threat to the life of humanity, this threat may very well come, as we have seen, from the decomposition of society. And this is all the more so since if the unleashing of the world war requires the adherence of the proletariat to the ideals of the bourgeoisie, a phenomenon which is by no means on the agenda at the moment for its decisive battalions, decomposition does not need such adherence to destroy humanity. Indeed, the decomposition of society does not, strictly speaking, constitute a ‘response’ of the bourgeoisie to the open crisis of the world economy. In reality, this phenomenon may develop precisely because the ruling class is not in a position, due to the non-recruitment of the proletariat, to provide its own specific response to this crisis, the world war and the mobilisation for it. The working class, by developing its struggles (as it has done since the late 1960s), by not allowing itself to be enrolled behind bourgeois flags, can prevent the bourgeoisie from unleashing world war. On the other hand, only the overthrow of capitalism can stop the decomposition of society. Just as the struggles of the proletariat in this system cannot in any way oppose the economic collapse of capitalism, so the struggles of the proletariat in this system cannot constitute an obstacle to its decomposition. "

Thus, 1989 marks a fundamental change in the general dynamics of capitalist society in decadence.

Before that date, the balance of power between the classes was the determining factor in this dynamic: it was on this balance of power that the outcome of the exacerbation of the contradictions of capitalism depended: either the unleashing of the world war, or the development of class struggle with, in perspective, the overthrow of capitalism.

After that date, this general dynamic of capitalist decadence is no longer directly determined by the balance of power between classes. Whatever the balance of power, world war is no longer on the agenda, but capitalism will continue to sink into decay, since social decomposition tends to spiral out of the control of the contending classes.

In the paradigm that dominated most of the 20th century, the notion of a "historical course" defined the two possible outcomes of a historical trend: either world war or class clashes. Once the proletariat had suffered a decisive defeat (as on the eve of 1914 or as a result of the crushing of the revolutionary wave of 1917-23), world war became inevitable. In the paradigm that defines the current situation (until two new imperialist blocs are reconstituted, which may never happen), it is quite possible that the proletariat will suffer a deep defeat without this having a decisive consequence for the general evolution of society. One may wonder, of course, whether such a defeat could have the consequence of permanently preventing the proletariat from raising its head. We would then have to talk about a definitive defeat that would lead to the end of humanity. Such a possibility cannot be ruled out, particularly given the increasing weight of decomposition. This threat is clearly indicated by the 9th Congress Manifesto: "Communist Revolution or Destruction of Humanity". But we cannot make a prognosis in this direction, neither in relation to the current situation of weakness of the working class, nor even if this situation worsens further. This is why the concept of the "historical course" is no longer able to define the dynamic of the current world situation and the balance of power between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat in the period of decomposition. Having become a concept inadequate for this new period, it has to be abandoned.

To conclude: the HC78 text, while preserving all its veracity from the point of view of method and the analysis of the period 1914–1989,  is now limited, firstly, by having been overtaken by major and unprecedented historic events; secondly by its tendency to identify the notion of historical course and the notion of the evolution of the balance of power between classes as the same, whereas they are not identical. In particular, the HC78 text speaks of the historical course to describe the different moments of class struggle in the 19th century when, in fact:

- an increase in workers' struggles did not mean the prospect of a revolutionary period at a time when proletarian revolution was not yet on the agenda, nor could it prevent a major war from breaking out (for example, the war between France and Prussia in 1870 when the power of the proletariat was rising);

- a major defeat of the proletariat (such as the crushing of the Paris Commune) did not result in a new war.

In a way, this tendency to mistakenly identify the historical course with the balance of class forces in general is similar to the imprecise way the concept of opportunism has been used. For some time, there was, within the ICC and more broadly in the political milieu, an identification between opportunism and reformism. At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, even if such an identification was already a mistake, it was based on a reality: indeed, at that time, one of the major manifestations of opportunism was constituted by reformism. But with the entry of capitalism into its period of decadence, reformism no longer has its place in the workers’ movement: organisations or currents that advocate the replacement of capitalism by socialism through progressive reforms of the current system necessarily belong to the side of the bourgeoisie, while opportunism continues to constitute a disease that can affect, and carry away, proletarian organisations.

We have tended, on the basis of what the working class experienced during the 20th century, to identify the notion of the evolution of the balance of power between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat with the notion of a “historical course”, whereas the latter indicates a fundamental alternative outcome, the world war or revolution, a sanction of this balance of power. In a way, the current historical situation is similar to that of the 19th century: the balance of power between classes can evolve in one direction or another without decisively affecting the life of society. Similarly, this balance of power or its evolution cannot be described as a "course". In this sense, the term "defeat of the proletariat", if it retains all its operational value in the current period, can no longer have the same meaning as in the period before 1989. What is important, on the other hand, is to take into account and study constantly, the evolution of the balance of power between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat: can we consider that this evolution is in favour of the proletariat (which does not yet mean that there can be no turning back) or that we are in a dynamic of the weakening of the class (knowing that this dynamic can also be reversed).

In a more general and long term sense dispensing with the concept of the “historic course” brings into sharper relief  the need of revolutionary marxists to make a more profound historical study of the entire evolution of the proletarian class struggle in order to better understand the criteria for evaluating the balance of class forces in the period of capitalist decomposition.

Last spring, the ICC held its 23rd International Congress. This article proposes to give an account of its work.

Point 4 of the “Report on the structure and functioning of the revolutionary organisation” defines the International Congress as “The highest moment in the unity of the organisation... It is at the International Congress that the programme of the ICC is defined, enriched, or rectified; that its ways of organising and functioning are established, made more precise or modified; that its overall orientations and analyses are adopted; that a balance sheet of its past activities is made and perspectives for future work drawn up”[1].

This Congress was centred round our continuity with the Communist International, whose centenary was last year. Historical continuity and transmission are a fundamental concern for the revolutionary organisation. It was with this approach that the activities resolution adopted by the Congress recalled that “the Communist International was founded a hundred years ago in March 1919 with the intention to be the ‘party of the revolutionary insurrection of the world proletariat’. Today, in different circumstances but in conditions still defined by the historic epoch of the decadence of capitalism, the objective posed by the Communist International, the creation of the world political party of the revolutionary working class, remains the ultimate aim of the fraction-like work of the ICC”.

 The resolution insists on the fact that “the Communist International was not created out of the blue, its foundation was dependent on the preceding decades of the fraction work of the marxist left in the 2nd International, particularly by the Bolshevik Party…[2]”. Which means for today’s revolutionaries that “just as the Comintern could not have been created without the preparatory work of the marxist left, so the future international will not come to be without an international centralised fraction-like activity of the organisational inheritors of the Communist Left”.

Recalling that “the Communist International was founded in the most difficult circumstances imaginable: it followed four years of mass carnage and immiseration of the world proletariat; the revolutionary bastion in Russia was subject to a total blockade and military intervention by the imperialist powers; the Spartacist Revolt in Germany had been drowned in blood and two of the key figures of the new International, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, murdered”, the resolution underlines that, despite the differences with the period of revolutionary response to the First World War and the ensuing counter-revolution, “The ICC faces increasingly difficult conditions as decadent capitalism sinks further into another barbaric spiral of economic crisis and imperialist conflict in its phase of decomposition. To accomplish its historic tasks ICC must draw strength and its fighting spirit from the crises it will face, as did the marxist left of 1919”.

Fraction-like work

To place ourselves in a line of continuity with the efforts of the Communist International, the Congress saw its aim as developing and concretising our work as being similar to that of a fraction. The notion of the fraction has always been crucial in the history of the workers’ movement. Like the working class as a whole, its political organisations are subjected to the pressure of alien ideologies, both bourgeois and petty bourgeois. This engenders, in particular, the disease of opportunism.[3] To fight against this disease, the proletariat gives rise to left fractions within its organisations:

“It has always been the left that has ensured the continuity between the proletariat’s three main international political organisations. It was the left, through the marxist current, which ensured the continuity between the 1st and 2nd International, against the Proudhonist, Bakuninist, Blanquist, and corporatist currents. It was the left, which fought first of all the reformist tendencies, and then the “social-patriots”, which ensured the continuity between the 2nd and 3rd International during the war, then by forming the Communist International. And it was the left, once again, and in particular the Italian and German lefts, which took up and developed the revolutionary gains of the 3rd International, trodden under foot by the social-democratic and Stalinist counter-revolution”[4].

If its struggle is to be victorious, the proletariat requires a continuity in its class consciousness. Otherwise it is doomed to be the plaything of the schemes of its enemy. The left fractions have always been the most committed and determined in the defence of this continuity in class consciousness, in its development and enrichment.

Groups like the Internationalist Communist tendency (ICT) make the following objection: fraction of what? For a long time there have been no communist parties within the proletariat[5]. And it’s true that, in the 1930s, the Communist Parties were definitively won over by the bourgeoisie. We are not fractions, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t have to carry out a work similar to that of a fraction[6]. A work which unites into a coherent whole:

• The fight against opportunism;
• The defence and development of the critical historical continuity of the proletariat, forming a bridge between the past of the workers’ movement and its future;
• The response to new situations arising in society and the proletarian class struggle.

The Congress deepened our understanding of fraction-like work at the level of our press, our intervention, theoretical method, the elaboration of marxist method and the defence of the organization. There is a whole work involved in constructing the bridge towards the future party which will have to be based on very firm theoretical, programmatic, analytical and organisational foundations. This is what the proletariat needs if it is find a path through the terrible convulsions of capitalism and develop a revolutionary offensive aimed at overthrowing this system. 

In this framework of fraction-like work a Report on Transmission was presented to the Congress, although due to lack of time we weren’t able to discuss it. However, given the importance of the question, we will take charge of discussing it in the coming period. Transmission is vital for the proletariat. Much more than all the other revolutionary classes in history, it needs the lessons of the battles of its preceding generations in order to assimilate their acquisitions and take its struggle forward towards its revolutionary goals. Transmission is particularly important for the continuity of revolutionary organisations because there is a whole series of approaches, practices, traditions and experiences which belong to the proletariat and are the fertile soil in which the proletarian political organisation elaborates its way of functioning and maintains its vitality. As it says in the activities resolution adopted by the Congress: “the ICC must be able to transmit to new comrades the necessity to study thoroughly the history of the revolutionary movement and develop a growing knowledge of the different elements of the experience of the communist left in the period of counter revolution”.

The report on transmission devotes a central chapter to understanding the conditions of militancy and the historical acquisitions which have to guide it. Forming conscious, determined militants, capable of standing up to the hardest tests, is a very difficult task but its indispensable for the formation of the future party of the proletarian revolution.

Decomposition, an unprecedented epoch in human history

During the 1980s, the ICC began to understand that global society was heading towards a historic impasse. On the one hand, given the resistance of the proletariat of the central countries to a military mobilisation, capitalism didn’t have a free hand to move towards its organic outcome to its historic crisis – generalised imperialist war. On the other hand, the proletariat, despite the advance in its struggles between 1983 and 1987, was not able to open up its own perspective towards the proletarian revolution. In the absence of either of the major classes being able to put forward a perspective, we were seeing society rotting on its feet, a growing chaos, the proliferation of centrifugal tendencies, of every man for himself. A spectacular manifestation of this dynamic was the collapse of the bloc around the former USSR.

The ICC had to face up to a challenge for marxist theory. On the one hand, in September 1989, we produced “Theses on the economic and political crisis in the eastern countries”[7] where, two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, we announced the brutal downfall of the USSR itself[8]. On the other hand, we were obliged to understand in depth the new situation, by elaborating in 1990 the Theses on Decomposition, the basic idea of which was this: “the generalised decomposition which is infecting the system today, and which can only get worse....Here again, quite apart from the strictly quantitative aspect, the phenomenon of social decomposition has today reached such a breadth and depth that it has taken on a new and unique quality, revealing decadent capitalism’s entry into a new and final phase of its history: the phase where decomposition becomes a decisive, if not the decisive factor in social evolution”.

The 23rd Congress carefully looked at the considerable aggravation of the process of decomposition, notably affecting the central countries. We have seen spectacular illustrations of this – among others – in Brexit in the UK, the victory of Trump or the Salvini government in Italy.

All these points were broadly taken up in the reports and resolutions of the congress which we have already published[9] and we invite our readers to study these documents attentively and critically. With these documents, we are trying to respond to the main tendencies in the present situation.

Decomposition, as we see it spreading on the world scale and more and more dominating all spheres of social life, is an unprecedented phenomenon in human history. The Communist Manifesto  of 1848 considered such a possibility “Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes”.[10]. However, historical cases involving the collapse of an entire civilisation and the “mutual ruin of the contending classes” have been very localised and could be easily overcome by the later imposition of new conquerers. To the extent that the decadence of modes of production prior to capitalism (slavery, feudalism) saw the very powerful economic emergence of the new ruling class, and that this was an exploiting class, the new relations of production could limit the decomposition of the old order and even profit from it for their own interests. By contrast, this is impossible in capitalism since “communist society, which alone can follow capitalism, cannot develop at all within it; the regeneration of society is thus completely impossible without the violent overthrow of the bourgeois class and the eradication of capitalist relations of production” (Theses on decomposition).

The proletariat has to face up to the conditions and implications imposed by this new historic epoch, drawing all the lessons that flow from it for its own struggle, in particular the need to defend, even more energetically than in the past, its political, class autonomy, since decomposition puts this in grave danger. Decomposition favours “partial” struggles (feminism, ecology, anti-racism, pacifism etc), struggles which don’t go to the roots of problems but only address their effects and, worse, focus on particular aspects of capitalism while preserving the system as a whole. These mobilisations dilute the proletariat into an inter-classist mass, dispersing and fragmenting it in a whole series of false “communities” based on race, religion, affinity etc. The only solution is the proletariat’s struggle against exploitation because “the struggle against the economic foundations of the system contains within it the struggle against all the super-structural aspects of capitalist society, but this is not true the other way around” (ICC platform point 12).

Situation of the class struggle

The revolutionary organisation is based on a militant engagement within the class. This is concretised in the adoption of resolutions in which the present situation is analysed by placing it in a historic framework, to make it possible to draw out perspectives that can give an orientation to the proletarian struggle. The Congress thus adopted a specific resolution on the class struggle and a more general one on the world situation.

Decomposition has had a powerful impact on the struggle of the proletariat. Combined with the disorienting effects of the fall of “socialism” in 1989 and the enormous anti-communist campaign launched by the bourgeoisie, the working class has suffered a deep retreat in its consciousness and its combativity whose effects still persist – and have even got worse over the last 30 years[11].

The Congress went deeper into the historic framework for understanding the class struggle, closely examining the evolution of the balance of class forces since 1968[12]. The resolution underlines that:

• The gains of the struggles between 1968 and 89 have not been lost, even if they have been forgotten by many workers (and revolutionaries): the fight for the self-organisation and extension of struggles; the beginnings of an understanding of the anti-working class role of the unions and parties of the capitalist left; resistance to being dragooned into war; distrust towards the electoral and parliamentary game, etc. Future struggles will have to be based on the critical assimilation of these gains, taking them further and certainly not denying or forgetting them;
• The great danger for the proletariat of democracy, democratism, and the instruments of the democratic state, notably the unions, the left parties and the extreme left, but also its ideological campaigns and political manoeuvres;
• The current weakness of the proletariat, despite the efforts we saw in the struggles between 2006 and 2011, where, as well as the reappearance of assemblies, many questions about the future of society began to be posed[13]
• The positive effect which certain elements of the present situation can eventually bring: a greater concentration of workers in huge cities, associated labour on a world scale, growing links between young workers on an international level, the incorporation of new battalions of the proletariat in countries like China, Bangladesh, South Africa, Mexico…[14];
• The indispensable role of the workers’ struggle on their class terrain against the increasingly violent blows of the historic crisis of capitalism.

At the congress, there were disagreements on the appreciation of the situation of the class struggle and its dynamic. Has the proletariat suffered ideological defeats which are seriously weakening its capacities? Is there a subterranean maturation of consciousness, or, on the contrary, are we seeing a deepening of the reflux in class identity and consciousness? 

These questions are part of an ongoing debate, with amendments presented to the Congress resolution.[15]

Other burning questions of the world situation

In line with its responsibilities, the Congress examined either aspects determining the evolution of world society, in particular:

• The tendency towards a loss of control by the political apparatus of the bourgeoisie of its electoral game and the formation of governments, a phenomenon eloquently attested by Brexit; see the Report on the impact of decomposition on the political life of the bourgeoisie (2019)[16];
• The considerable aggravation of imperialist tensions, notably between the US and China and in the Persian Gulf, as well as the intensification of the arms race; the trade war, which is the consequence of the worsening of the crisis, and which is used by the US as a means to put imperialist pressure on its rivals;
• The perspective, which is becoming closer and closer, of new convulsions in the world economy: falling growth rates, slow-down in world trade, exorbitant debt, the incredible phenomenon of negative interest rates, etc.

Marxism is a living theory. This means that it must be capable of recognising that certain instruments for analysing the historic situation are no longer valid. This is the case with the notion of the historic course, which was fully applicable to the period 1914-89 but which has lost its validity as a way of understanding the dynamic of the balance of forces between the classes in the current historic period. This led the Congress to adopt a report on this question[17].

The defence of the organisation

The revolutionary organisation is a foreign body in bourgeois society. The proletariat is “a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, an order which is the dissolution of all orders” (Marx). The workers can never really find their place in this society because economically, as the exploited class deprived of any means of production, they are always in a precarious situation, at the mercy of unemployment; and because, politically, they are “Pariahs” who can only find their salvation and their emancipation outside of capitalism, in a communist society which can’t emerge before the bourgeois state is overturned all over the world. The bourgeoisie, its politicians, its ideologues, may disdainfully accept the “working citizen”, workers as a sum of alienated individuals, but they abhor and furiously reject the proletariat as a class.

In the image of their class, revolutionary organisations, while being part of the capitalist world, are at the same time a foreign body within it because their very reason for existence and their programme is based on the need for a total break from the operation, reasoning, and values of present-day society.

In this sense, the revolutionary organisation is an entity which bourgeois society rejects with all its fibres. Not only because of the historic threat it represents as the vanguard of the proletariat, but because its very existence is a constant reminder to the bourgeoisie that it has been condemned by history, an affirmation of the urgent necessity for humanity to replace the deadly competition of each against all by the association of free and equal individuals. It’s this new form of radicality which the bourgeoisie cannot understand and fills it with anxiety, so that it has to permanently mobilise itself against the organisations and militants of the proletariat. As the Communist Manifesto underlines,

“The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property relations; no wonder that its development involved the most radical rupture with traditional ideas”.

Being a foreign body means that the revolutionary organization is permanently under threat, not only through repression and the attempts to infiltrate it and destroy from within by specialized state bodies, or by the actions of parasitic groups (as we shall see later on), but also by the permanent danger of being turned away from its tasks and its function by the penetration of ideologies which are alien to the proletariat.

The organisation can’t exist without permanent combat. The spirit of combat is an essential feature of the revolutionary organisation and its militants. Combats, crises, difficulties are part of all revolutionary organisations.

“Crises are not necessarily a guarantee of impending collapse and failure. On the contrary, the existence of crises can be an expression of a healthy resistance to an underlying tendency towards failure that had hitherto been developing peacefully. And therefore crises can be the sign of reacting to danger and struggling against signs of collapse. A crisis is also an opportunity: to understand the root causes of serious difficulties that will enable the organisation to ultimately strengthen itself and temper its militants for future battles.

In the Second International (1889-1914) the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party was well known for undergoing a series of crises and splits, and for this reason was held in contempt by the leaders of the larger parties of the International like the German Social Democracy (SPD) who presented an appearance of going from success to success, steadily increasing their membership and electoral votes. However the crises of the Russian Party, and the struggle to overcome and learn from them by the Bolshevik wing, steeled the revolutionary minority in preparation for standing against the imperialist war in 1914 and for leading the October Revolution of 1917. By contrast the facade of unity of the SPD (challenged only by ‘trouble-makers’ like Rosa Luxemburg) completely and irrevocably collapsed in 1914 with the complete betrayal of its internationalist principles in face of the First World War”[18].

The defence of the organisation is a permanent element in the activity of the organisation and was thus an important point in the balance sheet and perspectives for our activities at this Congress. This fight is carried out on all fronts. The most important and specific is the struggle against attempts to destroy it (through slander, denigration, suspicion and distrust). But, at the same time, “the ICC is not immune from the opportunist pressures on the programmatic positions, allied to sclerosis, that, on a different scale, have already debilitated the other groups of the communist left”. (Activities resolution of the Congress). This is why there is a unity and a coherence between this vital aspect of the struggle against the threat of destruction and the no less vital need to fight against any expression of opportunism that may arise in our ranks: “Without this permanent struggle on the long-term historic level against and vigilance toward political opportunism, the defence of the organisation, its centralisation and principles of functioning as such will be for nothing. If it is true that without proletarian political organisation the best programme is an idea without social force, it is equally true that without full fidelity to the historical programme of the proletariat the organisation becomes an empty shell. There is unity and no opposition or separation between the principles of political organisation and the programmatic principles of the proletariat. While the struggle for the defence of theory and the struggle for the defence of organisation are inseparable and equally indispensable, the abandonment of the former is a threat, certainly fatal, but in the medium term, while the abandonment of the latter is a short-term threat. As long as it exists, the organisation can recover, including theoretically, but if it no longer exists, no theory will revive it” (ibid)

The struggle against parasitism

The history of the workers’ movement has provided evidence of a danger which, today, has taken on a considerable importance - parasitism. The First International already had to defend itself against this danger identified by Marx and Engels. “It is high time to put an end, once and for all, to the internal conflicts provoked daily in our Association by the presence of this parasitic body. These quarrels only serve to waste energies which should be used to fight against the bourgeois regime. By paralysing the activity of the International against the enemies of the working class, the Alliance admirably serves the bourgeoisies and the governments" (Engels, “The General Council to all the members of the International” - a warning against Bakunin’s Alliance). The International had to fight against plots by Bakunin, an adventurer who used a façade of radicalism as a way of hiding a work of intrigue and slander against militants like Marx and Engels, of attacks against the central organ of the International (the General Council), of destabilisation and disorganisation of the sections, of creating secret structures to conspire against the activity and functioning of the proletarian organisation[19]

Obviously, the historic conditions in which today’s proletarian struggle develops are very different from those that existed at the time of the First International. This was a mass organisation regrouping all the living forces of the proletariat, a “power” which genuinely worried bourgeois governments. Today the proletarian milieu is extremely weak, reduced to a number of small groups who don’t represent an immediate danger for the bourgeoisie. This said, the difficulties and dangers which this milieu faces do have similarities with those confronted by the First International. In particular, the existence of “parasitic bodies” whose reason for existence is in no way to contribute to the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie but on the contrary to sabotage the activity of organisations engaged in this struggle. At the time of the First International, the Alliance led by Bakunin carried out its work of sabotage (before being expelled at the Hague Congress in September 1872) inside the International itself. Today, largely because of the dispersion of the proletarian milieu into a number of small groups, the “parasitic bodies” don’t operate inside one group in particular but on the margins of these groups, trying either to recruit elements who are sincere but who lack experience or are influenced by petty bourgeois ideas (as the Alliance did in Spain, Italy, Switzerland and Belgium), or by doing they can to discredit the authentically proletarian groups and sabotage their activity (as the Alliance did when it realised that it would not be able to take control of the International).

Unfortunately, this lesson from history has been forgotten by the majority of the groups of the communist left. Given that the priority of the parasites is to take aim at the main organisation of the communist left, the ICC, these groups consider that this is an “ICC problem”, even going so far as to maintain, at certain moments, cordial relations with parasitic groups. However, the behavior of the latter (from the Communist Bulletin Group nearly 40 years ago to the more recent International Group of the Communist Left) passing through a number of small groups, blogs or individuals, speaks for itself:

• Odious denigration of our organisation and its militants, in particular the accusation that we use Stalinist methods or are even state agents;
• Theft of our material means;
• Threats to use bourgeois justice or the police against our militants;
• Publication of police-like material providing information that could identify our militants or sow suspicion between militants inside the same organisation.

The General Council of the International considered that the Alliance “admirably serves the bourgeoisies and the governments”. In the same way, the activities resolution of the 23rd ICC congress considers that “in the current historic epoch, parasitism is objectively working on behalf of the bourgeoisie to destroy the ICC” and that “as the last 30 years’ experience shows, political parasitism is one of the most serious dangers that we will have to face… . In the past decades political parasitism has not only persisted but developed its anti-ICC arsenal and widened its repertoire”.

Thus, recently, we have witnessed a more sophisticated but also more dangerous kind of activity: the falsification of the tradition of the communist left through the promotion of a fake communist left based on Trotskyism. Without even considering the intention behind this, such an enterprise can only complete a front of slander and snitching aimed at “creating a cordon sanitaire that isolates the ICC from the other groups of the proletarian political milieu…and from the searching elements”.

This is why the Congress committed the whole organisation to engage in a determined and unrelenting struggle against parasitism, considering that “an essential, long term axis of the ICC’s intervention must be an open and continuous political and organisational combat against parasitism in order to eliminate it from the proletarian milieu” (ibid).

The struggle for the future party

Working like a fraction thus has a number of facets which form a unity: defence of the organisation, combat against parasitism, development of marxism, capacity for analysis and intervention confronted with the evolution of the world situation. This unity was at the heart of this Congress and will have to guide the activity of the ICC. As we said at the beginning of this article, the 23rd ICC Congress was centred round a militant reminder of the experience of the Third International and the effort to draw all the lessons from this experience. This is why the activities resolution ends with this commitment:

“To accomplish its historic tasks ICC must draw strength and its fighting spirit from the crises it will face, as did the Marxist left of 1919. If it is capable of assuming fraction-like work, then it will have the means to regroup the Communist Left current and new revolutionary energies on clear programmatic bases, and thus fully play its role in the foundation of the future party”.

ICC December 2019

The ICC adopted the Theses on Decomposition more than 25 years ago[1]. Since then, this analysis of the current phase of society has become a key element in our organisation's understanding of the evolution of the world. The following document provides an update of the Theses on Decomposition with regard to the evolution of the world situation during the last quarter century, and especially in the recent period.
Concretely, we must confront the essential points of the Theses with the present situation: to what degree have the various elements been confirmed, even amplified, and to what extent have they been disproved or need to be developed. In particular, the current world situation requires us to return to three issues of key importance:
- terrorism
- refugees
- the rise of populism as an expression of the loss of control by the bourgeoisie of the political game.

The general framework for the analysis of decomposition

"...it is vital to highlight the fundamental distinction between the elements of decomposition which have infected capitalism since the beginning of the century and the generalised decomposition which is infecting the system today, and which can only get worse. Here again, quite apart from the strictly quantitative aspect, the phenomenon of social decomposition has today reached such a breadth and depth that it has taken on a new and unique quality, revealing decadent capitalism’s entry into a new and final phase of its history: the phase where decomposition becomes a decisive, if not the decisive factor in social evolution." (Point 2)

"Concretely, not only do the imperialist nature of all states, the threat of world war, the absorption of civil society by the state Moloch, and the permanent crisis of the capitalist economy all continue during the phase of decomposition, they reach a synthesis and an ultimate conclusion within it." (Point 3)

"In this situation, where society’s two decisive - and antagonistic - classes confront each other without either being able to impose its own definitive response, history nonetheless does not just come to a stop. Still less for capitalism than for preceding social forms, is a ‘freezing’ or a ‘stagnation’ of social life possible. As a crisis-ridden capitalism’s contradictions can only get deeper, the bourgeoisie’s inability to offer the slightest perspective for society as a whole, and the proletariat’s inability, for the moment, openly to set forward its own can only lead to a situation of generalised decomposition. Capitalism is rotting on its feet." (Point 4)

"In fact, no mode of production can live, develop, maintain itself on a viable basis and ensure social cohesion if it is unable to present a perspective for the whole of the society which it dominates. And this is especially true of capitalism, which is the most dynamic mode of production in history." (Point 5)

"...in a historical situation where the working class is not yet capable of entering the combat for its own, and the only ‘realistic’ perspective - the communist revolution - but where the ruling class is not able either to put forward the slightest perspective of its own, even in the short term, the latter’s previous ability during the period of decadence to limit and control the phenomenon of decomposition cannot help but collapse under the repeated blows of the crisis." (Point 5)

To begin with, we must insist on an essential aspect of our analysis: the term “decomposition” is used in two different ways. On the one hand, it applies to a phenomenon that affects society particularly in the period of the decadence of capitalism and, on the other hand, it refers to a particular historical phase of capitalism, its ultimate phase.

"(...) the phenomenon of social decomposition has today reached such a breadth and depth that it has taken on a new and unique quality, revealing decadent capitalism’s entry into a new and final phase of its history: the phase where decomposition becomes a decisive, if not the decisive factor in social evolution."

On the basis of our analysis of decomposition, we can see this unprecedented situation in which neither of the two main classes of society, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, is in a position to implement its own response to the crisis of the capitalist economy, world war or the communist revolution. Even if there had been a shift in the balance of power between the classes, if, for example, the bourgeoisie were moving towards a new generalised war or if the proletariat had engaged in struggles opening up a revolutionary perspective, that would not mean that the period of decomposition of society would have been left behind (as the IGCL stupidly asserts). The process of decomposition of society is irreversible because it corresponds to the terminal phase of capitalist society. The only thing that could possibly have happened, in the case of such a change-round, is a slowing down of this process, certainly not a "turning back". But, in any case, such a change-round has not occurred. Over the past quarter century, the world proletariat has been totally incapable of providing itself with any prospect at all of overthrowing the existing order. Quite the contrary, we have witnessed a regression in its combativity as well as in its ability to display the fundamental weapon of its struggle, solidarity.

In the same way, the bourgeoisie has not succeeded in achieving for itself a real perspective "other than day-to-day stop-gap measures to prop up the economy" (Theses, point 9). Following the collapse of the eastern bloc, the world economy seemed to experience, after a period of instability in this area, a significant recovery from its crisis. In particular, we saw the emergence of the BRICs showing impressive growth rates. However, the sense of euphoria that had gripped the world bourgeoisie, imagining that its economy could revive as in the "post war boom" years, was cruelly dampened with the convulsions of 2007-2008 which highlighted the fragility of the financial sector and threatened a depression similar to that of the 1930s. The world bourgeoisie managed to limit the damage, in particular with a massive injection of public funds into the economy which resulted in an explosion of sovereign debt and caused, most notably, the Euro crisis in 2010-2013. At the same time, the rate of growth of the world's largest economy remained at a lower level than before 2007 despite interest rates being virtually equal to zero. As for the highly praised BRICs, they have now been reduced to ICs since Brazil and Russia are facing a spectacular slowdown in their growth, or even recession. What dominates in the ruling class today is not euphoria, the belief in "brighter tomorrows", but moroseness and anxiety, which is certainly not relaying to the whole of society the feeling that a "better future is possible", especially amongst the exploited whose living conditions continue to deteriorate.

Thus the historical conditions which led to this phase of decomposition have not only continued to exist, they have worsened, which has resulted in a worsening of most of the manifestations of decomposition.

In order to fully understand such worsening, it is important to recall that - as point 2 of the Theses points out - we are talking about the epoch or phase of decomposition and not merely "manifestations of decomposition".
Point 1 of the Theses insists that there is a crucial difference between the decadence of capitalism and the decadence of other modes of production that preceded it. To underline this difference is important in relation to the question that constitutes the key to decomposition: perspective. If we look at the decadence of feudalism we can see that it was limited by the "parallel" emergence of capitalist relations and the gradual and partial rise of the bourgeois class. The decomposition of a series of economic, social, ideological and political forms of feudal society was somehow attenuated in reality (not necessarily with any real consciousness) by the emerging new mode of production. Two illustrations can be given: the absolute monarchy was used in some countries for the economic development of capital, contributing to the formation of a national market; and the religious view of the "purification of the body" - supposed to be the home of the devil - had a usefulness in the primitive accumulation of capital by increasing the birthrate and by imposing discipline on future proletarians.
It is for this reason that in the decadence of feudalism there may have been more or less advanced manifestations of social decomposition, but there could not have existed a specific period of decomposition. In human history some very isolated civilisations were able to finish in a total decomposition leading to their disappearance. However, only capitalism can have in its decadence a global era of decomposition, as a historical and world phenomenon.

2) Social manifestations of decomposition

The theses of 1990 pointed to the main social manifestations of decomposition:

• "The proliferation of famines in the countries of the ‘third world’ (...)
• The transformation of this same ‘third world’ into an immense shantytown where hundreds of millions of human beings survive like rats in the sewers (...)
• The development of the same phenomenon in the heart of the major cities of ‘advanced’ countries (...)
  The ‘accidental’ catastrophes which have multiplied in recent times (...)
• The increasingly devastating effects of ‘natural’ disasters at the human, social and economic levels (...)
• The degradation of the environment which reaches astonishing proportions (...) "(Point 7)

The FAO's official figures show a fall in malnutrition since the 1990s. However, there are still close to one billion people who suffer from malnutrition today. This tragedy mainly affects Southern Asia and especially sub-Saharan Africa where, in some regions, nearly half of the population are the victims of hunger, especially the children, with dramatic consequences for their growth and development. While technology has led to phenomenal increases in productivity, including in the agricultural sector, at the same time farmers in many countries are unable to sell their produce, and hunger continues to be a scourge for hundreds of millions of people as in the worst periods of human history. And if it does not strike the rich countries, it is because the state is still able to feed its poor. For example, 50 million people in the United States receive food aid vouchers.

Today, more than one billion people live in shantytowns and the number has only increased since 1990. Thus, the "transformation of the Third World into a huge slum" is evident to such an extent that the Global Risks report presented to the Davos Forum in 2015 placed "rapid and uncontrolled urbanisation" among the major risks threatening the planet for the first time, noting in particular that "40% of urban growth takes place in shantytowns" globally, which means that this proportion is much higher in the under-developed countries.

And this phenomenon of the growth of shantytowns tends to spread into the richest countries, in various forms: millions of Americans losing their homes during the subprime crisis, inflating further the numbers of the existing homeless, the camps of Roma or refugees on the outskirts of many cities in Europe, and even in the centres ... And even for those who live in permanent housing, tens of millions of them live in real slums. In 2015, 17.4% of the inhabitants of the European Union lived in overcrowded conditions, 15.7% of dwellings were leaky or rotting and 10.8% of dwellings were without heat. This was not only the case for the poor countries of Europe, as the figures were 6.7%, 13.1% and 5.3%, respectively in Germany and 8%, 15.9% and 10.9% in the United Kingdom.

We could also cite many examples of "accidental" disasters, in the past 25 years. But it is enough to mention two of the most spectacular and dramatic affecting, not Third World countries, but the two most developed economic powers: the floods of New Orleans in August 2005 (nearly 2000 dead, a city emptied of inhabitants) and the Fukushima nuclear disaster in March 2011, which is comparable with that of Chernobyl in 1986.

As regards the "devastating scale of the degradation of the environment", something that is now confirmed by observations and forecasts that today are universally accepted in scientific circles and that most sectors of the bourgeoisie of every country now recognise (even if the ruling class is incapable of implementing the needed measures owing to the laws of capitalism). The list is long, not only the catastrophes awaiting humanity due to the destruction of the environment, but also those that are hitting us presently: pollution of the air in the cities and of the water of the oceans, climatic change bringing increasingly violent weather phenomena, the spreading desertification, the increasing disappearance of plant and animal species that more and more threatens the biological equilibrium of our planet (for example, the disappearance of bees is a threat to our food resources).

3) The political and ideological manifestations of decomposition
The picture we gave in 1990 was as follows:

" - the incredible corruption that grows and prospers inside the political apparatus (...)

• the development of terrorism, or the taking of hostages, as methods of warfare between states, to the detriment of the ‘laws’ capitalism established in the past to ‘regulate’ conflicts between fractions of the ruling class
• the constant increase in crime, insecurity and urban violence (...)
• the development of nihilism, despair and suicide among young people, and the hatred and xenophobia (...)
• the tidal waves of drug addiction, which is now become a mass phenomenon and a powerful element participating in the corruption of states and financial institutions (...)
• the profusion of sects, the revival of the religious spirit, including in some advanced countries, the rejection of a rational, coherent and constructive thought (...)
• the invasion of the same media by the spectacle of violence, horror, blood and massacres (...)
• the vacuity and venality of all ‘artistic’ production: literature, music, painting, architecture (...)
• the attitude of 'every man for himself', marginalisation, the atomisation of individuals, the destruction of family relationships, the exclusion of the elderly from social life, the annihilation of love and affection "(Point 8)

All these aspects have been confirmed and have even got worse. By leaving aside momentarily the aspects related to the points which will be emphasised below (terrorism, the refugee question and the rise of populism), we can note, for example, that violence and urban crime have exploded in many countries in Latin America and also in the suburbs of some European cities - partly in connection with drug trafficking, but not only this. As regards this traffic, and the enormous weight it has in society, including at the economic level, it can be said that this is a continually growing "market" because of the increasing malaise and the despair that affects every layer of the population. Regarding corruption, and all the manipulations that constitute "white-collar crime", many instances have been uncovered in recent years (like those of "Panama papers" which are just a tiny tip of the iceberg of the gangsterism in which the financial sector more and more has to tread). With respect to the venality of creative artists and their recuperation, we can quote the recent award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Bob Dylan, artistic symbol of revolt in the 1960s, but there are many others we could name. Finally, the destruction of human relationships, family ties, and human empathy has only worsened as evidenced by the use of anti-depressants, the explosion of psychological pressure and stress at work and the appearance of new occupations intended to "support" such people. There are also expressions of real carnage like that of summer 2003 in France where 15,000 elderly people died during the heat wave.

4) The question of terrorism

Obviously, this is not a new question either in the history or in the analyses of the ICC (see, for example, the texts "Terror, terrorism and class violence" published in issues 14 and 15 of the International Review.
That said, it is important to remember that it was on the basis of the Paris bombings in 1985 that our comrade MC began a reflection on decomposition. The theses analyse as particularly significant the entry of capitalism into the phase of decomposition: "the development of terrorism, the taking of hostages, as means of warfare between states, to the detriment of the ‘laws’ that capitalism established in the past to ‘regulate’ conflicts between fractions of the ruling class ".
It is hardly necessary to note to what extent this question has acquired a prominent place in the life of capitalism. Today, terrorism as an instrument of war between states has become central to the life of society. We have even seen the constitution of a new state, Daesh, with its army, its police, its administration, its schools, for which terrorism is the weapon of choice.

The quantitative and qualitative increase in the role of terrorism took a decisive step 15 years ago with the attack on the Twin Towers, and it was the world’s leading power that deliberately opened the door to this attack in order to justify its intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq. It was subsequently confirmed by the attacks in Madrid in 2004 and London in 2005. The establishment of Daesh in 2013-14 and the attacks in France in 2015-16, Belgium and Germany in 2016 represent another step in this process.
Moreover, the Theses give us some elements of explanation of the growing fascination of jihadism and suicidal acts on a part of the youth of the developed countries:
"- the development of nihilism, despair and suicide among young people, and the hatred and xenophobia
- the profusion of sects, the revival of the religious spirit, including in some advanced countries, the rejection of a rational, coherent and constructive thought (...)
- the invasion of the same media by the spectacle of violence, horror, blood and massacres (...)"

All these aspects have only increased in recent decades. They affect every sector of society. In the most advanced country of the world, there was the rise of a "religious right" (the "Tea Party") inside one of the two political parties in charge of managing the interests of the national capital, a movement involving the most favoured sectors of society. Similarly, in a country like France, the adoption of homosexual marriage (which in itself was only a manoeuvre of the Left to distract from the betrayal of its electoral promises and the attacks it had carried out against the exploited) has seen millions of people of all social sectors mobilised, but above all the bourgeois and the petty bourgeois, who considered that such a measure was an insult to God. At the same time, obscurantism and religious fanaticism continue to increase amongst the most disadvantaged sections of the population, especially young proletarian immigrants who are Muslim, drawing along with them a significant number of "native born" young people. Never in European cities have we seen so many veils, or even "burqas" on the heads of Muslim women. And what about the attitude of those tens of thousands of young people who, after the assassination of the cartoonists of the newspaper Charlie Hebdo, considered that they had brought it on themselves by drawing the "Prophet"?

5) The question of refugees

This question is not addressed in the theses of 1990. So here we provide a supplement to deal with this problem.

The question of refugees has acquired a central place in the life of society in recent years. In 2015, more than 6 million people were forced to leave their country, bringing to more than 65 million the number of refugees in the world (more than the population of Great Britain). To this number must be added the 40 million people who are displaced within their own country. This is an phenomenon unprecedented since the Second World War.

Population displacement is a part of the history of humankind, a species that appeared in a small part of East Africa 200,000 years ago and spread throughout the world wherever there were exploitable resources for food and the other basic needs of life. One of the great moments of these displacements of population is that of the colonisation of the greater part of the planet by the European powers, a phenomenon which appeared 500 years ago and coincided with the rise of capitalism (see the pages of the Communist Manifesto on this subject). In general, migratory flows (while they include traders, adventurers or soldiers driven by conquest) are composed mainly of populations fleeing their country because of persecution (English Protestants of the "Mayflower", Jews from Eastern Europe) or poverty (Irish, Sicilians). It is only with the advent of capitalism in its period of decadence that the dominant migratory flows are reversed. Increasingly, it is the inhabitants of the colonies who, driven by misery, come to find work (generally low-skilled and very poorly paid) in the metropoles. This phenomenon continued after the waves of decolonisation which have followed one another from the end of the Second World War until the 1960s. It was at the end of the 1960s that the open crisis of the capitalist economy, with the rise in unemployment in the developed countries at the same time as the increase in poverty in the former colonies, gave rise to a significant increase in illegal immigration. Since then, the situation has only worsened despite the hypocritical speeches of the ruling class, which finds in the "undocumented" a workforce still cheaper than those that have the necessary papers.

Thus, for several decades, the migratory flows were mainly about economic emigration. But what is new in recent years is that the proportion of immigrants having fled their country for reasons of war or repression has exploded, creating a situation like that experienced following the Spanish Civil war or the end of the Second World War. Year after year, the number of refugees who, by all sorts of means, including the most dangerous, are knocking on the doors of Europe, is increasing, which is putting to the test the capacities of European countries to play host and making the issue of refugees a major political issue in these countries (see below on the question of populism).
The massive displacements of populations are not phenomena peculiar to the phase of decomposition. But today they are assuming a dimension which makes them a singular element of decomposition and we can apply to this phenomenon the analysis we gave in 1990 about unemployment:
"In fact, although unemployment (which is a direct result of the economic crisis) is not in itself an expression of decomposition, its effects make it an important element of this decomposition." (Point 14)

6) The rise of populism

The year 2016, notably with Brexit and the election of Donald Trump at the head of the world’s top power marks a stage of great importance in the development of a phenomenon that had not yet played a significant role when it appeared in countries like France, Austria or, to a lesser extent, Italy with the rise of the populist extreme right in the elections. This phenomenon is obviously not the result of a deliberate political will of the dominant sectors of the bourgeoisie, even if these sectors clearly know how to use it against the consciousness of the proletariat.

The theses of 1990 stated:

"Among the major characteristics of the decomposition of capitalist society we should emphasise the growing difficulty of the bourgeoisie in controlling the evolution of the political situation." (Item 9)

"This general tendency for the bourgeoisie to lose control of its own policies, was one of the prime factors in the collapse of the Eastern bloc; this collapse can only accentuate the tendency:

- because of the resulting aggravation of the economic crisis;

- because of the disintegration of the western bloc which is implied by the disappearance of its rival;
- because of the temporary disappearance of the perspective of world war which will exacerbate the rivalries between the different bourgeois factions (between national factions especially, but also between cliques within national states)." (Point10)
 

If the worsening of the economic crisis resulting from the collapse of the Eastern bloc did happen at the beginning, it has not been sustained. However, the other aspects have remain valid. What needs to be emphasised in the current situation is the full confirmation of this aspect that we identified 25 years ago: the tendency for te dominant class to increasingly lose control of its political apparatus.

Obviously, these events are used by various sectors of the bourgeoisie (particularly those of the left) to revive the flame of antifascism (this is particularly the case in Germany) for obvious historical reasons. In France, too, during the last regional elections in December 2015, there was a "Republican Front" which saw the Socialist Party withdraw its candidates and call to vote for the right to block the road to the National Front. That said, it is clear that the main target of anti-fascist campaigns, as history has taught us, the working class, is not at present a threat or even a major concern for the bourgeoisie.

In fact, the almost unanimous view of the most responsible sectors of the bourgeoisie and their media against Brexit, against the election of Trump, against the extreme right in Germany or against the National Front in France cannot be considered as a manoeuvre: the economic and political options put forward by populism are by no means a realistic option for managing the national capital (contrary to the options of the left of capital which propose a return to Keynesian solutions faced with the "excesses" of neo-liberal globalisation). If we confine ourselves to the case of Europe, populist-led governments, if they were to implement their programmes, could only lead to a sort of vandalism which would only further aggravate the instability that threatens the institutions of this continent. And this is all the more so because while the political staff of the populist movements has acquired a serious experience in the field of demagogy, it is in no way prepared to take over the affairs of state.

When we developed our analysis of decomposition, we considered that this phenomenon affected the form of imperialist conflicts (see "Militarism and decomposition", International Review 64) and also the consciousness of the proletariat. On the other hand, we considered that it had no real impact on the evolution of the crisis of capitalism. If the current rise of populism were to lead to the coming to power of this current in some of the main European countries, such an impact of decomposition will develop.

Indeed, while the rise of populism can have specific causes in a given country (after the fall of Stalinism for certain Central European countries, the effects of the financial crisis of 2007-2008 which ruined and deprived millions of Americans of their homes, etc.), it has a common element that is present in most advanced countries: the deep loss of confidence in the "elites", that is to say, the traditional ruling parties (conservative or progressives like the social-democrats) because of their inability to restore the health of the economy, to stop a steady rise in unemployment and poverty. In this sense, the rise of populism constitutes a sort of revolt against the current political leaders, but a revolt that cannot lead to an alternative perspective to capitalism. The only class that can give such an alternative is the proletariat when it mobilises on its class terrain and gains consciousness of the necessity and the possibility of the communist revolution. It is the same with populism as with the general phenomenon of the decomposition of society which marks the present phase of the life of capitalism: their determining cause is the inability of the proletariat to put forward its own response, its own alternative to the crisis of capitalism. In this vacuum, a loss of confidence in the official institutions of society that are no longer able to protect it, a loss of confidence in the future, a tendency to look to the past, to seek out scapegoats responsible for the disaster, is getting stronger and stronger. In this sense, the rise of populism is a phenomenon totally typical of the period of decomposition. This is all the more so as it finds valuable allies in the rise of terrorism, which creates a growing sense of fear and helplessness, especially with the massive influx of refugees aggravating fears that they have come to take the jobs of the natives or will hide new terrorists in their midst.

When we had identified the entry of world capitalism into the acute phase of its economic crisis, we had pointed out that this system had succeeded initially in pushing its most catastrophic effects towards the periphery, but that these effects would not fail to return to the centre like a boomerang. The same model applies to the three questions which have been discussed in more detail since:
- terrorism already exists on a much more dramatic scale in some peripheral countries
- these same countries have a far greater problem with refugees than the central countries
- these countries are also subject to convulsions of their political apparatus.

The fact that today the central countries are witnessing such a boomerang return is an indication that human society is sliding further and deeper into decomposition.

7) The general difficulty in recognising the existence of decomposition

One of the reasons for the difficulty encountered by the proletariat and in, first of all, by its own vanguard, to identify and understand this era of decomposition and arm itself against it, is the very nature of decomposition as a historical phase.

The process of decomposition which imprints its mark on the present historical period constitutes a phenomenon which advances in a very insidious way. Insofar as it affects the foundations of social life most profoundly and is manifested in the breakdown of the most ingrained social relations, it does not necessarily have a single and indisputable expression as, for example, the outbreak of world war or the revolutionary situations. Rather, it is expressed by a proliferation of phenomena that have no apparent relation to one another.
Each of the phenomena, by itself, could be taken to show that decomposition is not new, each one is associated with earlier stages of capitalist decadence. For example, there is a continuation of imperialist wars. However, within this continuity, one finds the element of every man for himself and in particular "the development of terrorism, or the seizure of hostages, as methods of warfare between states, to the detriment of the ‘laws’ that capitalism established in the past to ‘regulate’ the conflicts between different ruling class factions"(thesis 8). These elements appear "indistinct" amidst the classical and general traits of imperialist war, which makes it difficult to identify them. A superficial examination will not uncover them. The same is true of the political apparatus of the bourgeoisie (thus, the emergence of populism can be erroneously linked to the phenomenon of fascism between the two wars).
The fact that the two basic classes of society (the proletariat and the bourgeoisie) are incapable of providing a perspective favours the lack of global vision and leads to a passive accommodation to existing reality. This favours narrow-minded, blind, petit bourgeois visions with no orientation towards future. It can be said that decomposition constitutes in itself a powerful factor in annihilating a consciousness of its reality. This is very dangerous for the proletariat. But it also produces a blindness of the bourgeoisie, so that decomposition, because of the difficulty to recognise it, produces a cumulative phenomenon, spiraling in its effects.

Finally, two tendencies peculiar to capitalism further aggravate this difficulty in recognising decomposition and its consequences:

•  Capitalism is the most dynamic mode of production in history (Thesis 5) and "the bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, which means the relations of production, that is to say the whole of social relations" (Communist Manifesto). This gives the impression of a permanent "modernity", of a society which, despite everything, "progresses" and develops. One consequence of this is that decomposition does not occur uniformly in all countries. It is more attenuated in China and other Asian countries. On the other hand, it takes a much more extreme form in other parts of the world, for example in Africa or in some countries of Latin America. All this tends to "hide" decomposition. One might say that the nauseating odour it produces is diminished by the seductive perfume of "modernity".
• In the most advanced countries, the bourgeoisie with the development of state capitalism is still capable of producing certain counter-tendencies to limit the effects of decomposition. We can see this with Brexit where the British bourgeoisie rapidly re-organised itself to reduce the damage.

8) The impact of decomposition on the working class

In point 13, the Theses deals with this question in the following terms:
"The different elements which constitute the strength of the working class directly confront the various facets of this ideological decomposition:

• solidarity and collective action are faced with the atomisation of ‘look out for number one’;
• the need for organisation confronts social decomposition, the disintegration of the relationships which form the basis for all social life;
• the proletariat’s confidence in the future and in its own strength is constantly sapped by the all-pervasive despair and nihilism within society;
• consciousness, lucidity, coherent and unified thought, the taste for theory, have a hard time making headway in the midst of the flight into illusions, drugs, sects, mysticism, the rejection or destruction of thought which are characteristic of our epoch." (Point 13)

The experiences of struggles over the last 25 years have largely confirmed these analyses. It is particularly the case if we look at the two most advanced movements of this period: the anti-CPE movement in France in 2006 and the movement of the Indignados in Spain in 2011. It is true that solidarity was at the heart of both movements, as it had been at the heart of more limited experiences – like the mobilisation against pension reform in France 2003 or the Metro strike in New York in 2005. However, these demonstrations remained isolated and, other than gaining a quite passive sympathy, did not arouse a general mobilisation of the class.

Solidarity and collective action is one of the fundamental features of the proletarian struggle, but it has been much more difficult to express it than in the past, despite the severity of attacks on the working class, at the level of redundancies, for example. It is true that the intimidating experience of the crisis has produced a temporary retreat in combativity; however, the fact that such a retreat has become almost permanent means that we have to understand that while this factor does play a role, it is not the only factor involved, and we should consider the importance of what thesis 13 says about "everyman for himself", atomisation and  individual withdrawal. 

The question of organisation is at the heart of the struggle of the proletariat. Leaving aside the enormous difficulties that revolutionary minorities have in seriously taking up the organisational question (which would merit a further text), the problems of the class in organising itself have worsened, despite the spectacular spread of general assemblies in the movement of the Indignados or in the anti-CPE movement. Over and above these more advanced examples, which remain a step towards the future, many other similar struggles have had great difficulty in organising themselves. This is especially the case with the "Occupy" movement in 2011 or the movements in Brazil and Turkey in 2013.

Confidence in its own strength as a class is a key element of the struggle of the proletariat that has been sorely lacking. In the cases of the two important movements just mentioned, the overwhelming majority of participants did not recognise themselves as working class. They saw themselves as "ordinary citizens", which is very dangerous from the point of view of the impact of democratic illusions but also in the face of the current populist wave.

Confidence in the future, and, in particular, in the possibility of a new society, has also been absent beyond a few very general insights or the capacity to pose in a very embryonic way questions about the state, morality, culture, etc. These reflections are certainly very interesting from the point of view of the future. However, they have remained very limited, and in general far below the level of reflection that existed in the most advanced movements in 1968.

The development of consciousness and coherent and unified thought comprise one of the elements, as noted in point 13 of the Theses, that face enormous obstacles in this phase. Whereas 1968 was prepared by a significant level of social upheaval amongst various minorities and afterwards, at least for a while, gave rise to a proliferation of searching elements; we should note that very little such social maturation prepared and followed the movements of 2006 and 2011. Despite the seriousness of the historical situation - incomparably more serious than in 1968 - no new generation of revolutionary minorities has appeared. This shows that the traditional gap within the proletariat - as Rosa Luxemburg emphasised - between objective evolution and subjective comprehension - has sharpened in a very important way with decomposition, a phenomenon that should not be underestimated.

In the context of the impact of decomposition on the life of the bourgeoisie, this report focuses more particularly on the difficulties faced by the bourgeoisie with the rise of populist currents and on the way in which it tries to react to this. It will therefore not deal directly and centrally with the history of populism or with more general issues such as the relationship between populism and violence.

Decomposition and populism

The ICC has not discussed a report on the life of the bourgeoisie since its 17th congress in 2007.

However, the "Report on decomposition" from the 22nd ICC congress, which updates and completes the main axes of the theses on the decomposition and places the phenomenon of populism in this context, provides the framework of reference for analysing and interpreting the upheavals characterising the political life of the bourgeoisie today. The main ideas are as follows:

- Decadent capitalism has entered "into a specific phase - the final phase - of its history, the one in which decomposition becomes a factor, if not the decisive factor, in the evolution of society" (Report on Decomposition). Along with the refugee crisis and the development of terrorism, populism is one of its most striking expressions. This process of decomposition of society is irreversible.

 - The rise of populism "is not the desired political choice of the dominant sectors of the bourgeoisie". On the contrary, it is a confirmation of the tendency towards "an increasing loss of control by the ruling class over its political apparatus" (Ibid.).

 - Its real cause is "the inability of the proletariat to put forward its own response, its own alternative to the crisis of capitalism. Into this vacuum comes the loss of trust in the official institutions of society, that are no longer able to protect it, and it grows stronger and stronger, giving rise to a loss of confidence in the future and the tendency to look to the past and to look for scapegoats to blame for the catastrophe" (Ibid.).

 - There is "a common element present in most advanced countries: the profound loss of confidence in the ‘elites’ (...) due to their inability to restore health to the economy and to stem the steady rise in unemployment and poverty". This revolt against the political leaders "(…) can in no way lead to an alternative perspective to capitalism" (Ibid.).

 - The populist reaction is to want to replace the existing hypocritical pseudo-equality with an ‘honest’ and open system of legal discrimination. (…) The logic of this argumentation is that, in the absence of a longer-term perspective of growth for the national economy, the living conditions of the natives can only be more or less stabilised by discriminating against everybody else. " (Resolution on the International Class Struggle., 22nd ICC Congress)

The increasing loss of control by the bourgeoisie of its political apparatus

Since 2017 and the 22nd International Congress, following the vote in support of Brexit in the UK and the election of Trump as President of the United States, the impact of populism on all aspects of the international situation has become increasingly clear: it has been shown clearly with regard both to the imperialist tensions and the struggle of the proletariat. It is also becoming more and more prominent in the economy. It is finally revealing itself in a spectacular way on the level of the bourgeoisie's political apparatus: the events of the last two years therefore confirm in a spectacular way "this aspect that we identified 25 years ago: the tendency towards a growing loss of control by the ruling class of its political apparatus" (Report on Decomposition).

There has been a spectacular expansion of this loss of control in recent years, accentuating a real populist groundswell. According to a study by The Guardian newspaper, covering the last twenty years, the populist parties have seen the number of votes for them in Europe triple (from 7% to 25%). In about ten countries, these parties participate in the government or the parliamentary majority: Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Austria, Denmark, Norway, Switzerland and Italy. The study points to two moments that affected these growth figures: the 2008 financial crisis and the refugee wave in 2015. The exacerbation of other phenomena characteristic of decomposition, such as terrorism, every man for himself, has fuelled the flames and stimulated the populist encroachment into all aspects of capitalist society. Finally, the rise to power within the leading imperialist power of a populist president has further intensified the power of the tidal wave, as recent data illustrate: the formation of a government composed solely of populist groups in Italy, a political apparatus that is sinking into confusion in Great Britain, strong pressure from populist forces on Merkel's politics in Germany, the victory of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, the "Yellow Vests" movement in France, the emergence of a nationalist populist party ("Vox") in Spain, and so on...

The expressions of populism are causing more and more uncontrollable convulsions within the political apparatus of the various bourgeoisies. The following sections of the report will show that they are a major factor in all industrialised countries and that they also have a significant impact in similar forms in a number of 'emerging' countries.

Trump's presidency and the exacerbation of opposition within the US bourgeoisie

The US bourgeoisie's crisis did not come about as a result of Trump's election. In 2007, the report already noted the crisis of the American bourgeoisie by explaining: "It is first and foremost this objective situation - a situation that excludes any long-term strategy on the part of the remaining dominant power - that made it possible to elect and re-elect such a corrupt regime, with a pious and stupid President at its head [Bush junior]. (...), the Bush Administration is nothing more than a reflection of the dead-end situation of US imperialism" (“The Impact of Decomposition on the Life of the Bourgeoisie”, a report to the 17th ICC Congress). However, the victory of a populist president (Trump) known for making unpredictable decisions not only brought to light the crisis of the US bourgeoisie, but also highlighted the growing instability of the political apparatus of the US bourgeoisie and the exacerbation of internal tensions.

Incapable of preventing his election, the most responsible fractions did everything in their power to try to limit the damage (a) by manoeuvring to remove him, but the "impeachment" procedures seem to be very long term; (b) by placing trusted men on the presidential staff (From McMaster to Kelly and Tillerson along the way) but they have gradually been removed (the last one, Mad Dog' Mattis has just quit); (c) by trying to impose political control through its Republican deputies although, in the end, it was Trump who played vampire to the Republican Party; (d) by aiming to develop an alternative to Trump within the Democratic Party - but this has been a failure so far. In the end, Trump's re-election for a second term seems increasingly probable.

Moreover, Trump's confusing and capricious policy highlights the perplexity and divisions within the US bourgeoisie about the economic and imperialist policies needed to maintain its global supremacy. Beyond Trump's versatile and commercial approach, the shift from multilateralism to bilateralism reveals a real tension within the bourgeoisie: the domination of US imperialism has always presented itself behind a moral screen: the defence of democracy and the free world, the defence of human rights (Clinton, Obama), the fight against evil (Bush), and this at the head of a broad coalition of states. Faced with the difficulties of maintaining this role as a global policeman, Trump openly broke with the hypocrisy of multilateralism to impose the cynical reality of the bilateral power struggle, even with his friends (Britain) and allies (Germany). In its logic, the US can only maintain its global supremacy if it improves its economic situation and this can be done by blackmailing its competitors through its overwhelming military supremacy. His former national security adviser, General McMaster, explained it well in the Wall Street Journal: he has "the farsighted vision that the world is not a ‘global community’, but an arena where nations, non-governmental and economic actors are engaged in competition. (…). Rather than denying this elementary nature of international relations, we embrace it" (30.05.2017). In this sense, Trump's irrationality does not reflect a lack of orientation of his policy but resides in the orientation itself, which positions the leader of world capitalism at the forefront of “every man for himself” and chaos.

Trump's unpredictability towards Russia reveals how much these tensions crystallise around the attitude towards the former leader of the opposing bloc; for large parts of the US bourgeoisie, it is the enemy of the "free world", but nevertheless a potential ally against China (and against Germany). While the majority of bourgeois factions seem to remain opposed to a rapprochement with Putin, Trump constantly blows hot and cold on this subject: there were friendly talks with Putin in Helsinki last July, with Trump, openly breaking NATO's blockade against Russia following the aggression against Ukraine, declaring his desire they do "great things in the world" together; then we have Trump's decision in October to abandon the agreement on the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons, claiming that Russia does not stand by it.

Results and consequences of the various strategies of the European bourgeoisies

The “Contribution on Populism” (June 2016, see International Review 157) envisaged as a hypothesis three types of strategies that the bourgeoisie could adopt in the face of the populist wave: first, direct opposition, playing the anti-populism card; second, having the traditional parties take over aspects of the populist politics and thirdly, re-invigorating, or even reviving the opposition of right vs left. To what degree have we seen these strategies implemented and what have been the consequences?

 Confrontation with an anti-populist policy: the French and German examples

In France, the bourgeoisie's anti-populist policy initially succeeded in countering Marine Le Pen by pulling the "new" Macron and his "La France en Marche" movement out of the hat – a movement which, according to the media campaign, was not linked to the traditional parties. However, Macron was quickly confronted with the problem of having to implement a policy oriented towards globalisation, at a time when Trump's protectionism was changing the rules, and especially when, at this time, he was forced to launch massive attacks against the working class.

The consequences were quick to appear: Macron was now confronted with a dizzying drop in popularity and the slingshots from the "Yellow Vests", which would undoubtedly benefit the populist currents most, especially since Macron still doesn’t really have the support of a solid and reliable political structure (a strong party machine) and this after the bourgeoisie had scuttled its traditional parties - weakened and plagued by internal disputes - in the 2017 elections. Nevertheless , despite its fragility, it remains the only political force in France capable of limiting the weight of the populist Rassemblement National.

In Germany, Merkel immediately established herself as the champion of anti-populism ("We can do this"), but this boosted the populist wave so that the German bourgeoisie was now confronted with AfD, which has become the country's second largest political party. As a result, the Grand Coalition had to be reconstituted after the last elections, having been largely forsaken in the general elections, and the election results in the regions of Bavaria and Saxony confirmed the electoral defeat for the CDU/CSU and the collapse of the SPD. The situation is complex and Merkel's relinquishing of the presidency of her party, CDU, (and therefore in the future the position of Chancellor) heralds a phase of uncertainty and instability for the dominant bourgeoisie in Europe.

The political apparatus of the German bourgeoisie is therefore in turmoil just as Germany is under pressure within the EU, on the one hand from the Central European countries that reject its policy towards refugees but also the rôle as subordinate subcontracting economies which they feel Germany imposes on them; and on the other hand from the countries of Southern Europe (Greece, Italy) which reject its economic policy; and all this while also finding itself in the sights of the Trump administration, which wants to impose import taxes on its cars and machines.

 The adoption of populist ideas by traditional parties: the British example

The British bourgeoisie tried to channel the disastrous consequences of the referendum to exit the EU by having one of its major traditional parties, the Conservative Party, take on the responsibility for implementing the Brexit plan. Far from stabilising the situation, conflicts within the British political system have intensified, giving rise to further instability and unpredictability as to what will be the final outcome:

- the May government's continued hesitation and delay (a) in putting forward a coherent policy to implement Brexit and (b) in reaching a clear agreement with the EU, is pushing the EU to take measures to safeguard its own interests against what the European officials are already calling "a failed state";

- negotiations within the British government, far from tending towards resolving conflicts, have exacerbated them (giving rise to a series of resignations of ministers opposed to what was the current policy at the time) and this especially within the Conservative Party itself, which is in danger of splitting apart, so that even May's vague and general agreement reached with the EU is unlikely to get approval from the British Parliament. The divisions are just as real within the Labour Party with the Brexiteers, including party leader Corbyn, opposed by a large number of MPs who are 'pro' the EU

- In the words of one European diplomat, there is deep instability and British politicians are more and more looking like a "political Taliban". In recent months, the most radical populist views have won renewed prominence, the dream of "Albion reborn", and not just those outside the traditional parties (like Farage) but hard-line Conservative Party politicians too (Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mog and Steve Baker).

 The constitution of a populist government: the Italian example

One scenario not envisaged by the text on populism is the constitution of a government composed solely of populist parties. For several years, populist parties have been part of government coalitions in various countries and, in several countries of the former Eastern bloc such as Hungary or Poland, populist parties have even taken over at the head of the state. Today, however, it is the EU's fourth largest economy, Italy, which, against the backdrop of a very difficult economic and social situation (Gross Domestic Product falling by 10% at constant prices between 2008 and 2017), has seen the emergence of a government made up exclusively of populist parties (the League and the Five Star Movement). This government combines a nationalist and xenophobic policy with a social welfare policy for Italians, namely: (a) a citizenship income, costing €9 billion (b) pension reform reducing the retirement age from 67 to 62 years (additional budget costs of €7 billion) (c) the adoption of the "dignity decree" which reduces the renewal period for fixed-term contracts from 3 to 2 years (d) the reduction in taxes for self-employed workers and SMEs (e) an obligation for companies that have received public aid to repay it if, within five years of obtaining it, they transfer their activities to another country.

The impact of this Italian populist policy on the stability of the EU is incalculable in the long term: in terms of its refugee policy, its hard line (attacking NGOs in particular) clashes with other European countries, especially France and Spain. On the budgetary side, the Italian government refuses the constraints imposed by the European Commission (budget deficit of 2.4% of GDP instead of the 0.8% planned for by the previous government, in total contradiction with European budgetary rules); instead it wants a social welfare policy for the "Italian people", which rejects the budgetary rigour advocated by Germany. However, any new monetary crisis involving Italy would call into question the existence of monetary union and the eurozone. Italy knows this, which allows it to use it as a form of blackmail. Also, the budget deficit will increase Italian debt, which would downgrade its rating with the international rating agencies and would lead institutional investors to abandon Italian funds.

We should closely follow the social policy impact of the populist coalition. The social measures announced so far remain far below what the populists promised, in particular by Five Star (9 billion announced for citizenship income instead of the 17 planned) and moreover, the Italian government has agreed, under pressure from the EU, to postpone a series of these measures to limit their budgetary impact. Moreover, the populist government did not repeal the Job Act, concocted by the Renzi government to liberalise the Italian labour market and make it largely precarious. As a result, many of the measures announced will have an effect contrary to that announced. Thus, the "dignity decree" theoretically reduces the possibilities of using limited-term contracts in the event of renewal but, under the Job Act, the trend will be towards non-renewal of contracts and thus an increase in precariousness. In addition, citizenship income will also increase pressure on the unemployed (it will be withdrawn if they refuse three job offers) and spending will be controlled (payments will be credited to a controlled-use card). Finally, retirement at age 62 will only be available to those who have contributed to the system for 38 years.

 The re-establishment of the right/left opposition

The third strategy envisaged, re-establishing the right/left opposition to cut the ground from under the feet of populism, does not seem to have been really put in place by the bourgeoisie. On the contrary, the past few years have been characterised by an irreversible trend towards the decline of the Socialist parties.

The question of the crisis of the social democratic parties refers to the question of the role of the left-wing parties, already addressed in the report on the life of the bourgeoisie of the 17th Congress (2007). After having played an essential role in halting the wave of workers' struggles of the 1970s and 1980s (left in government, left in opposition), these parties have been available for other tasks because, as the report points out, since the early 1990s, the social question was no longer the decisive factor in the formation of governments: "... there is another factor that is becoming increasingly important, which is becoming a truly decisive factor in the political life of the bourgeoisie in general and in the formation of government teams in particular: the decomposition of bourgeois society, which in recent years has made indisputable progress" (‘The impact of decomposition on the life of the bourgeoisie’). Indeed, in the second decade of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st, Socialist or social democratic parties were deployed in the front line to counter the first effects of decomposition on the bourgeoisie's political apparatus (cf. Blair, Schröder, Zapatero, Hollande).

As a consequence, they suffered not only from the disillusionment in the major democratic parties after the "post war boom", such as the Christian Democracy (in Italy, Holland, Belgium and even Germany) but they are also particularly identified with the failed political system. Thus the tendency towards decline seems irreversible: the Socialist Party has disappeared in Italy, is threatened with extinction in France, Holland and Greece and is in deep crisis in Germany, Spain or Belgium. Only the Labour Party in Britain seems to be escaping this trend at the present time, although this does not seem linked right now to the bourgeoisie's revitalisation of the right/left opposition. It is possible that the Labour Party could profit from the Conservative Party's difficulties in managing the populist groundswell around Brexit, when, should the Tory Party implode, the bourgeoisie will have to turn to it for help.

New radical popular left-wing formations of various types have emerged in some countries: Syriza, Podemos, "La France Insoumise", the Democratic Socialist current within the Democratic Party in the USA, with the support of a significant number of young people in the wake of Bernie Sanders' candidature in the past primaries, etc. The various alternatives to the bankruptcy of social democracy, which the bourgeoisie is putting in place, provide clues to the impact of decomposition and populism on the working class, in relation to the scale of the defeats suffered and the level of consciousness in the various industrialised countries today. In Italy, one of the countries where the working class was in the vanguard during the struggles from 1968 to the 1980s, the "left-wing alternative" proposed is the Five Star Movement, a populist movement that declares itself, furthermore, neither right nor left, and this underlines the importance of the political difficulties experienced by the Italian proletariat. In Germany, the alternative is not really the former Stalinists of Die Linke but rather the Greens, which also reflects the state of mind of the working class and the weakening of the sense of class identity. In France and Spain, on the other hand, the alternatives called for are explicitly located on the left, and develop instead a "workers’" discourse and claim to be located on a proletarian terrain, even if they appear to be concerned with the proper functioning of the bourgeois political apparatus (Syriza in Greece implemented the fierce austerity imposed by the EU; Podemos in Spain provided the support necessary to ensure a shaky stability to the central government). In this sense, they cannot be considered as left-wing populist parties.

The emergence of "strong leaders" in Eastern European countries and in countries outside the capitalist heartlands

The populist wave is not limited to the industrialised countries of the West but also affects a number of countries in Eastern Europe and some "emerging" countries, where it is manifested through specific phenomena, such as the rise of "strong leaders". The economic destabilisation under the pressure of the 2008 crisis on the one hand, and the huge corruption scandals affecting the political parties on the other hand, have caused resentment and exasperation among the population in a whole series of these countries, such as Poland, Hungary, and Turkey , which has been recuperated by populist forces through reactionary movements leading to the advent of "strong men", charismatic leaders like Orban, Kaczyński, Erdogan or Bolsonaro and, for quite a while already, Putin.

While the 1990s and even the early 21st century had been characterised by "democratic opening" in many of these countries (as well as in Russia and China), these "strong" leaders displayed their contempt for the "liberal" elites, the traditional "democratic" political game and an "independent" press, clearly preferring instead a nationalist authoritarian regime, rejecting immigrants or minorities that could alter national cohesion. "On July 26, 2014, in Romania, Mr. Orban clearly showed his colours in a resounding speech: (...) We consider, he said, that a democracy does not necessarily have to be liberal and that it is not because a state ceases to be liberal that it ceases to be a democracy (...). Societies with a liberal democracy as their foundation are unlikely to be able to maintain their competitiveness in the coming decades. (…). He also announced an economic project, that of ‘building a competitive nation for the great global competition of the coming decades’". (Le Monde Diplomatique, 23 September 2018). This is the idea that there are different models of democracy, an idea that is also found in some ways in Putin's Russian model or in China's application of the Singaporean model.

The hunt for corrupt elites (from Polish judges to Russian oligarchs, European bureaucrats, supporters of the Turkish Gülen movement or those of the Brazilian 'Workers Party') goes hand in hand with xenophobic nationalism that focuses on the rejection of foreigners (refugees from the Middle East or Africa, Venezuelans) or minorities (Erdogan accentuating his anti-Kurdish discourse, Orban targeting the Roma or Putin targeting the Chechens).

China

On the surface, the country shows an apparent serenity, but political tensions do not spare China, despite its dazzling economic and military development. Since the late 1970s, it has abandoned its essentially autarkic economy to develop, on the Japanese and Singaporean models, an economy gradually integrated into regional and then global markets. This political line, advocated by Deng Xiaoping, has not been maintained without political upheavals and struggles, as illustrated by the events in Tiananmen and again around 2003, but it was accentuated between 2003 and 2013 by President Hu Jintao. This orientation required the establishment of peaceful relations with the United States: in 1992 a memorandum of understanding was signed, which granted American requests concerning customs tariffs and intellectual property rights. It was also accompanied by a wave of democratisation in the 1980s and 1990s, but with limitations after Tiananmen. 

Xi Jinping's rise to power has showed a certain reorientation of Chinese politics, which is expressed on a political level, as in other countries, by a shift towards power into the hands of a strong leader. Xi is presented as Mao's equal. This reorientation is the result of a number of factors: (a) China's rapid economic development, which goes hand in hand with a further affirmation of international expansion (the "New Silk Road"); (b) it also leads to more explicit manifestations of nationalism and an impressive development of its military strength, while the USA develops an increasingly aggressive attitude towards China; (c) The supersonic transformation of the Chinese economy "has led to deep spatial and social divisions and significant ecological damage. (…). The Gini coefficient, a fine measure of income dispersion and thus of the degree of inequality in societies, has fallen from 0.16 at the beginning of the post-Maoist transition to 0.4 on average since the late 1990s (0.27 in Sweden, to 0.32 in France, 0.34 in the United Kingdom and 0.4 in the United States)" (Le Monde Diplomatique, 5 December 2017); and the prospects for restructuring linked to a shift towards a more skilled economy are proving perilous.

In this context, there are two trends within the party today: an economic trend and a nationalist trend. With Xi the latter seems predominant ("No one should expect China to swallow snakes at the expense of its interests" (XIX CCP Congress, 18.10.17)) but there seems to be some discussion within the party between a faction that tends to want to make concessions to the USA (according to Deng Xiaoping's conception of "hiding your talents and biding your time") and a faction with a hard line of confrontation with the USA; Xi seems rather to be in favour of the latter "asserting itself on the international scene as number one in a ‘great country’ - to use his expression - treating America as an equal partner" (Le Monde Diplomatique, 4 October 2018)

Populism, an essential factor in the political life of the bourgeoisie today

As the 22nd ICC International Congress "Report on Decomposition" recalled, decomposition, of which populism is one of the most striking expressions, is a decisive factor in the evolution of society and is an irreversible process. While populism is not the result of a deliberate political will on the part of the dominant sectors of the bourgeoisie, they have been unable to prevent its impact on their political apparatus from reaching such a level that they are confronted with a tendency towards a growing loss of control over it, and with unpredictable shocks that will more than ever characterise the political life of the bourgeoisie in the coming period.

1.. This loss of control by the bourgeoisie over its political apparatus is clearly distinct from the various political crises that the bourgeoisie may have experienced in the 1960s to 1980s. Their context is radically different: before the 1990s, the bourgeoisie's political crises were linked either to the inability to cope with the working class or to the consequences of imperialist confrontations (the Suez crisis in Britain and France, the Algerian crisis in France, the Maastricht Treaty in France and Holland, etc.) and were managed within the political apparatus. The current crisis concerns a growing tendency towards the loss of control by the bourgeoisie of its own political apparatus. This was already highlighted in the last report on the life of the bourgeoisie (17th ICC congress, 2007): "The bourgeoisie of the most developed countries of Europe, Japan and the United States, once masters in the subtle art of electoral manipulation, is now facing increasing difficulties in obtaining the least undesirable result" (“The impact of decomposition on the life of the bourgeoisie”). The unlikely political upheavals affecting the English, American and German bourgeoisies, the three most experienced bourgeoisies in mastering the political game in the past, perfectly illustrate the gravity of the problem.

Populist movements are formed around recurring themes such as refugees, security, the resentment of those left behind by the crisis, but they also feed on specific tensions within the national bourgeoisies: the US bourgeoisie's dismay at the decline of its world leadership, the British bourgeoisie's ambiguity towards Europe, divisions between regionalist and nationalist factions within the Spanish or Belgian bourgeoisie, etc.

2. While the increasing pressure of populism is plunging the traditional political apparatus of the bourgeoisie into chaos, these movements tend to benefit today in various countries - and not only in Eastern European countries but also in the USA and Great Britain for example - from the support of factions of the big bourgeoisie. Thus, in the USA, not only the steel or automotive sectors can support Trump's protectionist policy, but even the IT sector against the rise of Chinese companies, such as Huawei or Alibaba, which threaten their global domination. And other areas of Silicon Valley may be in favour of a rapprochement with Russia.

3. Populism is street politics. In fact, if populist parties and movements generate a kind of militant energy, unlike traditional parties, it is because these formations no longer respect taboos and therefore allow all prejudices to be expressed.

As a result, populist campaigns, marked by anger and resentment, denigrate the traditional political world and elites, and point fingers at those who are guilty for what is not working. They naturally lead to the stigmatisation of groups and individuals, to a tendency towards their demonisation, which is already happening and will happen more and more frequently and explicitly in various forms in the political news: attacks on refugee reception centres in Germany; letters with suspicious powder addressed to Trump and other members of his administration during the campaign for the mid-term elections in the USA, while trapped packages were sent to Democratic parliamentarians, the media (CNN) or elite figures (Soros); the anti-Jewish attack by a white supremacist in Pittsburgh; assassination attempt against presidential candidate Bolsonaro in Brazil and on his return the threats of the same Bolsonaro and his supporters against the WP and other left-wing movements; polarisation of the "Yellow Vests" against the figure of Macron, etc.

4. Unlike the first expressions of populism (Haider, Berlusconi,...) which defended an ultraliberal economic policy, the current populist parties advocate a policy aimed at protecting the indigenous population (“Italians first”, ”real Finns”, ”Eigen volk eerst” (“our own people first”, the slogan of  the Flemish populists),...) by openly discriminating against others. This may involve economic protectionism or the promotion of a form of chauvinist neo-Keynesian policy: Trump claims to protect American workers and their work against the "invasion" of Mexican and Central American immigrants as well as foreign products; Polish or Hungarian governments take protective measures for their employees and pensioners while opposing any refugee quota in the name of defending the nation's cultural integrity; the Lega/Five Star government in Italy is implementing an uncompromising and tough policy against the reception of refugees while planning a "citizenship income" for every Italian citizen and lowering the retirement age from 67 to 62 years. This kind of policy appears to be more "realistic" than that of the left, insofar as in safeguarding the benefits of the oppressed natives at the expense of other oppressed people.

Recent events in Russia and Hungary highlight the fact that the importance of such a chauvinistic “social” policy for the credibility of populist movements and “strong leaders” should not be underestimated. For example, in Russia, the draconian pension reform, which Putin and his government pushed through by taking advantage of the media hype around the Football World Cup (the retirement age rising from 55 to 63 for women, and from 60 to 65 for men), provoked strong protests and a decline in Putin's popularity rate from 80 to 63%. The latter immediately had to relax the measures and announce a big increase in the value of pensions, without however being totally convincing, insofar as his popularity is based more on the fact that by restoring state control over the oligarchs, he had succeeded in guaranteeing regular payment of wages and pensions. In Hungary, major demonstrations have taken place to protest against the Orban government's "slavery" law, which almost completely eliminates all wage compensation for overtime.

5. In response to the rise of populism, the bourgeoisie has set up anti-populist campaigns, particularly in France during the 2017 election campaign or in the USA where the populist/anti-populist opposition (anti-Trump) has been at the centre of political life since the Trump election, as the mid-term elections have further demonstrated. Often, while opposing populism, they are largely inspired and take up populist approaches or ideas:

(a) In France, the campaign around Macron used the same strategies as populism: rejection of traditional parties, "new" man (Macron) and political "movement" (LREM) presented as breaking with the past;

(b) By focusing priorities on the need to eliminate terrorism and on the public safety of citizens (increased controls, increased number of cameras, etc.), they also instilled the idea that it is inevitable to agree to sacrifice a little freedom for greater security.

(c) Lafontaine in Germany and Podemos in Spain fight populism by translating its anti-immigration language to the point of view of the "left": by creating an opposition between a left advocating "open borders" and another left advocating "closed borders and local help", they integrate populist arguments into the very anti-populist discourse.

 

January 2019

Capitalist society, in the final phase of decline, is giving birth to a whole variety of "identity crises". The atomisation inherent in the system of generalised commodity production is reaching new levels, and this applies both to social life as a whole and to the reactions against the increasing misery and oppression spawned by the system. On the one hand, groups and individuals suffering from particular oppressions are encouraged to mobilise as particular groups to fight their oppressions – as women, as gays, as transgender people, as ethnic minorities and so on - and not infrequently compete with each other directly, as with the current confrontation between transgender activists and certain branches of feminism.  These manifestations of "identity politics" are at the same time co-opted by the left wing of the bourgeoisie, all the way up to its most distinguished academics and most powerful political echelons (as with the Democratic Party in the USA).

Meanwhile, the right wing of the bourgeoisie, while superficially decrying the rise of identity politics, rises up in defence of its own form of identity-seeking: the search for the Real Men threatened by the spectre of feminism, the nostalgia for the glories of the White Race facing displacement by foreign hordes.

The quest for these partial, and sometimes entirely fictitious identities and communities, is a measure of mankind’s self-estrangement in a historic epoch in which a universal human community is both possible and necessary for the survival of the species. And above all, like other manifestations of social decomposition, it is the product of the loss of the one identity whose affirmation can lead to the creation of such a community, also known as communism: the class identity of the proletariat. The recent "Yellow Vest" movement in France provides us with a graphic illustration of the dangers that arise from this loss of class identity: that large numbers of workers, rightly angered by the constant attacks on their living standards, are mobilised not for their own interests but behind the demands and actions of other social classes – in this case, the petty bourgeoisie and a part of the bourgeoisie itself[1].

The proletariat's identity is by nature revolutionary

The exploitation of the working class is the foundation stone of the entire edifice of capitalism. It is not, as the proponents of identity politics argue openly or underhandedly, just one form of oppression amongst many.  Because, despite all the changes it has been through over the last two centuries, capitalism continues to rule the Earth, what Karl Marx famously wrote in 1844 about the revolutionary nature of the proletariat remains as true as ever. This is a class whose struggle against capitalism contains the solution to all the "particular wrongs" inflicted by this society -

• "a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, an estate which is the dissolution of all estates, a sphere which has a universal character by its universal suffering and claims no particular right because no particular wrong, but wrong generally, is perpetuated against it; which can invoke no historical, but only human, title; which does not stand in any one-sided antithesis to the consequences but in all-round antithesis to the premises of German statehood; a sphere, finally, which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all other spheres of society and thereby emancipating all other spheres of society, which, in a word, is the complete loss of man and hence can win itself only through the complete re-winning of man. This dissolution of society as a particular estate is the proletariat"[2].

In The Holy Family, written during the same period, Marx explains that the working class is by nature a revolutionary class, even when it is not aware of this:

• "When socialist writers ascribe this world-historic role to the proletariat, it is not at all, as Critical Criticism pretends to believe, because they regard the proletarians as gods. Rather the contrary. Since in the fully-formed proletariat the abstraction of all humanity, even of the semblance of humanity, is practically complete; since the conditions of life of the proletariat sum up all the conditions of life of society today in their most inhuman form; since man has lost himself in the proletariat, yet at the same time has not only gained theoretical consciousness of that loss, but through urgent, no longer removable, no longer disguisable, absolutely imperative need — the practical expression of necessity — is driven directly to revolt against this inhumanity, it follows that the proletariat can and must emancipate itself. But it cannot emancipate itself without abolishing the conditions of its own life. It cannot abolish the conditions of its own life without abolishing all the inhuman conditions of life of society today which are summed up in its own situation. Not in vain does it go through the stern but steeling school of labour. It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment regards as its aim. It is a question of what the proletariat is, and what, in accordance with this being, it will historically be compelled to do"[3].

Class identity thus has an objective basis which remains unalterable as long as capitalism exists, but the subjective consciousness of "what the proletariat is" has long been held back by the negative side of the proletarian condition: the fact that "man has lost himself in the proletariat", that this is a class which suffers the full weight of human self-alienation. In later works Marx would explain that the particular forms assumed by alienation in capitalist society – the process also known as "reification", the veil of mystification inherent in the universal exchange of commodities - make it particularly difficult for the exploited to grasp the true nature of their exploitation and the true identity of their exploiters. And this is why there must be a "theoretical consciousness of that loss" and socialism would have to become scientific in its methods.  But this theoretical consciousness is not in any sense divorced from the real conditions of labour and its revolt against the inhumanity of capitalist exploitation.

When Marx writes that the working class "cannot emancipate itself without abolishing the conditions of its own life", the so-called "communisation" current take this to mean that any affirmation of class identity can only be reactionary, since it is no more than an exaltation of what the proletariat is within capitalist society, so that the communist revolution demands the immediate self-negation of the working class. But this is to lose sight of the dialectical reality of the working class as a class that is both of capitalist society and not of it, an exploited and a revolutionary class at the same time. We insist, along with Marx, that it is only by affirming itself, both at the level of its economic and social struggles, and as the candidate for the political direction of society, that the proletariat can pave the way to the real dissolution of all classes and the "complete re-winning" of humanity. This is why this report will focus precisely on the problem of class identity: from its initial development in the ascendant phase of capitalism, to its subsequent loss and future re-appropriation.

The formation of class identity

The proletariat is by definition the class of dispossession. It is originally formed by the dispossession of the peasant’s small plot of land, or the artisan’s instruments of production, and herded into the disease-ridden slums of early industrial society. Engels in The Condition of the Working Class in England writes about all the demoralising effects of this process which led numerous proletarians into drunkenness and crime, subjecting them to the most brutal competition among themselves. But Engels rejected any moralistic condemnation of these purely individual reactions to their condition and pointed to the alternative that was already taking shape: the collective struggle of the workers for the improvement of their condition through the formation of trade unions, educational and cultural associations and political parties like the Chartists - all of this inspired ultimately by the vision of a higher form of society. The physical bringing together of the workers in the cities and the factories was the objective premise for this struggle. This is one dimension of the association of labour which overcomes the relative isolation of artisan and peasant labour; but as a purely "sociological" process, the machinery of early industrialisation was so brutal and traumatic that it could also have resulted in the production of an indifferent mass of paupers, and even in the extinction of the proletariat through starvation and disease. It was the recognition of a common class interest, opposed to that of the bourgeoisie, which was the real basis of the initial class identity of the proletariat. The "constitution of the proletarians into a class", as the Communist Manifesto put it, was thus inseparable from the growth of class consciousness and of organisation: "and consequently into a political party", as the phrase continues. The working class is not only an associated class "in itself", not only objectively: association as the premise for a higher form of social organisation only takes shape when the subjective dimension, the self-organisation and unification of the class in struggle against exploitation, arises out of its place in the capitalist social relation.

But the proletariat remains the class of dispossession, and this would eventually apply to the very instruments it had created for its own defence. The first unions and political parties, at one level motivated by the understanding that the proletariat was not a class of civil society, by the project of dissolving the existing order, were also bound by the need for the class to improve its lot inside the system. And contrary to the first expectations of the founders of marxism, this system was still far away from any "final crisis" or period of decline, so that the longer and more extensively the proletariat forged its organisations inside the shell of capitalist society, the greater the danger that these organisations would become part of civil society tout court – would become institutionalised. As Engels put it in 1892: at a certain point, "Trades’ unions, hitherto considered inventions of the devil himself, were now petted and patronised as perfectly legitimate institutions, and as useful means of spreading sound economical doctrines amongst the workers"[4]. With the hindsight of bitter historical experience, we know that the road to revolution did not pass through the gradual building up of workers’ mass organisations within the system. On the contrary, when the real test came with the onset of decadence, these organisations, which had become slowly but surely corrupted by the dominant society and ideology, were definitively recuperated by the ruling class to help it fight its imperialist wars and to combat the threat of revolution.

This was by no means a linear process. The proletariat was constantly being reminded that it was in essence an outlaw class – a force for revolution. Its initial efforts to build the most elementary combinations in its defence were ruthlessly suppressed by the bourgeoisie, which took a long time to understand that it could turn the workers’ own organisations against them. Moreover, the political conditions of mid-19th century Europe would lead the proletariat into overtly insurrectionary struggles against the ruling class in Europe in at least two key historical moments: 1848 and 1871. In France, already the homeland of revolution after the experience of 1789-93, the working class took up arms against the state and, particularly in 1871, concretely posed the problem of its destruction and replacement by the dictatorship of the proletariat. But class movements that pointed to a revolutionary future were not limited to France: in England, the country of "gradual reforms", the strike movement of 1842 already revealed the outlines of the mass strike that would become the characteristic mode of struggle in a later epoch[5]. The Chartist movement itself understood its demand for universal suffrage as a demand for the working class to take political power into its own hands, and its methods were not limited to petitioning the bourgeoisie: it  also gave rise to a "physical force" wing which, in the Newport rising of 1839, did not hesitate to arm itself against the existing regime[6]. The formation of the First International in 1864, even though it originated in the need for international coordination of defensive struggles, was a further indicator that the working class was pitted against the foundations of bourgeois society – that a really self-aware class identity could not be accommodated within the framework of the nation state.   

The fear that the International and the Paris Commune inspired in the hearts of the bourgeoisie, as well as the objective conditions of capitalist global expansion in the last part of the 19th century, provided the basis for the eventual integration of the mass workers’ organisations into bourgeois society and finally into the state apparatus itself. To these factors can be added the confusions and opportunist concessions that arose within the proletarian movement itself, not least the identification of the proletariat with the national interest, which the Second International, with its federal structure and its difficulties in understanding the evolution of the national question, was never able to overcome. But the sense of class identity that arose during the long period of social democracy, a period in which the organised labour movement provided a whole layer of workers not only with organs of economic defence and political activity, but a whole social and cultural life, by no means disappeared with the opening of the epoch of capitalist decline. On the contrary, transmuted into a mystification hostile to the proletariat, it would "weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living", and would in particular be taken over by the social democratic and Stalinist parties with aim of maintaining their control over the working class:"Class identity is the recognition by the proletariat that it constitutes a distinct class in society, opposed to the bourgeoisie and having an active role in society. However, this does not mechanically signify that it recognises itself as the revolutionary class in society. For many years, class identity gravitated around the notion of a class of capitalist society aspiring to have a decent standard of living and enjoying recognition and a social potency.

Such an identity was constructed by the counter-revolution and notably by the trade unions and Stalinism, basing themselves on certain weaknesses that go back to the period of the Second International:a blue collar worker, militant, concerned with his rights in society, recognised by it, linked to the large enterprises and working class neighbourhoods, proud of his condition as a ‘worker citizen’ and enclosed in the universe of the great family of workers.

• Such an identity was very much linked to a precise period: that of the zenith of capitalism (1870-1914), but its persistence in the period of decadence, in which the vision of a proletariat profoundly excluded from bourgeois society as announced by Marx, has led it to become a very dangerous false identity, full of illusions about being integrated into capitalist society, about reaching accommodation with it, and this destroying a real class identity and consciousness. The only identity possible for the proletariat is that of a class excluded from this society and which carries within it the communist perspective"[7]

Main stages in the dispossession of class identity in the epoch of decadence

A text on the balance of class forces adopted by our international central organ in April 2018, citing our Orientation Text on Confidence and Solidarity [8], outlined two phases in the history of the workers’ movement since 1848. Its focus is on the growth and loss of the self-confidence of working class, but this question is very closely linked to the problem of class identity: the working class can only have confidence in itself if it is aware of its own existence and interests.

• "During the first phase, extending from the beginnings of its self-affirmation as an autonomous class until the revolutionary wave of 1917-23, the working class was able, despite the series of often bloody defeats it suffered, to more or less continuously develop its self-confidence and its political and social unity. The most important manifestations of this capacity were, in addition to the workers’ struggle itself, the development of a socialist vision, of a theoretical capacity, and of a political revolutionary organisation. This process of accumulation, the work of decades and of generations, was interrupted and even reversed by the counter-revolution. Only tiny revolutionary minorities were able to maintain their confidence in the proletariat in the decades that followed. The historic resurgence of the working class in 1968, by ending the counter-revolution, began to once again reverse this tendency. However, the new expressions of self-confidence and class solidarity by this new and undefeated proletarian generation remained for the most part rooted in the immediate struggles. They were not yet based to the same extent as before the counter-revolution on a socialist vision and political formation, on a class theory, and on the passing on of accumulated experience and understanding from one generation to the next. In other words: the historic self-confidence of the proletariat, and its traditions of active unity and collective combat belong to the aspects of its combat which have suffered most from the break in organic continuity. Equally, they are among the most difficult aspects to re-establish, since they depend more than many others on a living political and social continuity. This in turn gives rise to a particular vulnerability of the new generations of the class and its revolutionary minorities".

We can add that even before the shattering blow of the defeat of the first revolutionary wave, the great battle of 1914-18 meant the loss of decades of patient labour in the construction of its unions and political parties, a loss which has been particularly difficult for the working class to accept and understand: even among the revolutionaries who opposed this betrayal, only a minority was able to grasp that these organisations had been irretrievably lost to the class. Subsequently, with the rise of Stalinism, what had been a difficulty of comprehension became the basis for the construction of the fake identity mentioned by the report on perspectives. But while this terrible burden inherited from the past was to have a disastrous impact on the progress of the revolutionary wave - expressed in particular through the theory and practice of the United Front - this period also shed light on the new form of class identity embodied in the mass strike, in the formation of workers’ councils and the rise of the Third International. As Marx had already put it, the proletariat is revolutionary or it is nothing: this rediscovered class identity was not really "new" but was simply bringing out "what the proletariat is": in the epoch of wars and revolutions, the class can only grasp its  identity by organising itself outside all existing institutions and in direct  antithesis to capitalist society.

The following decades of counter-revolution were to deepen this process of dispossession. In the 1930s the proletariat was confronted with the biggest economic crisis in the history of capitalism, the first real economic crisis of decadence. But the Communist Parties created to counter the treason of 1914 had in turn abandoned internationalism in favour of the infamous theory of socialism in one country and, through the Popular Front, were seeking to politically dissolve the working class into the nation and prepare it for war. Even the anarchist unions that had retained a proletarian life in Spain succumbed to this new betrayal. The outbreak of war in 1939 did not mean, as Vercesi argued, the "social disappearance of the proletariat" and thus the uselessness of organised political activity for revolutionaries. The social disappearance of the proletariat is impossible as long as capital survives, and the formation of revolutionary minorities obeys a permanent need within the class. But it certainly did signify a new step in its political disarray, not only through the terror of fascism and Stalinism but, more insidiously, through its incorporation into the project of defending democracy. And it included the rapid integration of the Trotskyist opposition into the war effort and the dispersal of its left fractions. The proletariat did manifest itself at the end of the war in certain countries, above all Italy in 1943, but contrary to the expectations of a large part of the Italian communist left (including Vercesi) this did not mean a reversal of the counter-revolutionary course.

The counter-revolution, taking ever more totalitarian forms, continued to hold sway during the period of post-war prosperity, while capital discovered new forms for undermining the proletariat’s sense of itself. This was the period in which "sociologists could begin theorising about the ‘embourgeoisiement’ of the working class as a result of the spread of consumerism and the development of the welfare state. And indeed both these aspects of capitalism after 1945 remain as important added weights on the possibility of the working class reconstituting itself as a revolutionary force.  Consumerism atomises the working class and peddles the illusion that everyone can attain the paradise of individual ownership.  Welfarism – which was often introduced by left parties and presented as a conquest of the working class, is an even more significant instrument of capitalist control. It undermines the self-confidence of the working class and makes it reliant on the benevolence of the state; and later on, in a phase of mass migration, its organisation by the nation state would mean that the issue of access to health, housing and other benefits became a potent factor in the scapegoating of immigrants and divisions within the working class"[9]

The revival of the class struggle after 1968, which reached its highest point with the mass strike in Poland in 1980, refuted the idea that the working class had been integrated into capitalism and gave us another glimpse of its essential identity as a force that can only express itself by bursting through its institutional chains. Wildcat strikes outside the unions, general assemblies and revocable strike committees, powerful tendencies towards the extension of the struggle – embryos or actual manifestations of the mass strike – renewed the perspective of workers’ councils. At the same time it provided the soil for a small but important revival of the international communist movement which had come close to disappearing by the 1950s – an essential prerequisite for the future formation of a new world party.

And yet as the above-quoted passage from the text on Confidence and Solidarity argues, while May 68 and ensuing movements did raise the question of a new society at the theoretical level, the class struggle as a whole remained on the economic terrain and was not able to grow towards a political confrontation with capitalism. The limits of the proletarian revival contained the seeds of the new phase of decomposition which has seen the proletariat come close to losing its class identity altogether.

Class identity in the phase of decomposition

To understand why, since the end of the 1980s, the proletariat’s awareness of itself as a social force has been in retreat, it is necessary to examine its different dimensions separately in order to understand how they operate together.

To begin with, a capitalist society whose very premises are beginning to unravel, a society in open disintegration, a society which has been through decades of decline and has been blocked in its further evolution, tends, more or less automatically, to exacerbate the social atomisation which has been a key characteristic of this society from its beginning, as Engels noted in The Condition of the Working Class in England [25]:

• ".However much one may be aware that this isolation of the individual, this narrow self-seeking is the fundamental principle of our society everywhere, it is nowhere so shamelessly barefaced, so self-conscious as just here in the crowding of the great city. The dissolution of mankind into monads of which each one has a separate principle and a separate purpose, the world of atoms, is here carried out to its utmost extreme"[10].

In the final phase of this society, the war of each against all intensifies at every level: from growing estrangement between individuals, to violent competition between street gangs operating at the level of this or that housing estate or neighbourhood, to the frenzied struggle between companies for their share of a limited market, to the expanding chaos of military completion between states and proto-states at the international level.   This tendency also underlies the search for communities based on a restricted identity that we referred to earlier – a reaction against atomisation which serves only to reinforce it at another level. This unravelling of social ties works continually and insidiously in polar opposition to the potential for the unification of the working class around its common interests – in other words, to the re-formation of proletarian class identity.

The bourgeoisie of course is directly affected by this same process – as we have noted in relation to its capacity to control its political apparatus, and in the growing difficulty of maintaining stable alliances at the level of relations between states. But unlike the working class the bourgeoisie can to a certain extent turn the effects of decomposition to its advantage and even reinforce them. The collapse of the eastern bloc, for example, was a prime example of the ‘objective’ processes of decomposition, spurred on by a deepening and irresolvable economic crisis. But because of the particular historical circumstances involved in the formation of this bloc – the result of a defeated proletarian revolution which gave rise to a system apparently different from the capitalism of the west – the bourgeoisie has been able to fashion from these events a whole ideological onslaught against the proletariat, an attack on class consciousness which played a significant part in the reflux of the struggle from the 1990s onwards. Facing a working class which, already in the post-68 waves of struggle, was experiencing great difficulty in developing a perspective for its resistance, the ‘death of communism’ campaigns frontally attacked this essential dimension of class consciousness: its capacity to look forward and provide itself with an orientation for the future. But these campaigns didn’t stop there: they proclaimed not only the end of any possibility of an alternative to capitalism, but even the end of the class struggle and of the working class itself. In doing so, the bourgeoisie itself showed the need to undermine class identity as a means of combating the threat of proletarian revolution.

A third dimension of the undermining of class identity in the period of decomposition connects to this: that is to say, the insistence that the working class is an endangered or extinct species  is deeply underpinned by the structural changes that the ruling class has been obliged to introduce in response to the economic crisis of its system – everything that goes under the misleading headings of neo-liberalism and globalisation, but above all the process of ‘de-industrialisation’ of the oldest capitalist centres. This process was of course determined by the necessity to abandon unprofitable industries and to move capital to areas of the globe where the same commodities could be produced much more cheaply. But there was always a directly anti-working class element in this process: the bourgeoisie was well aware, for example, that in taking on the miners in Britain and closing down the mines, it would not only rid itself of a major economic albatross, but would also strike a serious blow against a very combative section of its class enemy. Of course, by shifting whole industries to the Far East and elsewhere, the bourgeoisie would be creating new proletarian battalions for the class war, but it also had a certain understanding that the industrial working class of the main capitalist centres represented a particular danger to it. The working class is not limited to the industrial proletariat, but this sector has always been at the very heart of the workers’ movement and especially of the massive and revolutionary struggles of the past – shown for example by the role of the Putilov factory in the Russian revolution, the workers of the Ruhr in the German revolution, the Renault workers in the French mass strike of 68, the shipyard workers in Poland in 1980.

Along with the shutting down of many of these old industries, capitalism has tried to create a new model of the working class, especially in the service industries which have, in older capitalist countries like Britain, moved further towards the centre stage of economic life. This model is the so-called ‘gig economy’, whose employees are urged to see themselves not as workers but as individual entrepreneurs who can, if they work hard enough, make it big, who can negotiate with the company individual by individual to improve their pay and conditions. Again, these changes are ultimately dictated by the needs of profit, but they are also seized upon by the bourgeoisie to prevent workers from seeing themselves as workers and as part of an exploited class.

Populism and anti-populism

Since our last congress in April 2017 the populist upsurge has continued, despite the efforts of the most central factions of the bourgeoisie to erect a dyke against it, as with the election of Macron in France and the ‘Resistance’ against Trump orchestrated by the Democratic party and part of the state security services in the US. The reliability of Germany as a barrier to the spread of populism has been severely weakened by the electoral rise of the AfD and the development of a pogromist street movement in places like Chemnitz. The divisions and near-paralysis of the British bourgeoisie over Brexit has intensified. The installation of a populist government in Italy, together with the opposition mounted by populist governments in Eastern Europe, has posed serious problems for the future of the EU. The threat to the unity of the Spanish state by the forces of Catalan and other nationalisms has not been overcome. In Brazil the victory of Bolsanaro is a new step in the rise of "strong leaders" who openly advocate state terror against any opposition to their rule. Finally, the phenomenon of the "Yellow Vests" in France and elsewhere shows the capacity of the populists not only to manifest themselves on the electoral terrain, but also on the streets, in large-scale demonstrations that can appear to take up some of the concerns and even the methods of the working class., while having the effect of further confusing the meaning of class identity

Populism, with its aggressively nationalist and xenophobic language, its contempt for evidence and scientific research, its manipulation of conspiracy theories, and its barely concealed relation to the naked violence of fascist street gangs, is without doubt a pure product of decomposition, the indication that the capitalist class is, even in its own terms, going backwards in the face of the historic stalemate between the classes. But while it emerges as a product of social decay and tends to undermine the bourgeoisie’s control of its entire political and economic apparatus, here again the ruling class can make use of the problems created by populism in its permanent war against class consciousness.

This is evident in the case of those fractions of the proletariat who, lacking any perspective of class resistance against capitalism and the effects of its crisis, have been drawn directly into populist politics and have fallen for a new version of the "socialism of fools": the idea that their misery is caused by the growing tide of migrants and refugees who are in turn the shock troops of sinister elites who aim to undermine Christian, white, or national culture. These delusions are  combined with unquestioning support for the populist parties and demagogues who present themselves as an "anti-elite" force, as tribunes of the "real people". The grip of such ideas – which can also lead a significant minority towards the practice of the pogrom and terrorism – clearly works against these fractions regaining their real identity as part of an exploited class, as a section of the class who have been "left behind" not by the plots of anti-national cabals but by the remorseless impact of the global capitalist crisis.

But, recalling Bordiga’s famous dictum that "the worst product of fascism is anti-fascism", we must also point out that the bourgeois opposition to populism plays a no less important role in the ideological swindle that prevents the proletariat from recognising its independent, and antagonistic, class interests to all wings of the ruling class. Writing at the beginning of the Junius Pamphlet about the pogromist atmosphere that invaded Germany at the start of the First World War, Luxemburg noted that this "Kishinev air.. left the policeman at the corner as the only remaining representative of human dignity".  In the US, the same appearance is created by the egregious pronouncements and practices of a Trump, so that the Democrats, liberal Republicans, supreme court judges and even the FBI and CIA start to look like the good guys. In Britain, the apparent domination of political life by a small gang of "Brextremists", in turn linked to dark money and even the machinations of Russian imperialism, stimulates the development of a mass opposition to Brexit which, with the open encouragement of parts of the media, can mobilise up to 750,000 onto the streets of London to call for a second referendum. Although often derided as a polite middleclass movement, such mobilisations undoubtedly draw in large numbers of that educated urban proletariat who are angered by the lies of the populists but are not yet able to detach themselves from the liberal and left wing factions of the bourgeoisie.

In sum: the whole of political debate tends to be monopolised by the questions of pro- and anti-Trump, pro- and anti-Brexit, and so on, a debate entirely circumscribed by patriotic and democratic ideology. The bourgeois opposition to Trump presents itself as the Real America no less than Trump and his supporters, and it condemns the current administration above all for its violation of democratic norms; similarly, in the UK, the debate is always about the true interests of "our country", and both sides of the argument present themselves as the side interested in democracy and the will of the people.  This same polarisation can be observed in the "culture wars" which have fuelled the rise of populism: as we noted earlier, populism is itself a form of identity politics, casting itself as the defender of the exclusive interests of this or that nation or ethnic group, and it engages in a  mutually reinforcing battle with all the other forms of identity politics, whether the Islamist gangs who serve to misdirect the anger of a particular stratum of disaffected young proletarians stuck in urban ghettoes, or the more left leaning campaigns  around racial and gender issues. This polarisation is a real expression of a disintegrating and increasingly divided society, but, faced with the proletariat, decadent capitalism shows its totalitarian character, to the extent that this very polarisation occupies the social and political terrain and tends to block the emergence of debate or action on the terrain of the proletariat.

The danger of nihilism and the potential for a rediscovery of class identity

The capitalist world in decomposition necessarily engenders apocalyptic moods. It can offer humanity no future and its potential for destruction on a scale that beggars the imagination has become more and more evident to wide layers of the world’s population. The most extreme manifestations of this feeling that the world we live in is on its last legs expresses itself in the distorted mythologies of Islamic jihadism or right wing Christian survivalism, but this is a far more general mood. Increasingly disturbing reports of scientific panels about climate change, destruction of species and toxic pollution of all kinds have added to the sense of doom: if the scientists say that we have 12 years to prevent an environmental catastrophe, it is understood already that the governments and corporations of the world will do next to nothing to carry out the measures advocated by these reports, for fear of blunting the competitive edge of the national economies. Indeed, with the advent of populist governments, climate denial becomes more and more hysterical in face of the real dangers faced by the world, and opts for pure vandalism, withdrawal from international agreements and the removal of all limits to the exploitation of nature, as in the case of Trump in the USA and Bolsanaro in Brazil. Add to this the fact that imperialist war is becoming more chaotic and unpredictable while a growing number of states have access to nuclear weapons, then it is hardly surprising that nihilism and despair are even more widespread than they were in the period of World War Two, despite the proximity of the shadow of Auschwitz and Hiroshima and the threat of nuclear war between the two imperialist blocs.

Nihilism and despair arise from a sense of powerlessness, in a loss of conviction that there is any possible alternative to the nightmare scenario being prepared by capitalism. It tends to paralyse reflection and the will to action. And if the only social force that could pose this alternative is virtually unaware of its own existence, does this mean that the game is up, that the point of no return has already been reached?

We certainly recognise that the longer capitalism sinks into decomposition, the more it is sapping the basis for a more human society. Again this is illustrated most clearly by the destruction of the environment, which is reaching the point where it can accelerate the tendency towards a complete break-down of society, a condition which does not favour the self-organisation and confidence in the future required to make the revolution;  and even if the proletariat does come to power on a global scale, it will be faced by a gigantic labour not only to clean up the mess bequeathed by capitalist accumulation, but to reverse a spiral of destruction that it has already set in motion.

But we also know that despair also distorts reality, generates panic on the one hand, denial on the other, and does not permit us to think clearly about the possibilities that are still available to us. In a number of recent documents  presented to congresses and meetings of its central organ, the ICC has examined a series of objective developments which have taken place (or rather continued) over the last few decades and which could act in favour of the proletariat. The most important of these developments are:

• The growth of the proletariat on a world scale , which we tended to deny in the past, driven in particular by the extraordinary growth of industry in China and other eastern and pacific countries. The idea advanced by some sociologists that we are living in a "post-industrial" society appears completely ridiculous when we can see that more than ever, capitalist society presents itself "as an immense accumulation of commodities"; and that the core of all this stuff, this frenzied building, production and distribution, is still carried on by human beings, despite the rapid advance of robotisation. Capitalism without the proletariat is a pure fiction. At the same time, we have seen a growing proletarianisation of countless ‘professional’ and non-factory jobs.
• This economic growth – however fragile its underpinning – has, precisely because of its connection with modern communications technology, become increasingly globalised, an international chain which constantly balks at the limits of national borders and compels capitalism to organise itself on an international scale. The current trend towards nationalist protectionism is seeking to turn back this tide, but it is significant that most of its proponents are in reality incapable of breaking their links with "rootless" global capital. In Britain, for example, the leading financiers of Brexit (like Aaron Banks, whose offshore funds are currently under legal investigation) are all speculators on the world stage, and the same goes for Trump and some of his most committed supporters.  And these tendencies have produced a working class that is increasingly international in its form and in its daily activities: the use of the internet to coordinate global production networks, the "movement of labour" across borders which necessarily accompanies the movement of capital, and so on. This is a fraction of the class which is also highly qualified, often university educated, and has a more "natural" resistance to populism and racism.
• These developments in the shape of the proletariat also includes a growing incorporation of women into associated labour – in the health and care industries in the west, into communications in India, for example, or into factory production in Bangladesh and China. This provides the objective basis for overcoming the gender divisions in the class and for the understanding that the sexual oppression of women, and other forms of sexual oppression, are at root a problem for the class, a pernicious obstacle to its unification. At the same time, the participation of female proletarians in the class struggle has always been a potent element in the development of its moral dimension.
• Technological developments – in marxist terms, the development of the productive forces– are also, potentially, a factor in recognising the obsolescence of the capitalist mode of production. In the process of production, the growth of computers and robots under capitalism generates unemployment on the one hand, overwork on the other, but their possible use in relieving humanity from drudgery also becomes increasingly obvious. At the same time, the use of digital technology in the spheres of distribution, payment and finance hints at the possibility that the commodity form is itself bankrupt, that the technology could be used simply to measure distribution on the basis of need. This has given rise to various utopian "post-capitalist" theories which are deluded into thinking that such developments will arrive automatically from the use of technology itself[11], but  which nevertheless express a growing reality predicted by Marx: that "capital has outlived itself".
• The obsolescence of the commodity form, of value production, is expressed above all in what is perhaps the most crucial "objective factor" of all: the economic crisis. It is capital’s inability to go beyond itself, by itself, which is the underlying factor behind the present crisis of civilisation; and when the contradictions arising from this historic state of affairs become most open, they tend to reveal to the exploited class the necessity for a new mode of production. The 2008 crisis – even if the form it took (a credit crunch that hit proletarians more as individual savers than as part of a collective class) and the means used to overcome it (the application of heavy doses of the same poison that had led to it in the first place) did not favour a massive and global development of class consciousness – nevertheless remains as a proof of the essential vulnerability and obsolescence of the system, which is heading towards even greater convulsions in the future. There are major storm clouds brewing over the world economy  and there is no question that the growing inability of the ruling class to master the economic contradictions of the system, and thus the increasing necessity for frontal attacks on working and living conditions, remain a key potential factor in the revival of class struggle and of a more wide-spread proletarian self-awareness.
• Necessity for a development on the subjective level

But we must bear in mind that these objective factors, while being necessary to the recovery of class identity and class consciousness, are not sufficient in themselves, and that there are other factors operating against the realisation of the potential they contain. Thus, the new generations of industrial workers in the east have often show high levels of militancy (for example, massive strikes in the textile industry in Bangladesh) but they lack the long political traditions of the western proletariat, even if the latter have been buried to a large extent. The integration of women into the workplace has, when class consciousness is low, often been accompanied by an increase in harassment.  And we have also seen (certainly in the 1930s, but also to a certain degree in the wake of 2008) that the economic crisis can under certain circumstances become a factor of demoralisation and of individual atomisation rather than collective mobilisation.

The working class is the class of consciousness. Unlike the bourgeois revolution its revolution is not based on a steady accumulation of wealth and economic power. It can only accumulate experience, tradition of struggle, methods of organisation, and so on. In sum, the subjective element is crucial if an objective potential is to be seized and realised.

This subjective potential cannot be measured in immediate terms. The balance of class forces exists historically and we can say that, even if time is not on its side, even though decomposition is becoming a growing threat and the working class is experiencing considerable differences in emerging from its current retreat, globally the class has not been crushed since 1968 and thus remains an obstacle to the full descent into barbarism; it thus retains the potential for overcoming the whole system.. But we can only continue to assert this by carefully examining more immediate expressions of rebellion against the social order. And these are not absent:

With regard to the open struggles of the class, we will look at two recent examples:

1. In Britain in the last two years we have seen small but significant strikes by workers in the ‘gig’ economy, as recounted in this article in World Revolution:

• "One of the fears about workers in very precarious casual jobs, with a large proportion of immigrants among them, is that they will not be able to struggle, and so will be nothing but a competitive pressure to lower wages. Firms such as Uber and Deliveroo like to claim their workers are self-employed (so not getting minimum wage, holiday or sick leave). The recent strike at Deliveroo, which spread to UberEats drivers, has answered both questions. They are most definitely part of the working class, and most definitely able to struggle to defend themselves.
  Threatened with a new contract that would change from hourly pay plus a bonus for each delivery (£7 and £1) with pay only for each delivery, despite their apparent isolation from each other and their precarious circumstances, Deliveroo delivery workers organised meetings to run their struggle, a protest moped and cycle ride through the streets in London, and a 6 day strike. They insisted on collective negotiation against the managing director’s ‘offer’ to speak to them individually.  In the end the threat that they would lose their jobs if they did not sign up to the new contract was withdrawn, but it is being trialled by those who opt in. A partial victory.
  Some UberEats delivery workers came to Deliveroo meetings. They face similar conditions, being falsely given self-employed status; pay has fallen so they barely make the minimum wage, with no guaranteed pay, only getting £3.30 per delivery. After a wildcat strike one worker was sacked (or "deactivated" since he is not protected by employment law), underlining the courage needed by workers who struggle in such precarious industries…"[12]

More recently, in October, workers at a series of fast food outlets in a number of cities in the UK – Macdonalds, TGI Fridays and JD Witherspoon, together with UberEats drivers, came out on strike together and joined each others’ pickets and demonstrations. As the article in WR says, these actions are based on a recognition that the employees of these firms are indeed part of a collective social body and not just isolated individuals. It was also significant that these strikes involved many immigrant workers alongside those born in the UK, while some of the actions were coordinated with strikes in the same firms in Europe. At the same time, according to the BBC, "the strikes are being held to coincide with industrial action over pay by fast-food workers in Chile, Colombia, the US, Belgium, Italy, Germany, the Philippines and Japan"[13].

The notion of the ‘precariat’ applied to these workers implies that this is a new class, but precarious employment has always been part of the condition of the working class. In a sense, the methods of the ‘gig economy’, with workers increasingly employed on very short term and casual basis, takes us back to the days of building or port workers queuing for hire on a day to day basis.

The attempts of workers from different firms and countries to come together is an affirmation of class identity against the "new model" mentioned earlier, and shows that no section of the class, however dispersed and downtrodden, is incapable of fighting for its interests. At the same time, the fact that these workers have largely been ignored by the traditional unions has left a space for more radical forms of trade unionism: in the UK, semi-syndicalist organizations like the IWW, Independent Workers Union of Great Britain and United Voices of the World have quickly taken advantage of this and have become the main force ‘’organising’ the workers. This is probably inevitable in a situation where there is no general class movement, but the influence of these radical unions testifies to the need to contain a genuine radicalization amongst a minority of workers.

2. Struggles against the war economy in the Middle East

The strikes and demonstrations which erupted in July in many parts of Jordan, Iraq and Iran, described in several recent articles on our website[14], were a direct response by proletarians of the region to the miseries inflicted on the population by the war economy. The demands raised by the protests were heavily focused on basic economic issues: shortages of water and healthcare, poverty wages or unpaid wages, unemployment, testifying to the fact that these movements began on a class terrain. They also raised a number of political slogans which tend to assert proletarian interests against the interests of the ruling class and its wars: in Iran, for example, both "fundamentalist" and "reforming" factions of the theocracy were lumped together and the imperial pretensions of the Iranian regime were frequently ridiculed; in Iraq protesters cried out that they were neither Sunni nor Shia; and "Not only have government and municipal buildings been the target of demonstrators’ attacks but so have the Shia institutions belying their hypocritical "support" for the wave of protests. The ‘radical’ populist al-Sadr had his delegation to the protesters attacked and seen off – this was shown in footage on social media"[15].

Even more important, in the autumn of 2018 there were a number of very combative workers’ strikes in Iranian industry, with some clear expressions of solidarity between different enterprises, as in the case of the Foolad steel workers and the sugar workers at HaftTappeh. The latter struggle also became well known internationally through the holding of general assemblies and statements from a key strike leader Ismail Bakhshi about their strike committee as a kind of embryonic soviet. This has been taken up by various elements in the milieu to imply that workers’ councils were on the immediate agenda in Iran, which we think is far from being the case. Other statements by Bakhshi show that there are serious confusions about self-management even among the more advanced workers[16]. It’s also the case that some of the slogans in the earlier street protests had a nationalist and even monarchist character. Despite these profound weaknesses, we still consider that this wave of struggle in Iran was an important expression of the intact potential of the class struggle.  With war becoming a permanent reality for growing sections of the class, these movements are a reminder not only of the absolute antagonism between the proletariat and imperialist conflict, but of an embryonic awareness of this antagonism, expressed both in some of the slogans raised and in the international simultaneity of these upsurges in Iran, Iraq and Jordan.

The spread of social indignation

These examples are not presented as proof of a global revival of the class struggle or even of the end of its retreat, which would in any case require the emergence of important class movements in the central countries of the system. In these countries, the social situation is still marked more by an absence of major struggles on the proletarian terrain. On the other hand, we have seen a number of protests that express a growing indignation against the brutality and destructiveness of capitalist society, In the USA in particular, we have seen the direct actions at the airports against the detaining and expulsion of travellers from Muslim countries; huge demonstrations in the wake of police shootings of young black people in a number of cities: Charlotte, St Louis, New York, Sacramento…., and the massive mobilisation of young people following the school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Climate change and the destruction of the environment is also a factor sparking protests, notably the school strikes organised in many countries under the umbrella of "Youth for Climate" or the Extinction Rebellion protests in London.. In the same way, outrage over the patronising and violent treatment of women – not only in ‘backward’ countries like India but in the so-called ‘liberal democracies’ - has also been expressed on the streets rather than being limited to internet forums.

However, given the general loss of class identity, there is little to prevent these kinds of protests falling into the traps of the bourgeoisie – into  mystifications around identity politics and reformism, and thus being directly manipulation by left and democratic bourgeois factions. The Yellow Vest phenomenon also shows the danger of the class further losing itself in inter-classist movements dominated by the ideology of populism and nationalism.

 It is only through the class regaining a sense of itself as a class, through the development of the struggle on its own terrain, that all the energy and legitimate anger that today is being channelled in sterile or harmful directions could tomorrow be ‘recuperated’ by the proletariat. That this is more than a vague wish is shown by the dynamic of the Indignados movement in 2011. Motivated by ‘classic’ working class issues – unemployment, job insecurity, the impact of the 2008 crash on living standards – this was a movement which also raised questions about the future of humanity in a system which many of its participants saw as "obsolete". It consequently organised all kinds of discussions about morality, science, the environment, questions of sex and gender, and so on – in this sense clearly reviving the spirit of May 68 by posing the question of an alternative to capitalist society. This was an expression of a proletarian movement which had begun to understand that it contains the answer to "particular wrongs" as well as "wrong in general". It showed that the class struggle needs to extend not only across wider sectors of the capitalist economy, but also into the spheres of politics and culture.

Nevertheless, the problem remains that even if the Indignados was in essence a movement of the proletariat, largely made up of employed, semi-employed, unemployed, university and high school students, the majority of its protagonists saw themselves above all as citizens, and were thus particularly vulnerable to the ideology of "Democracy Now" and other leftists who tried to drag the assembly movement towards incorporation into a reformed parliamentary regime. There was, of course, a substantial proletarian wing (in the political rather than the sociological sense) of the movement which saw things differently but they remained a minority and seem to have given birth to  a far smaller minority of elements who have moved towards revolutionary politics. The "identity problem" of the Indignados movement was further emphasised in 2017 when so many of those who had been genuinely indignant against the future offered by capitalism fell for the fraud of nationalism, particularly its Catalan version.

One of the key weaknesses of the movement was its lack of connection between the movement in the streets and squares and the struggles in the workplaces, and this gap is something that future struggles will have to overcome. We have seen glimpses of this in the recent movements in the Middle East, and perhaps more explicitly in the metal workers’ strikes in Vigo in 2006. For just as gaining the street is essential for bringing together, workers from different sectors, as well as the unemployed, so the movement in the workplaces is key to reminding all those on the street that they are part of a class which has to sell its labour to capital.

This conjunction will also be important in solving the problem of the unitary organisation of future massive movements – the problem of the workers’ councils. In past revolutionary movements, the workers’ councils tended to arise from the centralisation of general assemblies in the large industrial units. This will no doubt remain an important factor in regions where such units still exist (Germany for example) or have been developed in the recent period (China, Indian sub-continent, etc). But given the importance of the old centres of the class struggle, above all in Europe, which have been subjected to a long process of deindustrialisation, it is possible that councils will emerge from a coming together of assemblies held in central workplaces such as hospitals, universities, warehouses etc, and mass meetings held on streets and squares where workers from more dispersed workplaces, the unemployed and precariously employed can unify their struggles.

The fact that major parts of the population have been proletarianised by the combined impact of the crisis and changes in the ‘skin’ of the working class implies that assemblies based on territorial rather than industrial units will retain a working class character, even if there is evidently the danger of the influence of petty bourgeois and other strata in such forms of organisation. Such dilemmas lead us to the question of the autonomy of the class and its relation to the transitional state in the revolution of the future, since the working class, having rediscovered its identity as a revolutionary social force, will have to maintain this autonomous identity politically and organisationally during the transitional period, until all have become proletarians and thus none are proletarians.

It is also likely that this newly-found revolutionary identity will take a more directly political form in the future: in other words, that the class will define itself through a growing adherence to the communist perspective, not least because the profundity of the social and economic crisis will have sapped away at illusions in any possible "return to normal" for capitalism in decompoistion. We saw an indication of this in the appearance of the proletarian wing in the Indignados movement: its proletarian character was based not so much on its sociological composition, but on its fight to defend the autonomy of the assemblies and a general perspective of social transformation against the various leftist recuperators. The party of the future could well emerge through the inter-action between such large proletarian minorities and the communist political organisations. Of course the fragility of the existing milieu of the communist left means that there is no guarantee that this rendez-vous will be made. But we can say that the appearance of new elements gravitating towards the communist left today – some of them very young – is a sign that the process of subterranean maturation is a reality and that it is continuing despite the very evident difficulties of the class struggle.  Even if we understand that the party of the future will by no means be a mass organisation that seeks to encompass the class as a whole, this dimension of the politicisation of the struggle brings out what is profoundly true in the classic marxist phrase: "constitution of the proletarians into a class, and thus into a political party".

(28.12.18)

Historical framework: the phase of capitalist decomposition

1) Thirty years ago, the ICC highlighted the fact that the capitalist system had entered the final phase of its period of decadence, that of decomposition. This analysis was based on a number of empirical facts, but at the same time it provided a framework for understanding these facts: "In this situation, where society's two decisive - and antagonistic - classes confront each other without either being able to impose its own definitive response, history nonetheless does not just come to a stop. Still less for capitalism than for preceding social forms, is a ‘freeze’" or a ‘stagnation’ of social life possible. As crisis­-ridden capitalism's contradictions can only get deeper, the bourgeoisie's inability to offer the slightest perspective for society as a whole, and the proletariat's inability, for the moment, openly to set forward its own historic perspective, can only lead to a situation of generalised decomposition. Capitalism is rotting on its feet." ("Decomposition, the final phase of the decadence of capitalism", Point 4, International Review No. 62)

Our analysis took care to clarify the two meanings of the term "decomposition"; on the one hand, it applies to a phenomenon that affects society, particularly in the period of decadence of capitalism and, on the other hand, it designates a particular historical phase of the latter, its ultimate phase:

"... it is vital to highlight the fundamental distinction between the elements of decomposition which have infected capitalism since the beginning of the century [the 20th century] and the generalised decomposition which is infecting the system today, and which can only get worse. Here again, quite apart from the strictly quantitative aspect, the phe­nomenon of social decomposition has today reached such a breadth and depth that it has taken on a new and unique quality, revealing decadent capitalism's entry into a new and final phase of its history: the phase where decompo­sition becomes a decisive, if not the decisive factor in social evolution." (Ibid., Point 2)

It is mainly this last point, the fact that decomposition tends to become the decisive factor in the evolution of society, and therefore of all the components of the world situation - an idea that is by no means shared by the other groups of the communist left - that constitutes the major thrust of this resolution.

2) The May 1990 theses on decomposition highlight a whole series of characteristics in the evolution of society resulting from the entry of capitalism into this ultimate phase of its existence. The report adopted by the 22nd Congress noted the worsening of all these characteristics, such as:

- "the proliferation of famines in the ‘Third World’ countries…;

- the transformation of the ‘Third World’ into a vast slum, where hundreds of millions of human beings survive like rats in the sewers;

- the development of the same phenomenon in the heart of the major cities in the ‘advanced’ countries, … ;

- the recent proliferation of ‘accidental’ catastrophes (…) the increasingly devastating effects, on the human, social, and economic levels, of ’natural’ disasters …;

- the degradation of the environment, which is reaching staggering dimensions" (Theses on decomposition, pt. 7)

The report on decomposition to the 22nd Congress of the ICC also highlighted the confirmation and aggravation of the political and ideological manifestations of decomposition as identified in 1990:

- "the incredible corruption, which grows and prospers, of the political apparatus (...);

- the development of terrorism, or the seizure of hostages, as methods of warfare be­tween states, to the detriment of the "laws" that capitalism established in the past to ‘regulate’ the conflicts between different ruling class factions;

- the constant increase in criminality, inse­curity, and urban violence, (...);

- the development of nihilism, despair, and suicide amongst young people … and of the hatred and xenophobia (...);

- the tidal waves of drug addiction, which have now become a mass phenomenon and a powerful element in the corruption of states and financial organisms (...);

- the profusion of sects, the renewal of the religious spirit including in the advanced coun­tries, the rejection of rational, coherent thought (...);

- the invasion of the same media by the spectacle of violence, horror, blood, massacres, (...);

- the vacuity and venality of all ‘artistic’ production: literature, music, painting, archi­tecture (...);

-’every man for himself’, marginalisation, the atomization of the individual, the de­struction of family relationships, the exclusion of old people from social life” (Theses on decomposition, pt. 8).

The report of the 22nd Congress focused in particular on the development of a phenomenon already noted in 1990 (and which had played a major role in ICC's awareness of the entry of decadent capitalism into the phase of decomposition): the use of terrorism in imperialist conflicts. The report noted that: "The quantitative and qualitative growth of the place of terrorism has taken a decisive step (...) with the attack on the Twin Towers (...) It was subsequently confirmed with the attacks in Madrid in 2004 and London in 2005 (...), the establishment of Daesh in 2013-14 (...), the attacks in France in 2015-16, Belgium and Germany in 2016".  The report also noted, in connection with these attacks and as a characteristic expression of the decomposition of society, the spread of radical Islamism, which, while initially inspired by Shia (with the establishment in 1979 of the mullahs' regime in Iran), became essentially the result of the Sunni movement from 1996 onwards, with the capture of Kabul by the Taliban and, even more so, after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq by American troops.

3) In addition to confirming the trends already identified in the 1990 theses, the report adopted by the 22nd Congress noted the emergence of two new phenomena resulting from the continuation of decomposition and destined to play a major role in the political life of many countries:

- a dramatic increase in migration flows from 2012 onwards, culminating in 2015, and coming mainly from the war-torn Middle East, particularly following the "Arab spring" of 2011;

- the continued rise of populism in most European countries and also in the world's leading power with the election of Donald Trump in November 2016.

Massive population displacements are not a phenomenon specific to the phase of decomposition. However, they are now acquiring a dimension that makes them a singular element of this decomposition, both in terms of their current causes (notably the chaos of war that reigns in the countries of origin) and their political consequences in the countries of destination. In particular, the massive arrival of refugees in European countries has been a prime basis for the populist wave developing in Europe, although this wave began to rise long before (especially in a country like France with the rise of the National Front).

4) In fact, over the past twenty years, populist parties have seen the number of votes polled in favour of them triple in Europe (from 7% to 25%), with strong increases following the 2008 financial crisis and the 2015 migration crisis. In about ten countries, these parties participate in the government or parliamentary majority: Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Austria, Denmark, Norway, Switzerland and Italy. Moreover, even when populist groups are not involved in government, they have a significant influence on the political life of the bourgeoisie. Three examples can be given:

- in Germany, it was the electoral rise of the AfD that considerably weakened Angela Merkel, forcing her to give up the leadership of her party;

- in France, "Man of Destiny” Macron, an apostle of a "New World", although he managed to win a large victory over Marine Le Pen in the 2017 elections, has in no way succeeded in reducing the influence of the latter's party, which in the polls is hot on the heels of his own party, the République en Marche, which claims to be both of the "right and left" with political personnel on both sides (for example, a Prime Minister from the Right and a Minister of the Interior from the Socialist Party);

- in Great Britain, the traditionally most skilful bourgeoisie in the world has been giving us for more than a year the spectacle of deep distress resulting from its inability to manage the "Brexit" imposed on it by the populist currents.

Whether the populist currents are in government or simply disrupting the classic political game, they do not correspond to a rational option for the management of national capital nor therefore to a deliberate card played by the dominant sectors of the bourgeois class which, particularly through its media, is constantly denouncing these currents. What the rise of populism actually expresses is the aggravation of a phenomenon already announced in the 1990 theses: "Amongst the major characteristics of capitalist society's decomposition, we should emphasize the bourgeoisie's growing difficulty in controlling the evolution of the political situation" (Item 9). A phenomenon clearly noted in the report of the 22nd Congress: "What must be stressed in the current situation is the full confirmation of this aspect that we identified 25 years ago: the trend towards a growing loss of control by the ruling class over its political apparatus.”

The rise of populism is an expression, in the current circumstances, of the bourgeoisie's increasing loss of control over the workings of society, resulting fundamentally from what lies at the heart of its decomposition, the inability of the two fundamental classes of society to provide a response to the insoluble crisis into which the capitalist economy is sinking. In other words, decomposition is fundamentally the result of impotence on the part of the ruling class, an impotence that is rooted in its inability to overcome this crisis in its mode of production and that increasingly tends to affect its political apparatus.

Among the current causes of the populist wave are the main manifestations of social decomposition: the rise of despair, nihilism, violence, xenophobia, associated with a growing rejection of the "elites" (the "rich", politicians, technocrats) and in a situation where the working class is unable to present, even in an embryonic way, an alternative. It is obviously possible, either because it will itself have demonstrated its own powerlessness and corruption, or because a renewal of workers' struggles will cut the ground under its feet, that populism will lose its influence in the future. On the other hand, it cannot in any way call into question the historical tendency of society to sink into decomposition, nor the various manifestations of it, including the increasing loss of control by the bourgeoisie of its political game. And this has consequences not only for the domestic policy of each state but also for all relations between states and imperialist configurations.

The historic course – a paradigm change

5) In 1989-90, in the face of the dislocation of the Eastern bloc, we analysed this unprecedented historical phenomenon - the collapse of an entire imperialist bloc in the absence of a generalised military confrontation -  as the first major manifestation of the period of decomposition. At the same time, we examined the new configuration of the world that resulted from this historic event:

“The disappearance of the Russian imperialist gendarme, and that to come of the American gendarme as far as its one-time ‘partners’ are concerned, opens the door to the unleashing of a whole series of more local rivalries. For the moment, these rivalries and confrontations cannot degenerate into a world war (even supposing that the proletariat were no longer capable of putting up a resistance). (…) Up to now, during the period of decadence, such a situation where the various imperialist antagonisms are dispersed, where the world (or at least its decisive zones) is not divided up between two blocs, has never lasted long. The disappearance of the two major imperialist constellations which emerged from World War II brings with it the tendency towards the recomposition of two new blocs. Such a situation, however, is not yet on the agenda (…) This is all the more true in that the tendency towards a new share-out of the planet between two military blocs is countered, and may even be definitively compromised, by the increasingly profound and widespread decomposition of capitalist society, which we have already pointed out (…)

Given the world bourgeoisie's loss of control over the situation, it is not certain that its dominant sectors will today be capable of enforcing the discipline and coordination necessary for the reconstitution of military blocs.” (“After the collapse of the Eastern bloc, destabilization and chaos”, International Review No. 61)

Thus, 1989 marks a fundamental change in the general dynamics of capitalist society:

- Before that date, the balance of power between the classes was the determining factor in this dynamic: it was on this balance of forces that the outcome of the exacerbation of the contradictions of capitalism depended: either the unleashing of the world war, or the development of class struggle with the overthrow of capitalism as the perspective.

- After that date, this dynamic is no longer determined by the balance of forces between classes. Whatever the balance of forces, world war is no longer on the agenda, but capitalism will continue to sink into decay.

6) In the paradigm that dominated most of the 20th century, the notion of a "historical course" defined the outcome of a historical trend: either world war or class confrontations; and once the proletariat had suffered a decisive defeat (as on the eve of 1914 or as a result of the revolutionary wave of 1917-23), world war became ineluctable. In the paradigm that defines the current situation (until two new imperialist blocs are reconstituted, which may never happen), it is quite possible that the proletariat will suffer a defeat so deep that it will definitively prevent it from recovering, but it is also possible that it will suffer a deep defeat without this having a decisive consequence for the general evolution of society. This is why the notion of "historical course" is no longer able to define the situation of the current world and the balance of forces between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

In a way, the current historical situation is similar to that of the 19th century. At that time:

- an increase in workers' struggles did not mean the prospect of a revolutionary period since proletarian revolution was not yet on the agenda, nor could it prevent a major war from breaking out (for example, the war between France and Prussia in 1870 when the power of the proletariat was rising with the development of the International Workingmen’s Association);

- a major defeat of the proletariat (such as the crushing of the Paris Commune) did not result in a new war.

That said, it is important to stress that the notion of "historical course" as used by the Italian Fraction in the 1930s and by the ICC between 1968 and 1989 was perfectly valid and constituted the fundamental framework for understanding the world situation. In no way can the fact that our organisation has had to take into account the new and unprecedented facts on this situation since 1989 be interpreted as a challenge to our analytical framework until that date.

Imperialist tensions

7) As early as 1990, at the same time as we were seeing the disappearance of the imperialist blocs that had dominated the "Cold War", we insisted on the continuation, and even the aggravation, of military clashes:

“In the period of capitalist decadence, all states are imperialist, and take the necessary measures to satisfy their appetites: war economy, arms production, etc. We must state clearly that the deepening convulsions of the world economy can only sharpen the opposition between different states, including and increasingly on the military level. … For the moment, these rivalries and con­frontations cannot degenerate into a world war. … However, with the disappearance of the discipline imposed by the two blocs, these conflicts are liable to become more frequent and more violent, especially of course in those areas where the proletariat is weakest.” (International Review No. 61, "After the collapse of the Eastern bloc, destabilisation and chaos")

 “the present disappearance of imperialist blocs does not imply the slightest calling into question of imperialism's grip on social life. The fundamental difference lies in the fact that (…) the end of the blocs only opens the door to a still more barbaric, aberrant, and chaotic form of imperialism.” (International Review n°64, "Militarism and Decomposition")

Since then, the global situation has only confirmed this trend towards worsening chaos, as we observed a year ago:

 “ … The development of decomposition has led to a bloody and chaotic unchaining of imperialism and militarism;

 - the explosion of the tendency of each for himself has led to the rise of the imperialist ambitions of second and third level powers, as well as to the growing weakening of the USA’s dominant position in the world;

 - The current situation is characterised by imperialist tensions all over the place and by a chaos that is less and less controllable; but above all, by its highly irrational and unpredictable character, linked to the impact of populist pressures, in particular to the fact that the world’s strongest power is led today by a populist president with temperamental reactions.” (International Review No. 161, "Analysis of Recent Developments in Imperialist Tensions, June 2018")

8) The Middle East, where the weakening of American leadership is most evident and where the Americans’ inability to engage too directly on the military level in Syria has left the field open to other imperialisms, offers a concentration of these historical trends:

 - Russia has imposed itself as an essential power in the Syrian theatre thanks to its military force, in particular to preserve its naval bases in Tartus

 - Iran, through its military victory to save its ally, the Assad regime, and by forging an Iraqi-Syrian land corridor directly linking Iran to the Mediterranean and the Lebanese Hezbollah, is the main beneficiary and has fulfilled its objective of taking the lead in this region, in particular by deploying troops outside its territory.

 - Turkey, obsessed by the fear of the establishment of autonomous Kurdish zones that can only destabilise it, operates militarily in Syria.

 - The military “victories” in Iraq and Syria against the Islamic State and the retention of Assad in power offer no prospect of stabilisation. In Iraq, the military defeat of the Islamic State did not eliminate the resentment of the former Sunni faction around Saddam Hussein that gave rise to it: the exercise of power for the first time by Shiites only further fuels it. In Syria, the regime's military victory does not mean the stabilisation or pacification of the shared Syrian space, which is subjected to the intervention of different imperialisms with competing interests.

 - Russia and Iran are deeply divided over the future of the Syrian state and the presence of their military troops on its territory;

Neither Israel, hostile to the strengthening of Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria, nor Saudi Arabia, can tolerate this Iranian advance; while Turkey cannot accept the excessive regional ambitions of its two rivals.

Nor can the United States and the West give up their ambitions in this strategic area of the world.

The centrifugal action of the various powers, small and large, whose divergent imperialist appetites constantly collide, only fuels the persistence of current conflicts, as in Yemen, as well as the prospect of future conflicts and the spread of chaos.

9) While, following the collapse of the USSR in 1989, Russia seemed doomed to play only a secondary power role, it is making a strong comeback to the imperialist level. A power in decline and lacking the economic capacity to sustain military competition with other major powers in the long term, it has demonstrated, through the restoration of its military capabilities since 2008, its very high military aggressiveness and its capacity to be a nuisance internationally:

- It has thus thwarted US “containment” (with the integration into NATO of its former Warsaw Pact allies) on the European continent with the annexation of Crimea in 2014, with the separatist amputation of Donbass breaking any possibility of making Ukraine a central part of the anti-Russian apparatus.

- It has taken advantage of America’s difficulties to push towards the Mediterranean: its military intervention in Syria has enabled it to strengthen its naval military presence in that country and in the eastern Mediterranean basin. Russia has also managed for the time being to make a rapprochement with Turkey, a NATO member, which is moving away from the American orbit.

Russia's current rapprochement with China on the basis of the rejection of American alliances in the Asian region has only a weak prospect of creating a long-term alliance given the divergent interests of the two states. However the instability of relations between the powers confers on Russia as a Eurasian state a new strategic importance in view of the place it can occupy in the containment of China.

10) Above all, the current situation is marked by China's rapid rise to power. The latter has the aim (by investing massively in new technological sectors, in artificial intelligence, etc) of establishing itself as the leading economic power by 2030-50 and acquiring by 2050 a "world-class army capable of winning victory in any modern war". The most visible manifestation of its ambitions is the launch since 2013 of the "new Silk Road" (creation of transport corridors at sea and on land, access to the European market and security of its trade routes) designed as a means of strengthening its economic presence but also as an instrument for developing its imperialist power in the world and in the long term, directly threatening American pre-eminence.

This rise of China is causing a general destabilisation of relations between powers, a serious strategic situation in which the dominant power, the United States, is trying to contain and block the threatening rise of China. The American response started by Obama taken on and amplified by Trump by other means - represents a turning point in American politics. The defence of its interests as a national state now means embracing the tendency towards every man for himself that dominates imperialist relations: the United States is moving from being the gendarme of the world order to being the main agent of every man for himself, of chaos, of questioning the world order established since 1945 under its auspices.

This "strategic battle for the new world order between the United States and China", which is being fought in all areas at once, further increases the uncertainty and unpredictability already embedded in the particularly complex, unstable and shifting situation of decomposition: this major conflict is forcing all states to reconsider their evolving imperialist options.

11) The stages of China's rise are inseparable from the history of the imperialist blocs and their disappearance in 1989: the position of the communist left affirming the "impossibility of any emergence of new industrialised nations" in the period of decadence and the condemnation of states "which failed to succeed in their ‘industrial take-off’ before the First World War to stagnate in underdevelopment, or to preserve a chronic backwardness compared to the countries that hold the upper hand" was valid in the period from 1914 to 1989. It was the straitjacket of the organisation of the world into two opposing imperialist blocs (permanent between 1945 and 1989) in preparation for the world war that prevented any major disruption of the hierarchy between powers. China's rise began with American aid rewarding its imperialist shift to the United States in 1972. It continued decisively after the disappearance of the blocs in 1989. China appears to be the main beneficiary of ‘globalisation’ following its accession to the WTO in 2001when it became the world's workshop and the recipient of Western relocations and investments, finally becoming the world's second largest economic power. It took the unprecedented circumstances of the historical period of decomposition to allow China to rise, without which it would not have happened.

China's power bears all the stigma of terminal capitalism: it is based on the over-exploitation of the proletarian labour force, the unbridled development of the war economy through the national programme of “military-civil fusion” and is accompanied by the catastrophic destruction of the environment, while national cohesion is based on the police control of the masses subjected to the political education of the One Party and the fierce repression of the populations of Uighur Muslims and Tibet. In fact, China is only a giant metastasis of the generalised militaristic cancer of the entire capitalist system: its military production is developing at a frenetic pace, its defence budget has increased six-fold in 20 years and has been ranked second in the world since 2010.

12) The establishment of the “New Silk Road” and China's gradual, persistent and long-term progress (the establishment of economic agreements or inter-state partnerships all over the world; with Italy, with its access to the port of Athens in the Mediterranean; in Latin America; with the creation of a military base in Djibouti - the gateway to its growing influence on the African continent) affects all states and upsets the existing balances.

In Asia, China has already changed the balance of imperialist forces to the detriment of the United States. However, it is not possible for it to automatically fill the “void” left by the decline of American leadership because of the domination of each for themselves in the imperialist sphere and the distrust that its power provokes. Significant imperialist tensions have crystallized in particular with:

- India, which denounces the creation of the Silk Road in its immediate vicinity (Pakistan, Burma, Sri Lanka) as a strategy of encirclement and an attack on its sovereignty, is undertaking a major programme to modernise its army and has almost doubled its budget since 2008.

- and Japan, which has the same desire to block it. Tokyo has begun to question its post World War II status limiting its legal and material capacity to use military force, and it directly supports regional states, diplomatically but also militarily, in order to confront China.

The hostility of these two states towards China is driving towards their convergence as well as their rapprochement with the United States. The latter have launched a four-party Japan-United States-Australia-India alliance that provides a framework for diplomatic, but also military, rapprochement between the various states opposed to China's rise.

In this phase of "catching up" with US power by China, it is trying to hide its hegemonic ambitions in order to avoid direct confrontation with its rival, which is harmful to its long-term plans, while the United States is taking the initiative now to block it and refocus most of its imperialist attention on the Indo-Pacific area.

13) Despite Trump's populism, despite disagreements within the American bourgeoisies on how to defend their leadership and divisions, particularly regarding Russia, the Trump administration adopts an imperialist policy in continuity and consistency with the fundamental imperialist interests of the American state. It is generally agreed among the majority sectors of the American bourgeoisie that it is vital to defend the USA’s rank as undisputed leading world power.

Faced with the Chinese challenge, the United States is undergoing a major transformation of its imperialist world strategy. This shift is based on the observation that the framework of "globalisation" has not guaranteed the United States' position but has if anything weakened it. The Trump administration's formalisation of the principle of defending only their interests as a national state and the imposition of profitable power relations as the main basis for relations with other states, confirms and draws implications from the failure of the policy of the last 25 years of fighting against the “every man for himself” tendency as a world policeman in defence of the world order inherited from 1945.

This turnaround by the United States is reflected in:

- its withdrawal from (or questioning of) international agreements and institutions that have become obstacles to their supremacy or contradictory to the current needs of American imperialism: withdrawal of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, reduction of contributions to the UN and their withdrawal from UNESCO, the United Nations Human Rights Council, the Global Compact on Migrants and Refugees.

- the willingness to adapt NATO, the military alliance inherited from the blocs, which has lost much of its relevance in the current configuration of imperialist tensions, by imposing on the allies a greater financial responsibility for their protection and by revising the automatic character of the deployment of the American umbrella.

- the tendency to abandon multilateralism in favour of bilateral agreements (based on its military and economic strength) using the levers of economic blackmail, terror and the threat of the use of military brute force (such as atomic strikes against North Korea) to impose themselves.

- the trade war with China, largely with a view to denying China any possibility of gaining economic stature and developing strategic sectors that would allow it to directly challenge US hegemony.

- the questioning of multilateral arms control agreements (NIF and START) in order to maintain their technological lead and relaunch the arms race to exhaust America’s rivals (according to the proven strategy that led to the collapse of the USSR). The United States adopted in 2018 one of the highest military budgets in its history; it is relaunching its nuclear capabilities and is considering the creation of a sixth component of the US Army to “dominate space” to counter China's threats in the satellite field.

The vandalising behaviour of a Trump, who can denounce American international commitments overnight in defiance of established rules, represents a new and powerful factor of uncertainty, providing further impetus towards “each against all”. It is a further indication of the new stage in which capitalism is sinking further into barbarism and the abyss of untrammelled militarism.

14) The change in American strategy is noticeable in some of the main imperialist theatres:

- in the Middle East, the United States' stated objective towards Iran (and sanctions against it) is to destabilise and overthrow the regime by playing on its internal divisions. While seeking to continue its progressive military disengagement from the quagmire of Afghanistan and Syria, the United States now unilaterally relies on its allies in Israel and especially Saudi Arabia (by far the largest regional military power) as the backbone of its policy to contain Iran. In this perspective, they provide each of these two states and their respective leaders with the guarantees of unwavering support on all fronts to tighten their alliance (provision of state-of-the-art military equipment, Trump's support in the scandal of the assassination of the Saudis’ opponent Khashoggi, recognition of East Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and of Israeli sovereignty on the Syrian Golan Heights). The priority of containing Iran is accompanied by the prospect of abandoning the Oslo agreements, with its "two-state" solution (Israeli and Palestinian) to the Palestinian question. The cessation of US aid to the Palestinians and the PLO and the proposal for a “big deal” (the abandonment of any claim to the creation of a Palestinian state in exchange for considerable US economic aid) are aimed at trying to resolve the Palestinian bone of contention, which has been instrumentalised by all regional imperialisms against the United States, in order to facilitate de facto rapprochement between its Arab and Israeli allies.

- in Latin America, the United States is engaging in a counter-offensive to ensure better imperialist control in its traditional area of influence. Bolsonaro's rise to power in Brazil is not as such the result of a simple push of populism but results from a vast operation of American pressure on the Brazilian bourgeoisie, a strategy woven by the American state with the objective, now fulfilled, of bringing this state back into its imperialist fold. As a prelude to a comprehensive plan to overthrow the anti-American regimes of the "Troika of Tyranny" (Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua) we have seen the so-far abortive attempt to remove the Chavist/Maduro regime in Venezuela.

Washington, however, is clearly inflicting a setback on China, which had made Venezuela a political ally of choice for expanding its influence and has proved powerless to oppose American pressure. It is not impossible that this American offensive of imperialist reconquest of its Latin American backyard may inaugurate a more systematic offensive against China on other continents. For the time being, it raises the prospect of Venezuela's plunge into the chaos of a deadlocked clash between bourgeois factions, as well as an increased destabilisation of the entire South American zone.

15) The current general strengthening of imperialist tensions is reflected in the re-launch of the arms race and military technological supremacy not only where tensions are most apparent (in Asia and the Middle East) but for all states, all leading major powers. Everything indicates that a new stage is looming in inter-imperialist clashes and that the system sinking into military barbarism.

In this context, the EU (European Union) in relation to the international imperialist situation will continue to confront the tendency towards fragmentation as put forward in the Report on Imperialist tensions from June 2018 (International Review 161).

The economic crisis

16) On the economic level, since the beginning of 2018, the situation of capitalism has been marked by a sharp slowdown in world growth (from 4% in 2017 to 3.3% in 2019), which the bourgeoisie predicts will be worsening in 2019-20. This slowdown proved to be greater than expected in 2018, as the IMF had to reduce its forecasts for the next two years and is affecting virtually all parts of capitalism simultaneously: China, the United States and the Euro Zone. In 2019, 70% of the world economy has been slowing down, particularly in the ‘advanced’ countries (Germany, United Kingdom). Some of the emerging countries are already in recession (Brazil, Argentina, Turkey) while China, which has been slowing down since 2017 and is expected to grow by 6.2% in 2019, is experiencing its lowest growth figures in 30 years.

The value of most currencies in the emerging countries has weakened, sometimes considerably, as in Argentina and Turkey

At the end of 2018, world trade recorded zero growth, while Wall Street experienced in 2018 the largest stock market “corrections” in the last 30 years. Most indicators are flashing and point to the prospect of a new dive in the capitalist economy.

17) The capitalist class has no future to offer, its system has been condemned by history. Since the 1929 crisis, the first major crisis of the era of the decadence of capitalism, the bourgeoisie has not ceased to develop the intervention of the state to exercise general control over the economy. Increasingly faced with a narrowing of extra-capitalist markets, more and more threatened by generalised overproduction "capitalism has thus kept itself alive thanks to the conscious intervention of the bourgeoisie, which can no longer afford to rely on the invisible hand of the market. It is true that solutions also become part of the problem:

- the use of debt clearly accumulates huge problems for the future,

- the swelling of the state and the arms sector is generating appalling inflationary pressures.

Since the 1970s, these problems have led to different economic policies, alternating between ‘Keynesianism’ and ‘neoliberalism’, but since no policy can address the real causes of the crisis, no approach can achieve final victory. What is remarkable is the determination of the bourgeoisie to keep its economy moving at all costs and its ability to curb the tendency to collapse through gigantic debt." (16th international congress, Resolution on the international situation)

Produced by the contradictions of the decadence and historical impasse of the capitalist system, state capitalism implemented at the level of each national capital does not, however, obey a strict economic determinism; on the contrary, its action, essentially of a political nature, simultaneously integrates and combines the economic dimension with the social (how to face its class enemy according to the balance of forces between the classes) and imperialist dimensions (the need to maintain a huge armaments sector at the centre of any economic activity). Thus, state capitalism has experienced different phases and organisational modalities in the history of decadence.

18) In the 1980s, under the impetus of the major economic powers, such a new phase was inaugurated: that of "globalisation". In a first stage, it first took the form of Reaganomics, quickly followed by a second, which took advantage of the unprecedented historical situation of the fall of the Eastern bloc to extend and deepen a vast reorganisation of capitalist production on a global scale between 1990 and 2008.

Maintaining cooperation between states, using in particular the old structures of the Western bloc, and preserving a certain order in trade exchanges, were means of coping with the worsening crisis (the recessions of 1987 and 1991-93) but also with the first effects of decomposition, which, in the economic field, could thus be largely mitigated.

Following the EU's reference model of eliminating customs barriers between member states, the integration of many branches of world production has been strengthened by developing veritable chains of production on a global scale. By combining logistics, information technology and telecommunications, allowing economies of scale, the increased exploitation of the proletariat's labour power (through increased productivity, international competition, free movement of labour to impose lower wages), the submission of production to the financial logic of maximum profitability, world trade has continued to increase, even if less so, stimulating the world economy, providing a “second wind” that has extended the existence of the capitalist system.

19) The 2007-09 crash marked a step in the sinking of the capitalist system into its irreversible crisis: after four decades of recourse to credit and debt in order to counter the growing trend of overproduction, punctuated by ever deeper recessions and ever more limited recoveries, the 2009 recession was the most significant since the Great Depression. It was the massive intervention of the states and their central banks that saved the banking system from complete bankruptcy, racking up a huge public debt by buying back debts that could no longer be repaid.

Chinese capital, which has also been seriously affected by the crisis, has played an important role in the stabilisation of the world economy by applying plans to relaunch the economy in 2009, 2015 and 2019, based on massive state debts.

Not only have the causes of the 2007-2011 crisis not been resolved or overcome, but the severity and contradictions of the crisis have moved to a higher level: it is now the states themselves which are faced with the crushing burden of their debt (the “sovereign debt”), which further affects their ability to intervene to revive their respective national economies. “Debt has been used as way of supplementing the insufficiency of solvent markets but it can’t grow indefinitely as could be seen from the financial crisis which began in 2007. However, all the measures which can be taken to limit debt once again confront capitalism with its crisis of overproduction, and this in an international context which is in constant deterioration and which more and more limits its margin of manoeuvre” (International Situation Resolution, 20th ICC Congress).

20) The current development of the crisis through the increasing disruptions it causes in the organisation of production into a vast multilateral construction at the international level, unified by common rules, shows the limits of “globalization”. The ever-increasing need for unity (which has never meant anything other than the imposition of the law of the strongest on the weakest) due to the “trans-national” intertwining of highly segmented production country by country (in units fundamentally divided by competition where any product is designed here, assembled there with the help of elements produced elsewhere) comes up against the national nature of each capital, against the very limits of capitalism, which is irremediably divided into competing and rival nations. This is the maximum degree of unity that it is impossible for the bourgeois world to overcome. The deepening crisis (as well as the demands of imperialist rivalry) is putting multilateral institutions and mechanisms to a severe test.

This fact is illustrated by the current attitude of the two main powers competing for world hegemony:

- China has ensured its economic rise both by using the levers of WTO multilateralism while developing its own economic partnership policy (such as through the "New Silk Road" project aimed at counteracting the slowdown in its growth) without regard to environmental or "democratic" standards (a specific aspect of globalisation policy aimed at imposing Western standards and global competition between the beneficiaries and losers of globalisation). Ideologically, it challenges the Western liberal order that it considers to be in decline and since 2012 has been trying, through the creation of institutions (the Shanghai Organization, the Asian Development Bank...) to lay the foundations of an alternative competing international order, which the Western bourgeoisie describes as “illiberal”.

- The American state under the Trump administration (supported by a majority of the American bourgeoisie), considers itself the loser of "globalisation" (which it had originally initiated), its position as world leader having been eroded progressively by its rivals (mainly China, but also western powers like Germany). The policy of “America First” tends to bypass regulatory institutions (WTO, G7 and G20) which are increasingly unable to preserve America’s position (which had been their primary vocation) and to favour bilateral agreements that better defend its interests and the stability essential for conducting business.

21) The influence of decomposition is an additional destabilising factor. In particular, the development of populism further aggravates the deteriorating economic situation by introducing a factor of uncertainty and unpredictability in the face of the turmoil of the crisis. The coming to power of populist governments with unrealistic programmes for national capital, which weakens the functioning of the world economy and trade, is creating a mess, and raises the risk of weakening the means imposed by capitalism since 1945 to avoid any autarkic retreat into the national framework, encouraged by the uncontrolled contagion of the economic crisis. The mess of Brexit and the difficult exit of Britain from the EU provide another illustration: the inability of British ruling class parties to decide on the conditions for separation and the nature of future relations with the European Union, the uncertainties surrounding the "restoration" of borders, in particular between Northern Ireland and Eire, the uncertain future of a pro-European Scotland threatening to separate from the United Kingdom affect the English economy (by reducing the value of the pound) as well as that of its former EU partners, deprived of the long-term stability they need to regulate the economy.

The disagreements about economic policy in Britain, the US and elsewhere show that there are growing divisions not only between rival nations but also at home – divisions between “multilateralists” and “unilateralists”, but even within these two approaches (eg between “hard” and “soft” Brexiteers in the UK) Not only is there no longer any minimal consensus about economic policy even between the countries of the former western bloc – this question is also increasingly causing conflicts within the national bourgeoisies themselves.

22) The current accumulation of all these contradictions in the context of the advancing economic crisis, as well as the fragility of the monetary and financial system and the massive international indebtedness of states following 2008, open up a period of serious convulsions to come and once again place the capitalist system in front of the prospect of a new downward dive. However, it should not be forgotten that capitalism has certainly not definitively exhausted all the means it has to slow down its sinking into the crisis and to avoid uncontrolled situations, particularly in the central countries. The over-indebtedness of states, where an increased share of the national wealth produced must be allocated to servicing the debt, heavily affects national budgets and severely reduces their room for manoeuvre in the face of the crisis. Nevertheless, it is certain that this situation will not:

- end the policy of indebtedness, as the main palliative to the contradictions of the crisis of overproduction and a means of postponing the inevitable, at the cost of ever more serious future convulsions;

- put any brake on the mad arms race to which each state is irrevocably condemned. This is taking on a more manifestly irrational form with the growing weight of the war economy and the production of arms, the growing share of their GDP that will continue to be devoted to it (and which today is reaching its highest level since 1988, at the time of the confrontation between imperialist blocs).

23) Concerning the proletariat, these new convulsions can only result in even more serious attacks against its living and working conditions at all levels and in the whole world, in particular:

- by strengthening the exploitation of labour power by continuing to reduce wages and increase rates of exploitation and productivity in all sectors;

- by continuing to dismantle what remains of the welfare state (additional restrictions on the various benefit systems for the unemployed, social assistance and pension systems); and more generally by “softly” abandoning the financing of all forms of assistance or social support from the voluntary or semi-public sector;

- the reduction by states of the costs represented by education and health in the production and maintenance of the proletariat's labour power (and thus significant attacks against the proletarians in these public sectors);

- the aggravation and further development of precariousness as a means of imposing and enforcing the development of mass unemployment in all parts of the class.

- attacks camouflaged behind financial operations, such as negative interest rates which erode small saving accounts and pension schemes. And although the official rates of inflation for consumer goods are low in many countries, speculative bubbles have contributed to a veritable explosion of the cost of housing.

- the increase in the cost of living notably of taxes and the price of goods of prime necessity

Nevertheless, although the bourgeoisie in all countries is more and more compelled to strengthen its attacks against the working class, its margin of manoeuvre on the political level is by no means exhausted. We can be sure it will make use of every means to prevent the proletariat from replying on its own class terrain against the growing deterioration of its living conditions imposed by the convulsions of the world economy.

May 2019

1) By the late 1960s, with the exhaustion of the post-war economic boom and in the face of deteriorating living conditions, the working class had re-emerged on the social scene. The workers' struggles that exploded on an international scale put an end to the longest period of counter-revolution in history, opening a new historical course towards class confrontations, thus preventing the ruling class from putting in place its own response to the acute crisis of capitalism: a Third World War. This new historical course had been marked by the emergence of massive struggles, particularly in the central countries of Western Europe with the May 1968 movement in France, followed by the "hot autumn" in Italy in 1969 and many others such as Argentina in spring 1969 and Poland in winter 1970-71. In these massive movements, large sectors of the new generation who had not experienced war once again raised the perspective of communism as a real possibility.

In connection with this general movement of the working class in the late 1960s and early 1970s, we must also highlight the international revival, on a very small but no less significant scale, of the organized communist left, the tradition that remained faithful to the flag of world proletarian revolution during the long night of counter-revolution. In this process, the constitution of the ICC represented an important impetus for the communist left as a whole.

Faced with a dynamic towards the politicisation of workers' struggles, the bourgeoisie (which had been surprised by the May 1968 movement) immediately developed a large-scale and long-term counter-offensive in order to prevent the working class from providing its own response to the historical crisis of the capitalist economy: the proletarian revolution.

2) Because of the break in political continuity with the workers’ movement of the past, the tendency towards the politicisation of the 1960s was manifested in the emergence of what Lenin called a “political swamp”: a milieu of confused groups and elements, and at the same time a zone of transmission, situated between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. At the moment of its greatest extension, this area of politicisation comprised mainly young and inexperienced people, many of them students Already in the first half of the 1970s, the result of the decantation within this zone was that:

- the left of capital succeeded in winning over a large part of these young elements involved in the process of politicisation

- frustration and disappointment led many of them, strongly marked by the impatience and “radicalism” of the petty bourgeoisie,  towards partial struggles or the violent, minority actions of terrorism (the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany, Red Brigades in Italy, then Action Directe in France)

- the layers of the swamp striving towards proletarian positions tended to gravitate in the direction of autonomism and workerism, or towards defending the myth of ‘self-management’.

Moreover, The “critical” adherence of the main leftist groups (Trotskyist and Maoist) to the counter-revolution and their organisational practice and intervention as crypto-Stalinist sects, but also the mindless activism of the autonomist milieu and the cult of violence of the terrorist micro-groups destroyed a large part of this new generation in the process of being politicised. This destructive work helped to deform and discredit the real revolutionary movement of the proletariat. Parallel to this extremely negative role played by the pseudo-radical component of the swamp and the groups of the extreme left, the bourgeoisie developed a wide-scale and long-term political counter-offensive against the historic revival of the class struggle. This political counter-offensive of the bourgeoisie initially consisted, at the beginning of the 1970s, in setting up the "alternative” of bringing the left to government in the main Western countries. The aim was to herd the working class back to the electoral fold by sowing the illusion that the programme of the left parties would make it possible to improve the living conditions of the exploited masses. This first wave of struggles, which had developed since the late 1960s, was therefore exhausted during these "years of illusions".

3) But with the worsening of the economic crisis in the second half of the 1970s, a new wave of workers' struggles had emerged, also involving the proletariat in some Eastern European countries (notably in Poland in the summer of 1980).

Faced with this resumption of class combat after a short period of reflux, the bourgeoisie had to modify its strategy aimed at hindering any politicisation of the proletariat through its economic struggles. Thanks to a judicious division of labour between the various bourgeois factions, right-wing parties in government were appointed to carry out economic attacks against the living conditions of the proletariat, while the left-wing parties in the opposition (supported by the unions and leftists) had the responsibility of sabotaging workers' struggles from the inside and diverting them onto the terrain of electoral mystifications.

The mass strike in Poland in August 1980 revealed that the proletariat, despite the leaden weight of the Stalinist regimes, was able to raise its head and spontaneously recover its methods of struggle, including sovereign general assemblies, the election of strike committees responsible to these assemblies, the necessary geographical extension of the struggles and their unification beyond corporatist divisions.

This gigantic struggle of the working class in Poland revealed that it is in the massive struggle against economic attacks that the proletariat can become conscious of its own strength, affirm its class identity which is antagonistic to capital, and develop its self-confidence.

But the defeat of the Polish workers, with the founding of the "free" trade union Solidarnosc (which benefited from the support of the trade unions of Western countries) also revealed the very strong weight of democratic illusions in a country where the proletariat had no experience of bourgeois democracy. The defeat and repression of Polish workers opened a new period of retreat for international class struggle in the early 1980s.

4) Nevertheless, despite its depth, this retreat was short-lived. In the first half of the 1980s, faced with the worsening economic crisis, the explosion of unemployment and the new attacks on the living conditions of the proletariat in the central countries, a third wave of struggles emerged. Despite the defeat of the long miners' strike in Great Britain in 1985, this wave of struggles was marked by the erosion of the left in the opposition, a growing discrediting of trade unions (as witnessed in several countries, including Scandinavia, by the sporadic spontaneous strikes that broke out outside and against repeated union manoeuvres). This third wave of workers' struggles was accompanied by an increase in abstention rates in the elections.

In order to avoid being surprised as in May 68, and to paralyse the whole dynamic of confrontations with trade unionism, the bourgeoisie developed a third strategy: that of strengthening its apparatus for controlling the working class through the deployment of base unionism, led by the groups of the extreme left of capital. Faced with the rise of militancy, notably in the public sector, the bourgeoisie strengthened its union and para-union forces. The aim of this policy was to prevent any extension of struggles beyond corporations or sectors, to sabotage the class identity of the proletariat through setting up divisions between “white collar” and “blue collar” workers, and to block any tendency towards the self-organisation of the working class.

5) It was the British bourgeoisie (the most intelligent in the world), with the policies of the “Iron Lady” Margaret Thatcher, which sounded the key-note for the strategy of the ruling class in other central countries, aimed at stopping the dynamic of the class struggle.

Thanks to the sabotaging role of the miners’ union, the ruling class had imprisoned the workers in a long, exhausting sectional strike, totally separated from other sectors of production. The crushing defeat of the miners’ strike dealt a savage blow to the whole working class in this country. This success of the ruling class in Britain served as a model for the bourgeoisie in other countries, notably in France, the country in Europe where the proletariat had traditionally been very combative. The French bourgeoisie, inspired by the example of the Iron Lady in blocking the dynamic of the class struggle, set out to lock up the workers in corporatism, taking full advantage of the tendency towards “each for themselves” (which was one of the first phenomena of the decomposition of capitalism).

In 1986, since the most traditionally combative and experienced sectors of the French proletariat had since May 68 confronted union sabotage on a number of occasions (in the mines, steel, transport, car industry…) the bourgeoisie could only use such a strategy by setting up “coordinations” aimed at taking on the baton from the discredited main union confederations.

In Italy, where the proletariat had fought very important and massive struggles (in particular the “Hot Autumn” of 1969), the bourgeoisie also used the same policy of corporatist containment, by recuperating the education workers’ coordinations after 1987.

In France, despite the defeat of the railway workers’ strike in 1986 (thanks to the sabotaging work of the “coordinations” in the SNCF), two years later, in 1988, the workers’ militancy exploded once again in another part of the public sector, the hospitals. Faced with a deep and general discontent towards the unions, and the potential danger of this massive struggle spreading to the whole public sector, the ruling class again reinforced its strategy for boxing up and dividing the working class. The French bourgeoisie was able to make use of a hospital sector which was still inexperienced and politically more “backward”, the nurses, in order to keep any push towards unification stuck in the hospitals, sabotaging any possibility of the movement spreading to other parts of the public sector.

In order to break the movement in the hospital sector, the manoeuvre of the bourgeoisie consisted in offering the nurses on their own a kind of bribe (a wage increase of 350 francs a month, unblocking a billion francs already held in reserve for this purpose), whereas other categories in the hospitals who had mobilised for the movement got nothing! This defeat of the working class, given the historic tendency towards “each for themselves” could only be inflicted on the proletariat thanks to the dirty work of the self-proclaimed “nurses’ coordination” which had been set up straight away with the help of the CFDT. This semi-union organ succeeded in derailing the anger of the nurses onto the rotten ground of defending their “status” of “Bac plus 3” in order to justify the re-evaluation of their wages, when their movement had originally broken out against the lack of personnel and the degradation of conditions affecting everyone in the hospitals, “white collar” as well as “blue collar” (see our pamphlet, Bilan de la lutte des infirmières: les coordinations, la nouvelle arme de la bourgeoisie. In the other countries of Europe, including in Germany (notably in the car industry), this manoeuvre by the bourgeoisie consisted of granting wage increases to one category of workers in the same enterprise, with the aim of dividing the workers, aggravating competition between them, sapping class solidarity and setting them against each other.

But worse still with this strategy of dividing the workers and encouraging “each for themselves”, the bourgeoisie and its tame unions were able to present defeats of the working class as victories.

Revolutionaries must not underestimate the Machiavellianism of the bourgeoisie in the evolution of the balance of class forces. This Machiavellianism can only continue with the aggravation of attacks on the exploited class. The stagnation of the class struggle, then its retreat at the end of the 80s, resulted from the capacity of the ruling class to turn certain manifestations of the decomposition of bourgeoisie society, especially the tendency towards “each for themselves”, against the working class.

6) Since the retreat of the first wave of struggles, it has been essentially democratic illusions (fuelled by the bourgeoisie's counter-offensive and trade union sabotage) that have been the main obstacle to the politicisation of the working class struggles.

As highlighted in the article in International Review n°23, "The struggle of the proletariat in the period of decadence", the working class is confronted with several factors which make the politicisation of its struggles difficult:

- The true nature of the proletariat both as an exploited class, dispossessed of all property, and as a revolutionary class, has always meant that class consciousness cannot advance from victory to victory but can only develop unevenly towards victory through a series of defeats, as Rosa Luxemburg argued.

In the period of decadence:

- the working class can no longer maintain permanent mass organizations, political parties and workers' unions, to defend its interests;

- there is no longer a "minimum" political programme as in the ascendant period, but only a "maximum" programme. Bourgeois democracy and its national framework is no longer an arena for the political action of the proletariat;

- the bourgeois state has learned to intelligently use the former workers’ political parties, which betrayed the proletariat, against the politicisation of the working class.

In addition, in the current period:

- the bourgeois state has learned to slow the pace of the economic crisis and to plan its attacks in concert with the trade unions by deploying all possible means to avoid a unified response by the working class and a re-appropriation of the final political goals of its struggle against capitalism.

- all the forces of capitalism have worked to block the politicisation of the working class by preventing it from making the link between its economic struggles against exploitation and the refusal of workers in central countries to allow themselves to be mobilised behind the bourgeoisie's war policy. A particularly significant manoeuvre in the early 1980s was the pacifist campaign against Reagan's “Star Wars" programme. As the third wave of struggles began to wear out in the late 1980s, a major event in the international situation, the spectacular collapse of the Eastern bloc and the Stalinist regimes in 1989, dealt a brutal blow to the dynamics of class struggle, thus changing the balance of forces between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the benefit of the latter in a major way. This event loudly announced the entry of capitalism into the final phase of its decadence: that of decomposition. When Stalinism collapsed, it did one last service to the bourgeoisie. It allowed the ruling class to put an end to the dynamic of class struggle which, with advances and setbacks, had developed over two decades.

Indeed, insofar as it was not the struggle of the proletariat but the rotting of capitalist society on its feet that put an end to Stalinism, the bourgeoisie was able to exploit this event to unleash a gigantic ideological campaign aimed at perpetuating the greatest lie in history: the identification of communism with Stalinism. In doing so, the ruling class dealt an extremely violent blow to the consciousness of the proletariat. The bourgeoisie's deafening campaigns on the so-called "bankruptcy of communism" have led to a regression of the proletariat in its march towards its historical perspective of overthrowing capitalism. They were a major blow against its class identity.

This profound retreat in consciousness and class struggle has manifested itself in a decline in the workers' fighting spirit in all countries, a strengthening of democratic illusions, a very strong revival of the trade union grip and a very great difficulty for the proletariat to return to the path of massive struggles, despite the worsening of the economic crisis, the rise in unemployment, precariousness, and the general deterioration of its living conditions in all sectors and all countries.

Moreover, with the entry of capitalism into the ultimate phase of its decadence, the proletariat now had to face the miasma of the decomposition of bourgeois society that affects its ability to find the way back towards its revolutionary perspective. On the ideological level, “The different elements which constitute the strength of the working class directly confront the various facets of this ideological decomposition:

1. solidarity and collective action are faced with the atomisation of ‘look out for number one’;
2. the need for organisation confronts social decomposition, the disintegration of the relationships which form the basis for all social life;
3. the proletariat’s confidence in the future and in its own strength is constantly sapped by the all-pervasive despair and nihilism within society;
4. consciousness, lucidity, coherent and unified thought, the taste for theory, have a hard time making headway in the midst of the flight into illusions, drugs, sects, mysticism, the rejection or destruction of thought which are characteristic of our epoch”. (Theses on decomposition, International Review 62)

With the retreat of its revolutionary perspective and class identity, the proletariat has also largely lost confidence in itself and in its ability to effectively confront capitalism in the defence of its living conditions.

7) One of the objective factors that aggravated the loss of class identity of the proletariat was the policy of relocation and restructuring of the productive apparatus in the main countries of Western Europe and the United States. Many large concentrations of workers were dismantled with the closure of mines, steel mills, automobile plants, etc, sectors where the working class had traditionally led massive and very combative struggles. This industrial desertification was accompanied by the strengthening of the ideological campaigns about the end of the class struggle, and therefore of any revolutionary perspective. These bourgeoisie campaigns have been able to develop thanks to the Stalinist or social democratic parties which, for decades, have identified the working class only with the "blue collar" workers, thus masking the fact that it is wage labour and the exploitation of labour power that defines the working class. Moreover, with the development of new technologies, the "white collar" proletariat is much more dispersed in small production units, making it more difficult for massive struggles to emerge.

In such a situation of retreat of the class consciousness of the proletariat and the move away from any revolutionary perspective, the tendency towards every man for himself and the competition to survive in the midst of the growing economic slump tend to dominate.

The increase in unemployment and precariousness has also highlighted the phenomenon of the "Uberisation" of work. By using an internet platform to find a job, Uberisation disguises the sale of labour power to a boss as a form of "individual enterprise", while reinforcing the impoverishment and precariousness of these "entrepreneurs". The “Uberisation” of individual work is a key factor in enforcing atomisation, and increasing the difficulty of going on strike, because the self-exploitation of these workers considerably hinders their ability to fight collectively and develop solidarity against capitalist exploitation.

8) With the bankruptcy of the Lehman Brothers bank and the financial crisis of 2008, the bourgeoisie was able to push one more wedge into the consciousness of the proletariat by developing a new ideological campaign on a global scale, aimed at instilling the idea (put forward by the left-wing parties) that it is the "crooked bankers" who are responsible for this crisis, while making it appear that capitalism is personified by traders and the power of money.

The ruling class was thus able to hide the roots of the failure of its system. On the one hand, it sought to pull the working class into defending the "protective" state, since bank rescue measures were supposed to protect small savers. On the other hand, this bank rescue policy has also been used, particularly by the left, to point the finger at governments seeking to defend bankers and the financial world.

But beyond these mystifications, the impact of this campaign on the working class has been to reinforce its powerlessness in the face of an impersonal economic system whose general laws appear to be natural laws that cannot be controlled or modified.

9) The unleashing of imperialist conflicts in the Middle East, as well as the absolute misery of the impoverished masses of the countries of the African continent, have resulted in an increasing flow of refugees into the countries of Western Europe. On the other side of the Atlantic, the sinking of capitalism into decay has also been illustrated by the exodus of waves of migrants from Latin American countries to the United States.

Faced with these manifestations of the decomposition of capitalist society, a new danger has emerged for the proletariat: populist ideology based on a rigorous “identitarian” policy of de-solidarisation, advocating, in face of the worsening crisis, when ”resources” and ”opportunities” are shrinking, that ”native” populations can only avoid the worst at the expense of other parts of the non-exploiting population. This policy manifests itself in protectionism, the stigmatisation of immigrants as "profiteers on the welfare state" and the closing of borders to waves of migrants.

The increasingly open rejection of traditional bourgeois parties and "elites" has not led to a politicisation of the proletariat on its class terrain but a tendency to seek "new" men in the electoral fields of bourgeois democracy. These "new men" are largely populist demagogues and adventurers (like Donald Trump). The rise of far-right parties in several European countries, as well as the rise to power of Trump in the United States, elected with many votes from workers in the "rust belt", reveals that some fringes of the proletariat (particularly those affected by unemployment) can be poisoned by populism, xenophobia, nationalism and all the reactionary and obscurantist ideologies that emanate from the foul putrefaction of capitalism.

The tendency towards the individual “looking after number one” and the dislocation of society has also manifested itself in the danger of certain sectors of the proletariat being recruited behind national or regional flags (as was the case during the independence crisis in Catalonia in 2018).

10) Because of the current great difficulty of the working class in developing its struggles, its inability for the moment to regain its class identity and to open up a perspective for the whole of society, the social terrain tends to be occupied by inter-classist struggles particularly marked by the petty bourgeoisie. This social layer, without a historic future, can only be a vehicle for illusions in the possibility of reforming capitalism by claiming that capitalism can have a more  "human face", can be more democratic, more just, cleaner, more concerned about the poor and the preservation of the planet.

These inter-classist movements are the product of the absence of any perspective which affects society as a whole, including an important part of the ruling class itself.

The popular revolt of the "Yellow Vests" in France against the "high cost of living" as well as the international movement of the "Youth for Climate" are an illustration of the danger of inter-classism for the proletariat. The citizen revolt of the "Yellow Vests" (supported and encouraged from the beginning by all parties of the right and the extreme right) revealed the ability of the bourgeoisie to use inter-classist social movements against the consciousness of the proletariat.

By releasing a package of 10 billion euros to deal with the chaos accompanying the Yellow Vests demonstrations, the French bourgeoisie and its media were able to insidiously instil the idea that only inter-classist citizens’ movements and petty bourgeois methods of struggle can push the government back.

Faced with the acceleration of economic attacks against the exploited class, and the danger of the resurgence of workers' struggles, the bourgeoisie is now seeking to erase class antagonisms. By trying to drown and dilute the proletariat in the "population of citizens", the ruling class aims to prevent it from regaining its class identity. The international media coverage of the Yellow Vest movement reveals that it is a concern of the bourgeoisie of all countries.

The youth movement for the climate, although expressing a global concern about the threat of the destruction of humanity, has been totally diverted onto the terrain of partial struggles that can easily be recuperated by the bourgeoisie and are very strongly marked by the petty bourgeoisie. “Only the proletariat bears within it a perspective for humanity. In this sense, the greatest capacity for resistance to this decomposition lies within its ranks. However, this does not mean that the proletariat is immune, particularly since it lives alongside the petty bourgeoisie which is one of the major carriers of the infection…During this period, it must aim to resist the noxious effects of decomposition in its own ranks, counting only on its own strength and on its ability to struggle collectively and in solidarity to defend its interests as an exploited class” (Theses on decomposition)

The struggle for the class autonomy of the proletariat is crucial in this situation imposed by the aggravation of the decomposition of capitalism:

- against inter-classist struggles;

- against partial struggles put forward by all kinds of social categories giving a false illusion of a "protective community";

- against the mobilisations on the rotten ground of nationalism, pacifism, "ecological" reform, etc.

In the balance of forces between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, it is always the ruling class that is on the offensive, except in a revolutionary situation. Despite its internal difficulties and the growing tendency to lose control of its political apparatus, the bourgeoisie has been able to turn the manifestations of the decomposition of its system against the consciousness and class identity of the proletariat. The working class has therefore not yet overcome the deep setback it has suffered since the collapse of the Eastern bloc and the Stalinist regimes. This is all the more so since democratic and anti-communist campaigns, maintained over the long term, have been regularly updated (for example on the occasion of the centenary of the October Revolution in 1917).

11) Nevertheless, despite three decades of retreat of the class struggle, the bourgeoisie has so far failed to inflict a decisive defeat on the working class, as it did in the 1920s and 1930s. Despite the seriousness of the issues at stake in the current historical period, the situation is not identical to that of the counter-revolutionary period. The proletariat of the central countries has not suffered physical defeat (as was the case during the bloody crushing of the revolution in Germany during the first revolutionary wave of 1917-23). It has not been massively recruited behind national flags. The vast majority of proletarians are not ready to sacrifice their lives on the altar of defending the national capital. In the major industrialised countries, in the United States as well as in Europe, the proletarian masses did not join the imperialist (and so-called "humanitarian") crusades of "their" national bourgeoisie.

The proletarian class struggle is made up of advances and setbacks during which the working class strives to overcome its defeats, to learn from them and to return to the combat again. As Marx stated in the 18 Brumaire, "The bourgeois revolutions, like those of the 18th century, quickly rush from success to success, (...) Proletarian revolutions, on the other hand, like those of the 19th century, constantly criticize themselves, interrupt at every moment their own course, go back to what already seems to be accomplished to start it over again, mercilessly mock the hesitations, the weaknesses and miseries of their first attempts, seem to bring down their opponent only to allow him to draw new strengths from the earth and to recover again, formidable, in front of them, constantly retreat again before the infinite immensity of their own goals, until the situation is finally created making it impossible to turn back, and the circumstances themselves cry: Hic Rhodus, hic salta! " (The 18th Brumaire)

These "circumstances" which will create a “situation that makes it impossible to turn back" will be determined, in the first place, by the exhaustion of the palliatives which have so far enabled the bourgeoisie to slow down the collapse of the world economy. Indeed, in order for the conditions for the emergence of a period of revolutionary struggle to be created, it is necessary "that exploiters cannot live and govern as in the past. Only when ‘those below’ no longer want to and ‘those above’ cannot continue to live in the old way, only then can the revolution triumph." (Lenin, Left-wing Communism: an Infantile Disorder

The inexorable worsening of poverty, precariousness, unemployment, the attacks on the dignity of the exploited in the years to come, constitute the material basis which can push the new generations of proletarians to find their way back to the path of the struggles that were led by previous generations, in defence of all aspects of their living conditions. Despite all the dangers threatening the proletariat, the period of decomposition of capitalism has not put an end to the objective "circumstances" that have been the impetus for the revolutionary struggles of the proletariat since the beginning of the workers’ movement.

12) The worsening economic crisis has already revealed a new generation on the social scene, even if it is still very limited and embryonic: in 2006, the student movement in France against the CPE, followed five years later by the "Indignados" movement in Spain. These two massive movements of proletarian youth spontaneously rediscovered the methods of struggle of the working class, including the culture of debate in massive general assemblies open to all.

These movements were also characterized by solidarity between generations (whereas the student movement of the late 1960s, very strongly marked by the weight of the petty bourgeoisie, had often seen themselves as being in opposition to the generations which had been mobilised for war) .If, in the movement against the CPE, the vast majority of students fighting against the prospect of unemployment and precariousness, had recognised themselves as part of the working class, the Indignados in Spain (although their movement had spread internationally through social networks) did not have a clear awareness of belonging to the exploited class.

While the massive movement against the CPE was a proletarian response to an economic attack (which forced the bourgeoisie to retreat by withdrawing the CPE), the Indignados movement was essentially marked by a global reflection on the bankruptcy of capitalism and the need for another society.

Within this new generation, the class identity of the proletariat has not yet been recovered due to the lack of experience of this young generation, its vulnerability to the mystifications of "anti-globalisation" ideology and its difficulty in reclaiming the history and experience of the workers’ movement.

Nevertheless, these movements had begun to lay the groundwork for a slow maturation of consciousness within the working class (and especially among its young highly skilled generations) about the challenges of the current historical situation

13) An essential characteristic of the development of the class consciousness of the proletariat has always been its capacity for subterranean maturation, that is, the ability to develop outside periods of open struggle and even in periods of major defeat. Class consciousness can develop in depth, in small minorities, without it spreading widely throughout the proletariat. The development of class consciousness should therefore not only be measured by its immediate extension in the class at a given time, but also through its historical continuity. As we stated in the article in International Review 42 "Internal debate: Centrist slidings towards councilism": "It is necessary to distinguish what is part of a continuity in the historical movement of the proletariat - the progressive elaboration of its political positions and its programme - from what is related to circumstantial factors - the extent of their assimilation and their impact in the whole class”

The existence and determined maintenance of the organisations of the communist left, under the difficult conditions of the decomposition of capitalism, expresses this underground capacity of class consciousness to develop its historical movement in a period of profound disorientation of the proletariat such as the one we are living today.

This subterranean maturation of the class consciousness of the proletariat is also manifested today through the emergence of small minorities and young elements in search of a class perspective and the positions of the communist left.

The organisations of the communist left must not ignore these small minorities, even if they appear to be insignificant. The process of decantation in the period of capitalist decomposition is much slower and more uneven than it was at the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s.

Despite the deleterious effects of decomposition and the dangers facing the proletariat, "Today, the historical perspective remains completely open. Despite the blow that the Eastern bloc’s collapse has dealt to proletarian consciousness, the class has not suffered any major defeats on the terrain of its struggle (...) Moreover, and this is the element which in the final analysis will determine the outcome of the world situation, the inexorable aggravation of the capitalist crisis constitutes the essential stimulant for the class’ struggle and development of consciousness, the precondition for its ability to resist the poison distilled by the social rot. For while there is no basis for the unification of the class in the partial struggles against the effects of decomposition, nonetheless its struggle against the direct effects of the crisis constitutes the basis for the development of its class strength and unity" (Theses on Decomposition).

14) In the economic and defensive struggles of the proletariat "Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of the workers. This union is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by modern industry, and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact that was needed to centralise the numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle between classes. But every class struggle is a political struggle. And that union, to attain which the burghers of the Middle Ages, with their miserable highways, required centuries, the modern proletarian, thanks to railways, achieve in a few years.

This organisation of the proletarians into a class, and, consequently into a political party, is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves. But it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier”(Communist Manifesto).

The "increase in the means of communication" allowing workers to "make contact" to "centralise local struggles" are no longer the railways, as in Marx's time, but the new digital telecommunications technologies.

In fact, if the effects of "globalisation", relocations, the disappearance of entire sectors of industry, the dispersion into a multitude of small productive units, the multiplication of small service jobs, precariousness and Uberisation of work have added to the blows to the class identity of the proletariat of the old industrial metropoles, the new economic, technological and social conditions in which the proletariat finds itself today contain elements favourable to the re-conquest of this class identity on a much larger scale than in the past. “Globalisation" and especially the development of the Internet, the creation of a kind of "global network" of knowledge, skills, collaborations in work at the same time as mass travel, create the objective bases for the development of a class identity on a global scale, especially for the new proletarian generations.

15) One of the main reasons why the proletariat has not been able to develop its struggles and consciousness to the level required by the gravity of the historical situation is the rupture of political continuity with the workers’ movement of the past (and especially with the first revolutionary wave of 1917-23). This rupture was illustrated by the weakness of the revolutionary organisations of the communist left current that had fought Stalinism in the 1920s and 1930s.

This means that an enormous responsibility lies on the communist left as a bridge between the former party that has disappeared (the 3rd International) and the future party of the proletariat. Without the constitution of this future world party, proletarian revolution will be impossible and humanity will end up being swallowed up by the barbarism of war and/or the slow decomposition of bourgeois society.

“Theoretically, the communists have over the rest of the proletariat the advantage of a clear understanding of the conditions, the march and the general ends of the proletarian movement as a whole" (Communist Manifesto).

May 2019

 

This report was written for a recent congress of our section in France and will be followed by other reports on the world situation.

The disaster continues and worsens: officially there are 36 million infected and over a million deaths worldwide[1]. Having recklessly postponed preventive counter measures to the spread of the virus, then imposed a brutal shutdown of wide sectors of the economy, the different factions of the world bourgeoisie subsequently gambled on an economic recovery, at the expense of an even greater number of victims, by re-opening society while the pandemic had only temporarily abated in certain countries. As winter approaches it is clear that the gamble has not paid off, presaging a deterioration, at least in the medium term, both economically and medically. The burden of this disaster has fallen on the shoulders of the international working class.

Up till now one of the difficulties of recognising the fact that capitalism has entered the final phase of its historic decline - that of social decomposition – is that this present epoch, opened up definitively by the collapse of the Eastern Bloc in 1989, had superficially appeared as a proliferation of symptoms with no apparent interconnection, unlike previous periods of capitalist decadence which were defined and dominated by such obvious landmarks as world war or proletarian revolution[2]. But now in 2020, the Covid pandemic, the most significant crisis in world history since the Second World War, has become an unmistakable emblem of this whole period of decomposition by bringing together a series of factors of chaos that signify the generalised putrefaction of the capitalist system. These include:

- the prolongation of the long-term economic crisis that began in 1967[3], and the consequent accumulation and intensification of austerity measures, has precipitated an inadequate and chaotic response to the pandemic by the bourgeoisie, which has in turn obliged the ruling class to massively aggravate the economic crisis by interrupting production for a significant period;

- the origins of the pandemic clearly lie in the accelerated destruction of the environment created by the persistence of the chronic capitalist crisis of overproduction;

- the disorganised rivalry of the imperialist powers, notably among former allies, has turned the reaction of the world bourgeoisie to the pandemic into a global fiasco;

- the ineptitude of the response of the ruling class to the health crisis has revealed the growing tendency to a loss of political control of the bourgeoisie and its state over society within each nation;

- the decline in the political and social competence of the ruling class and its state has been accompanied in an astonishing way by ideological putrefaction: the leaders of the most powerful capitalist nations are spewing out ridiculous lies and superstitious nonsense to justify their ineptitude.

Covid-19 has thus brought together in a clearer way than before the impact of decomposition on all the principle levels of capitalist society – economic, imperialist, political, ideological and social.

The current situation has also dispelled the significance of a number of phenomena that were supposed to contradict the analysis that capitalism had entered a terminal phase of chaos and social breakdown. These phenomena, our critics alleged, proved that our analysis should be ‘put in question’ or simply ignored. In particular, a few years ago the stunning growth rates of the Chinese economy appeared, to our critical commentators, to be a refutation that there was a period of decomposition and even of decadence. These observers had in reality been taken in by the ‘perfume of modernity’ emitted by Chinese industrial growth. Today, as a result of the Covid pandemic, not only has the Chinese economy stagnated but it has revealed a chronic backwardness that gives off the less pleasant aroma of underdevelopment and decay.

The ICC perspective from 1989 that world capitalism had entered a final phase of inner dissolution, based on the marxist method of analysing underlying global and long-term trends, instead of running after temporary novelties or sticking with outworn formulas, has been strikingly confirmed.

The present health catastrophe reveals, above all, an increasing loss of control of the capitalist class over its system and its increasing loss of perspective for human society as a whole. The increasing loss of mastery of the means that the bourgeoisie has hitherto developed to constrain and channel the effects of the historic decline of its mode of production has become more tangible.

Moreover, the current situation reveals the extent to which the capitalist class is not only less able to prevent a growing social chaos but is also increasingly aggravating the very decomposition that it previously kept in check.

Pandemic, decadence, decomposition.

In order to more fully understand why the Covid pandemic is symbolic of the capitalist decomposition period we have to see how it could not have happened in previous epochs in the way it has today.

Pandemics of course have been known in previous social formations and have had a devastating and accelerating effect on the decline of previous class societies, like the Justinian Plague at the end of ancient slave society or the Black Death at the close of feudal serfdom. But feudal decadence did not know a period of decomposition because a new mode of production (capitalism) was already taking shape within and alongside the old. The devastation of the plague even hastened the early development of the bourgeoisie.

The decadence of capitalism, the most dynamic system of the exploitation of labour in history, necessarily envelopes the whole of society and prevents any new form of production from emerging within it. This is why, in the absence of a route to world war and of the re-emergence of the proletarian alternative, capitalism has entered into a period of ‘ultra-decadence’ as the ICC Theses on Decomposition put it[4]. So, the present pandemic will not give way to any regeneration of mankind’s productive forces within existing society but forces us instead to glimpse the inevitability of the collapse of human society as a whole unless world capitalism is overthrown in its entirety. The resort to the medieval methods of quarantine in answer to Covid, when capitalism has developed the scientific, technological and social means to understand, pre-empt and contain the eruption of plagues, (but is unable to deploy them) is testimony to the impasse of a society that is ‘rotting on its feet’ and increasingly unable to utilise the productive forces that it has set in motion.

The history of the social impact of infectious disease in the life of capitalism gives us a further insight into the distinction to be made between the decadence of a system and the specific period of decomposition within its period of decline that began in 1914. The ascendancy of capitalism and even the history of most of its decadence show in fact a growing mastery of medical science and public health over infectious disease especially in the advanced countries. The promotion of public hygiene and sanitation, the conquering of smallpox and polio and the retreat of malaria for example, is evidence of this progress. Eventually, after the Second World War, non-communicable diseases became the dominant reasons for premature death in the heartlands of capitalism. We shouldn’t imagine that this improvement in the power of epidemiology took place for the humanitarian concerns that the bourgeoisie has claimed. The overriding goal was to create a stable environment for the intensification of exploitation demanded by the permanent crisis of capitalism and above all for the preparation and ultimate mobilisation of the populations for the military interests of imperialist blocs.

From the 1980s the positive trend against infectious disease started to reverse. New, or evolving pathogens began to emerge such as HIV, Zikah, Ebola, Sars, Mers, Nipah, N5N1, Dengue fever, etc. Vanquished diseases became more drug resistant. This development, particularly of zoonotic viruses, is linked to urban growth in the peripheral regions of capitalism - particularly of mass slums which account for 40% of this growth - and deforestation and burgeoning climate change. While epidemiology has been able to understand and track these viruses the state’s implementation of counter-measures has failed to keep pace with the threat. The insufficient and chaotic response of the bourgeoisies to Covid-19 is a striking confirmation of the capitalist state’s growing negligence toward the resurgence of infectious diseases and public health, and thus of a disregard of the importance of social protection at the most basic level. This development of growing social incompetence by the bourgeois state is linked to decades of cuts to the ‘social wage’, particularly of health services. But the growing disregard for public health can only be fully explained in the framework of the phase of decomposition, which favours irresponsible and short-term responses by large parts of the ruling class.

The conclusions to be drawn from this reversal in the progress of infectious disease control over the past few decades are inescapable: it is an illustration of the transition of decadent capitalism to a final period of decomposition.

Of course, the worsening of the permanent economic crisis of capitalism is the root cause of this transition, a crisis which is common to all periods of its decadence. But it is the management - or rather the growing mismanagement - of the effects of this crisis that has changed and is a key component of present and future disasters that are characteristic of the specific period of decomposition.

Those explanations which fail to take this transformation into account, like those of the International Communist Tendency for example, are left with the truism that the profit motive is to blame for the pandemic. For them the specific circumstances, timing and scale of the calamity remains a mystery.

Nor can the reaction of the bourgeoisie to the pandemic be explained by reverting to the schema of the Cold War period, as though the imperialist powers have ‘weaponised’ the Covid virus for imperialist military purposes and the mass quarantines are a mobilisation of the population in this regard. This explanation forgets that the main imperialist powers are no longer organised in contending imperialist blocs and do not have their hands free to mobilise the population behind their war aims. This is central to the stalemate between the two main classes that is the root cause of the period of decomposition.

Generally speaking, it is not viruses but vaccines which benefit imperialist bloc military ambitions[5]. The bourgeoisie has learnt the lessons of the Spanish flu of 1918 in this respect. Uncontrolled infections are a massive liability to the military as the demobilisation of several US aircraft carriers and a French aircraft carrier by Covid-19 has shown. By contrast, keeping deadly pathogens under strict control has always been a condition for every imperialist power’s bio-warfare capability.

This is not to say that the imperialist powers haven’t used the health crisis to further advance their interests at the expense of their rivals. But these efforts have on the whole revealed that the vacuum of world imperialist leadership left by the United States is increasing, without any other power, including China, being able to assume this role or capable of creating an alternative pole of attraction. The chaos at the level of imperialist conflicts has been confirmed by the Covid catastrophe.

The mass quarantine by the imperialist states today is certainly accompanied by the greater presence of the military in daily life and the use of war-like exhortations by the states. But this demobilisation of the population is to a considerable extent motivated by the state’s fear of the threat of social disorder in a period when the working class, while quiescent, remains undefeated.

The fundamental tendency to self-destruction that is the common feature of all periods of capitalist decadence has changed its dominant form in the period of decomposition from world war to a world chaos that only increases the threat of capitalism to society and humanity in its entirety.

The pandemic and the state.

The loss of control by the bourgeoisie that has characterised the pandemic is mediated through the instrument of the state. What does this calamity reveal about state capitalism in the decomposition period?

We will recall, in order to help understand this question, the observation of the ICC pamphlet The Decadence of Capitalism on the ‘overturning of the superstructures’ that the growth of the role of the state in society is a feature of the decadence of all modes of production. The development of state capitalism is the extreme expression of this general historical phenomenon.

As the GCF[6] pointed out in 1952 state capitalism is not a solution to the contradictions of capitalism, even if it can delay their effects, but is an expression of them. The capacity of the state to hold a decaying society together, however invasive it becomes, is therefore destined to weaken over time and in the end become an aggravating factor of the very contradictions it is trying to contain. The decomposition of capitalism is the period in which a growing loss of control by the ruling class and its state becomes the dominant trend of social evolution, which Covid reveals so dramatically.

However, it would be wrong to imagine this loss of control develops in a uniform way at all levels of the state’s actions, or that it hits all nations equally or is merely a short-term phenomenon.

At the International level

With the collapse of the Eastern bloc and the consequent redundancy of the Western bloc, military structures like NATO have tended to lose their cohesion as the experience of the Balkan and Gulf wars have shown. The dislocation at the military and strategic level has inevitably been accompanied by the loss of power - at different speeds - of all the inter-state agencies that were set up under the aegis of US imperialism after the 2nd World War, such as the World Health Organisation and UNESCO at the social level, the EU (in its former guise), the World Bank, the IMF, the World Trade Organisation at the economic level. These agencies were designed to maintain the stability and the ‘soft power’ of the Western bloc under the leadership of the US.

The process of dissolution and weakening of these inter-state organisations has particularly intensified with the election of US president Trump in 2016.

The relative impotence of the WHO during the pandemic is eloquent in this regard and is connected to each state playing its own game chaotically with the deadly results we know. The ‘war of the masks’ and now the coming war of the vaccines, the proposed withdrawal from the WHO by the US, the attempt of China to manipulate this institution for its own benefit, hardly needs comment.

The impotence of the inter-state bodies and the resulting every-man-for-himself among the competing nation states has helped turn the pathogenic threat into a global disaster.

However, at the level of the world economy - despite the acceleration of the trade war and tendencies to regionalisation - the bourgeoisies have still been able to coordinate essential measures, like the action of the Federal Reserve Bank to preserve dollar liquidity throughout the world in March at the beginning of the economic shutdown.  Germany, after an initial reluctance, decided to try and coordinate with France an economic rescue package for the European Union as a whole.

Nevertheless, if the international bourgeoisie is still able to prevent a complete meltdown of important parts of the world economy it hasn’t been able to avoid the enormous long-term damage done to economic growth and world trade by the shutdown necessitated by the delayed and dislocated response to Covid-19. In comparison with the response of the G7 to the 2008 financial crash, the present situation shows the long term wearing out of the ability of the bourgeoisie to coordinate actions to slow down the economic crisis.

Of course, the tendency towards ‘every man for himself’ has always been a feature of the competitive nature of capitalism and its division into nation states. But today it is the absence of imperialist bloc discipline and perspective which has stimulated the resurgence of this tendency in a period of economic impasse and decline. Whereas before a certain amount of international cooperation was maintained, Covid-19 reveals its increasing absence.

At the national level

In the Theses on Decomposition in point 10 we noted that the disappearance of the perspective of world war exacerbates rivalries between cliques within each nation state as well as between the state themselves. The dislocation and unpreparedness concerning Covid-19 at the international level has been replicated to a greater or lesser degree in each nation state, particularly at the executive level:

“A major characteristic of the decomposition of capitalist society we should emphasise is the growing difficulty of controlling the evolution of the political situation.” pt 9.

This was a prime factor in the collapse of the Eastern bloc aggravated by the aberrant nature of the Stalinist regime (a single party state that defined the ruling class itself). But the underlying causes of the conflicts in the ‘executive committee’ of the whole bourgeoisie - chronic economic crisis, loss of strategic perspective and foreign policy fiascos, disaffection of the population - is now hitting the advanced capitalisms, which is nowhere more clearly shown in the current crisis than in major countries where populist or populist-influenced governments, especially those led by Donald Trump and Boris Johnson have come to power. The conflicts in these major states inevitably reverberate in the other states which have, for the moment, followed a more rational policy.

Before these two countries were a symbol of the relative stability and cogency of world capitalism; the woeful performance of their bourgeoisies today shows they have instead become beacons of irrationality and disorder.

Both the US administration and the British government have, guided by nationalist bluster, willfully ignored and delayed their responses to the Covid calamity and even encouraged a lack of respect for the danger by the population; they have undermined the advice of the scientific authorities and are now opening up the economy while the virus is still raging. Both governments scrapped pandemic task forces on the eve of the Covid crisis.

Both governments, in different ways, are deliberately vandalising the established procedures of the democratic state and creating discord among the different state departments such as Trump’s abrogation of military protocol in his response to the Black Lives Matter protests and fraudulent manipulations of the judiciary, or Johnson’s current disruption of the civil service bureaucracy.

It’s true that, in a period of every-man-for-himself, each nation state has inevitably followed its own path. However, those states which have displayed more intelligence than others are also facing growing divisions and loss of control.

Populism is proving the idea of the Theses on Decomposition that senile capitalism is returning to a ‘second childhood’. Populism’s ideology pretends that the system can return to a youthful period of capitalist dynamism and less bureaucracy simply through demagogic phrases and disruptive initiatives. But in reality decadent capitalism in its phase of decomposition is exhausting all palliatives.

.While populism appeals to the xenophobic and petit bourgeois illusions of a disaffected population that is disoriented temporarily by the absence of a proletarian resurgence, it is clear from the current health crisis that populism’s programme - or anti-programme - has developed within the bourgeoisie and the state itself.

It is not accidental that the US and UK, of the more developed countries, have seen the greatest casualty rates for the pandemic.

However, it should be remembered that the economic agencies of the state in the majority of developed countries have by contrast remained stable and taken rapid emergency measures to prevent their economies going into free fall and delayed the effect of mass unemployment on the population.

Indeed, as a result of the actions of the central banks we are seeing the state strongly increase its role in the economy. For example:

“Morgan Stanley [the investment bank] notes that the central banks of the G4 countries - US, Japan, Europe and the UK - will collectively expand their balance sheets by 28% of gross domestic production over this cycle. The equivalent number during the 2008 financial crisis was 7%.” Financial Times 27 June 2020.

The perspective for the development of state capitalism however, at root, is a sign that the state’s capacity for containing the crisis and the decomposition of capitalism is waning.

The increasing weight of the intervention of the state into every aspect of social life as a whole is not a solution to the growing decomposition of the latter.

It should not be forgotten that there is a strong resistance within these states to the vandalism of populism by the traditional liberal parties or important sections of them. In these countries this sector of the state bourgeoisie forms a vocal opposition, particularly through the media, which, as well as ridiculing populist buffoonery, can hold out the hope to the population of a return to democratic order and rationality, even if there is no real capacity now to close the populist Pandora’s box.

And we can be sure that the bourgeoisie in these countries has by no means forgotten the proletariat, and will be able to deploy all its dedicated agencies when the time comes.

The ‘boomerang’ effect experienced in the period of decomposition.

The Report on Decomposition of 2017 highlights the fact that in the first decades after the emergence of the economic crisis at the end of the 60s, the richest countries pushed the effects of the crisis onto the peripheries of system, while in the decomposition period, the tendency tends to reverse or rebound on the heartlands of capitalism - such as the spread of terrorism, mass influx of refugees and migrants, mass unemployment, destruction of the environment and now deadly epidemics to Europe and America. The current situation where the strongest capitalist country in the world has suffered the most from the pandemic is a confirmation of this tendency.

The Report also remarked in a prescient way that:

“…we considered that [decomposition] had no real impact on the evolution of the crisis of capitalism. If the current rise of populism were to lead to the coming power of this current in some of the main European countries, such an impact of decomposition will develop.”

One of the most significant aspects of the current calamity is that decomposition has indeed rebounded on the economy in a devastating way. And this experience has not diminished the taste of populism for further economic mayhem, as shown by the continuing economic war of the US against China, or the determination of the British government to pursue the suicidal and destructive course of Brexit.

The decomposition of the superstructure is taking its ‘revenge’ on the economic foundations of capitalism that gave rise to it.

“When the economy trembles, the whole superstructure that relies on it enters into crisis and decomposition ….Beginning as consequences of a system they then most often become accelerating factors in the process of decline”.
Decadence of Capitalism, Chapter 1.

 

16.7.20

We publish here the third of the reports on the world situation written for the Congress of our section in France. This one focuses on the situation of the international working class prior to and during the global pandemic

The Covid 19 pandemic is a major event of the phase of decomposition, the most important for the world working class since 1989. It’s both a product of the decomposition of capitalism and an essential factor in its aggravation, particularly because of its impact on the living conditions of the proletarians. The repercussions of this pandemic already have an historic importance, opening up a completely unprecedented period for the exploited class.

The pandemic has not yet reached its peak in many parts of the world; no one, not even medical specialists, can predict whether the current situation will be followed by a second wave all over the planet, or what the virus will do next. For the capitalist economy and the ruling class, it is also a leap into the unknown: the economic consequences will be devastating, but, again, no one can at this stage determine the extent and depth of these consequences. The whole of capitalist society is tipping over into an entirely new situation, one of considerable movement and instability, where "nothing will be the same as before".

In these circumstances, which are destined to last some time depending on the evolution of the situation at various levels, the organisation of revolutionaries must avoid hasty judgments and must keep in mind the impossibility of making definitive predictions, particularly in the area of class struggle.

However, the ICC is not approaching this situation without any weapons of analysis. Its political framework, as well as its reliance on the marxist method, are the points of support that allow it to understand:

- the political situation of the proletariat as it is shaken by the pandemic;
- the repercussions of the pandemic on the conditions which it faces: the brutal shock of the acceleration of decomposition, the way it will impact on the economic recession, the inevitable and colossal obstacles in its path.

 

1) The balance of power between classes just before the pandemic

1. The framework of the ICC’s 23rd Congress:

“Because of the current great difficulty of the working class in developing its struggles, its inability for the moment to regain its class identity and to open up a perspective for the whole of society, the social terrain tends to be occupied by inter-classist struggles particularly marked by the petty bourgeoisie. This social layer, without a historic future, can only be a vehicle for illusions in the possibility of reforming capitalism by claiming that capitalism can have a more ‘human face’, can be more democratic, more just, cleaner, more concerned about the poor and the preservation of the planet…

Faced with the acceleration of economic attacks against the exploited class, and the danger of the resurgence of workers' struggles, the bourgeoisie is now seeking to erase class antagonisms. By trying to drown and dilute the proletariat in the ‘population of citizens’, the ruling class aims to prevent it from regaining its class identity. The international media coverage of the Yellow Vest movement reveals that this is ....a concern of the bourgeoisie of all countries…

“Only the proletariat bears within it a perspective for humanity. In this sense, the greatest capacity for resistance to this decomposition lies within its ranks. However, this does not mean that the proletariat is immune, particularly since it lives alongside the petty bourgeoisie which is one of the major carriers of the infection… During this period, it must aim to resist the noxious effects of decomposition in its own ranks, counting only on its own strength and on its ability to struggle collectively and in solidarity to defend its interests as an exploited class” (Theses on decomposition, International Review 107).

The struggle for the class autonomy of the proletariat is crucial in this situation imposed by the aggravation of the decomposition of capitalism:
- against inter-classist struggles;
- against partial struggles put forward by all kinds of social categories giving a false illusion of a ‘protective community’;
- against the mobilisations on the rotten ground of nationalism, pacifism, ‘ecological’ reform, etc.

….Despite its internal difficulties and the growing tendency to lose control of its political apparatus, the bourgeoisie has been able to turn the manifestations of the decomposition of its system against the consciousness and class identity of the proletariat. The working class has therefore not yet overcome the deep setback it has suffered since the collapse of the Eastern bloc and the Stalinist regimes. This is all the more so since democratic and anti-communist campaigns, maintained over the long term, have been regularly updated (for example on the occasion of the centenary of the October Revolution in 1917).

Nevertheless, despite three decades of retreat of the class struggle, the bourgeoisie has so far failed to inflict a decisive defeat on the working class, as it did in the 1920s and 1930s. Despite the seriousness of the issues at stake in the current historical period, the situation is not identical to that of the counter-revolutionary period. The proletariat of the central countries has not suffered physical defeat (as was the case during the bloody crushing of the revolution in Germany during the first revolutionary wave of 1917-23). It has not been massively recruited behind national flags. The vast majority of proletarians are not ready to sacrifice their lives on the altar of defending the national capital. In the major industrialised countries, in the United States as well as in Europe, the proletarian masses did not join the imperialist (and so-called ‘humanitarian’) crusades of ‘their’ national bourgeoisie…

The worsening economic crisis has already revealed a new generation on the social scene, even if it is still very limited and embryonic: in 2006, the student movement in France against the CPE, followed five years later by the ‘Indignados’ movement in Spain”. (Resolution on the balance of class forces, 23rd ICC Congress, in International Review 164)

   B. The movement against the pension reform in France: specific situation or indication of changes in the international class struggle?

This framework has had to be updated with the emergence of expressions of workers' struggles, in France as well as at the international level, showing:
- the capacity of these struggles to situate themselves on the class terrain of the proletariat in response to attacks or the degradation of working conditions, wages; against the effects of the economic crisis;
- the ability of the proletariat to make its way through the historically unfavourable conditions of capitalist decomposition (and which have further deteriorated) and the negative influence of inter-classist struggles in which its weaker parts of the class are at risk of drowning. Despite the efforts of the ruling class in France to strengthen the deleterious inter-classist influence of the Yellow Vests within the class, this influence has remained very marginal; the class shows, by struggling, its resilience to the influence of populism in general and does not appear to be totally gangrened by it.

Our method, the criteria the ICC used in 2003 to identify the turning point in the class struggle, then allow us to evaluate:
- the dimension of the changes in the class struggle from 2018/spring 2019, culminating in the movement against pension reform in France in autumn 2019/winter 2020,
- to what extent they confirm the continuation of the slow, uneven and heterogeneous process of the development of the class struggle that began in 2003.

*In the first place, in a report on the evolution of the class struggle adopted by the ICC’s international central organ in October 2003, the ICC saw "the simultaneity of the movements in France and Austria", however tenuous and reduced to the situation in two countries, as an important criterion for the analysis of the situation. The situation at the end of 2019/early 2020 was marked by expressions of workers' combativity at the international level, particularly in Europe and North America:

 - In Europe: the movement in France against pensions, the postal and transport strike in Finland. In the U.S. and North America: "In the last two years, the number of mass mobilisations and support for the unions has reached proportions not seen in several decades. Teachers and workers in the automobile, hotel and other industries have gathered on picket lines in crowds not seen since the mid-1980s "(from an article on the NBC news channel). At General Motors: "the most massive strike in 50 years, and the first in the U.S. in 12 years, after a period of little international mobilization of the working class."[1] There was also the massive strike in January 2020 by the 30,000 public school teachers in Los Angeles, in the second largest population base in the United States, the first in 30 years and the first since 1989.

*In the 2003 report, the ICC put forward the perspective of "the growing impossibility for the class - despite its persistent lack of self-confidence – of avoiding the need to fight in the face of the dramatic worsening of the crisis and the increasingly massive and widespread nature of the attacks.”

- The development of struggles shows that the working class and the class struggle are still alive;

- It confirms the role played by the crisis as a spur to the class to manifest its resistance to the attacks imposed by the crisis and its willingness to fight back; it demonstrates the return of a combativeness that had not been seen in the working class for more than a decade, or even since the 1980s and 1990s.

- These struggles are developing on the class terrain, a vital precondition for the recovery of class identity faced with all the traps of inter-classism and the general weight of decomposition.

- This situation is essentially demonstrated by fractions of the western proletariat; by contrast, in China or Southeast Asia, in India or Latin America (with a few exceptions) there have not been many important struggles.

   C) The ongoing process of the subterranean maturation of consciousness in the working class

In 2003, the emphasis was placed not on the pace of the development of combativeness but on the question of consciousness:

- on changes in consciousness: "This change affects not only the combativeness of the class but also the state of mind within it, the perspective from which its actions take place. Signs of loss of illusions (...) such turning points in the class struggle - even if they are triggered by an immediate worsening of material conditions - are always the result of underlying changes in the vision of the future. (...) The working class has a historical memory: as the crisis deepens, this memory slowly begins to be activated. Massive unemployment and cuts in wages today bring back the memories of the 1930s, visions of widespread insecurity and impoverishment. Today, the qualitative advance of the crisis may allow questions such as unemployment, poverty and exploitation to be raised in a more global and political way: pensions, health, maintenance of the unemployed, living conditions, the length of a working life, the link between generations. In a very embryonic form, this is the potential that has been revealed in the latest movements in response to the attacks on pensions.” (2003 report on the class struggle)

- the need for the proletariat to recover its class identity: "The current struggles are those of a class that has yet to regain, even in a rudimentary way, its class identity." (ibid) The essential point of the movement has precisely consisted in the tendency to recover class identity: "The rebirth of this feeling of belonging to the same class, of all being struck by the same exploitation, the same iniquitous attacks by successive governments, of finally being able to gather in the streets with the same watchwords, the same demands, (...) this need and desire to be in solidarity in the struggle"[2]

- “The importance of struggles today is that they can be the stage for the development of class consciousness. The fundamental question at stake - the reconquest of class identity - is extremely modest. But behind class identity there is the question of class solidarity - the only alternative to the crazy bourgeois logic of competition, of every man for himself. Behind class identity there is the possibility of re-appropriating the lessons of past struggles and reactivating the collective memory of the proletariat." (2003 report)

The movement in France in 2019-20 expressed very clearly the search for solidarity and the extension of the struggles; but also in Finland: in solidarity with the employees of a subsidiary of the Post Office on whom a 30% wage cut was inflicted: “the workers went on strike on November 11th. For almost 2 weeks, 10,000 postal workers followed the movement, in solidarity with the threatened workers and to demand wage increases. But the conflict extended beyond the Post Office: solidarity strikes were called on 25/11 in land and air transport, ferries, etc. When the threat of a blockade of ports or even a general strike loomed, the management of the Post Office withdrew its plan"[3].

In the face of the violent attacks impelled by the crisis and the ruling class, and in spite of the severe defeats (France, USA) it has suffered, the proletariat shows a refusal to surrender itself to the conditions that face it and shows an effort of consciousness on how to fight and reinforce the struggle.

   D) Signs of a change in the state of mind in the working class

Much is revealed by the reaction of the bourgeoisie, which does not expect this situation to be temporary. This does not lead to the need for a wholesale adaptation of its political apparatus such as we saw in the 1980s, but nevertheless the unions adopt a more "class struggle" posture and even certain parliamentary forces are positioning themselves to deal with this.

So the change of state of mind in the working class is a reality that has gone through stages since 2003[4], and the bourgeoisie has understood it well, noting the search for solidarity and the existing will to develop the struggle.

The current change poses the problems in a broader way than in 2003. The process of subterranean maturation is not at all homogeneous and is more evident in some parts of the world than others. For example, in the USA, where we can see a small but significant development of a milieu of young people looking to engage with the positions of the communist left. 

 

2) The impact of the pandemic on the class struggle

The pandemic intervenes in this context where the class struggle in France and internationally had shown a change of state of mind in the working class marked by anger, discontent, but also a willingness to respond to attacks, resulting in a development of combativeness (and even in the beginning of taking initiatives) and also a beginning of reflection in the class on the lack of perspective in capitalism. But this is a process that is at its very beginning.

   A) An unprecedented situation for the proletariat

Even though exposure to epidemics is part of the class condition of the proletariat (most notably the terrible Spanish flu epidemic in 1918), it is facing an unprecedented situation: a global pandemic requiring the general lock-down of a major part of humanity and the near-total shutdown of the capitalist economy.

This pandemic is of international importance for the entire working class. The specificity of this pandemic is that it constitutes a direct challenge to the health and life of workers. On an immediate level, for the health workers, who are forced to face it without the necessary equipment, and for the rest of the proletariat as well. In a situation that has analogies with a war situation, the population is confronted with life-threatening fear.

The impact of the pandemic is not identical in all parts of the world. It started in China and moved to other South East Asian countries; the wave then spread to Europe and then the United States, and wreaked havoc in Latin America, Brazil in particular, and began to hit the rest of the world (India). The proletariat is thus not everywhere in the immediate future confronted with the same impact. It is not yet known whether there will just be a second wave or whether Covid-19 will become endemic, seasonal.

The impact of the lock-down on the class has not been the same in different parts of the world either. It is simply not possible in many parts of the world where people are forced to live from day to day, and it does not have the same effect of propelling entire sections of the population into impoverishment, depending on the social and health protection systems of the different states.

In the context where the advance of decomposition in many parts of the world had already resulted in many social upheavals and movements of various kinds affecting and endangering the cohesion of capitalist society (Covid can only accelerate these tendencies), the eminently political decision to impose general lock-downs has been forced on the majority of the world bourgeoisie as the only means (comparable to those of the past) available to the states to cope with the situation. Under these conditions, to remain inactive in the face of the pandemic contained the risk for the bourgeoisie of a catastrophic alteration of its credibility and its ability to ideologically ensure the direction of society, entailing a threat to its class domination. Moreover, it had to strengthen the iron corset of state control over society in order to maintain its cohesion in the face of the tendencies to chaos that could arise and to control the oppressed strata, and the exploited class in particular.

   B) What are the similarities and differences with the crisis situations of 1989 and 2008?

What is the impact on the consciousness, the combativeness of the working class? What is the impact on the credibility of the bourgeoisie and the effectiveness of its ideological campaigns, the way the bourgeoisie presents and uses the different crises? Will 2020 see a repetition of an identical scenario of regression of consciousness and regression of combativity on a historical scale?

The context for the working class is very different both in terms of the objective situation of the state of capitalist society and the political situation of the class.

1989 and 2020 represent two historical events of global significance: one, 1989, as the inauguration of a new phase in the history of the decadence of capitalism; the other, 2020, as the most important historical event within the phase of decomposition, marking a stage in its evolution.

1. "The spectacular collapse of the Eastern bloc and the Stalinist regimes in 1989 dealt a brutal blow to the dynamics of class struggle, thus changing the balance of forces between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the benefit of the latter in a major way. This event loudly announced the entry of capitalism into the final phase of its decadence: that of decomposition. When Stalinism collapsed, it did one last service to the bourgeoisie. It allowed the ruling class to put an end to the dynamic of class struggle which, with advances and setbacks, had developed over two decades”. (Resolution on the balance of class forces, 23rd ICC Congress).

This was only possible because this collapse of a part of the capitalist world, which took place neither under the blows of the class struggle nor of imperialist war, could appear as a kind of event 'outside' capitalist relations. In itself this event could only have a negative impact on the class.

2020: the capitalist origin of the pandemic is much harder to hide. Certainly, the source of the pandemic is the subject of imperialist tensions between China and the US and the prey of conspiracy theories, which have shifted from the margin to the mainstream, increasingly encouraged by heads of state like Trump. Nevertheless, the magnitude of the cataclysm makes the responsibility of austerity policies and the negligence of all capitalist states appear more openly.

1. To the alleged "bankruptcy of communism" the bourgeoisie could oppose the victory of capitalism, which seemed to strengthen and proclaim the opening of an era of peace, democracy and prosperity. This event was not only not considered as a failure of capitalism, because economically the situation did not lead to an economic crisis in the years after the implosion, but gave rise to and was used as an ideological attack against the working class. This event was thus presented as proof of the superiority of capitalism.

2020: today nothing like it: the three decades of crisis and austerity, of degradation of the living conditions of the proletariat have led to a certain loss of illusions that capitalism offers a place to the proletariat, to an embryonic awareness of the impasse and the lack of perspective that capitalism offers. At the same time, capitalism is weakening in its ideological capacity to mask its bankruptcy:

- 1989: "The bourgeoisie was able to use this event to unleash a gigantic ideological campaign to perpetuate the biggest lie in history: the identification of communism with Stalinism. In doing so, the ruling class dealt an extremely violent blow to the consciousness of the proletariat. The deafening campaigns of the bourgeoisie over the so-called ‘bankruptcy of communism’ have caused the proletariat to regress in its march toward its historical perspective of overthrowing capitalism. They have dealt a blow to its class identity. This profound retreat in class consciousness and class struggle manifested itself by a decrease in workers' combativeness in all countries, a reinforcement of democratic illusions, a very strong revival of the unions' hold and a very great difficulty for the proletariat to resume the path of its massive struggles despite the aggravation of the economic crisis, the rise of unemployment, of precariousness, and the general degradation of all its living conditions in all sectors and all countries." (Resolution on the balance of class forces from the 23rd ICC Congress, pt 7).

- The impact of this collapse was felt "at a time when the third wave of struggles was beginning to be exhausted towards the end of the 1980s" (ibid); the current international dynamic is that of a nascent resumption of workers' struggles, the beginning of a process of struggles.

- 1989 marked the starting point of the blow to class identity; 2020 the beginnings of a dynamic of recovery of class identity.

- 1989 "a strengthening of democratic institutions, a very strong revival of the hold of the trade unions" (Resolution on the balance of class forces). In 2020 in France the key question was: how to build a balance of forces that would force the government to step back from its pension reform.

- Again in 2008 "With the bankruptcy of the Lehman Brothers bank and the financial crisis of 2008, the bourgeoisie was able to push one more wedge into the consciousness of the proletariat by developing a new ideological campaign on a global scale, aimed at instilling the idea (put forward by the left-wing parties) that it is the ‘crooked bankers’ who are responsible for this crisis, while making it appear that capitalism is personified by traders and the power of money.

The ruling class was thus able to hide the roots of the failure of its system. On the one hand, it sought to pull the working class into defending the ‘protective’ state… to reinforce its powerlessness in the face of an impersonal economic system whose general laws appear to be natural laws that cannot be controlled or modified” (Resolution on the balance of class forces, 23rd ICC Congress).

The state was presented in this crisis as a means of protection for individual workers. The alternative presented was therefore to 'clean up' capitalism – for example in the Occupy Wall Street movement. - by turning against the banking sector.

Today, the bourgeoisie no longer has the same leeway to hide its bankruptcy and to turn certain effects or aspects of it ideologically against the proletariat:

- While it is not immediately perceptible that Covid was produced by the conditions of the decaying capitalist mode of production, capitalism appears more clearly responsible for the effects of the pandemic even though the economic crisis can still be blamed on the virus.

- The policy of decades of attacks and austerity measures in the dismantling of the hospital sector was responsible for the magnitude of the health crisis.

- "Illiberal democracies" or populist-led states have been marked by a more open contempt for human life, but in essence “democratic” or “liberal” have told the same lies and displayed the same scarcity of materials.

- In spite of efforts to hide the fact that the recession is the result of its system, the bourgeoisie has not managed to completely conceal the reality, which is that the recession started before the pandemic.

The analyses of the ICC have been confirmed by the "accompanying" economic measures taken by the main central states to alleviate the immediate impact of the sudden loss of jobs or income by large sectors of the working class (guarantee of minimum income for the unemployed, state benefits to allow technical or partial unemployment, creation of aid, etc.) even when they are largely symbolic, as in the USA where there is not the same social protection as in Europe. This extremely cautious approach on the part of the dominant class is partly motivated by a need to avoid a collapse in key economic sectors, but it also shows:

- The awareness of the bourgeoisie that it is far from dealing with a defeated class, on which it could easily impose any measure of degradation of its conditions or even embroil it in its imperialist projects.

- The circumspection of the bourgeoisie with regard to possible reactions of the exploited class;

The violent attacks on the working class and the measures taken by the bourgeoisie in all countries, its attempt to create a certain national unity, the strengthening of the control of the police state, the intimidation and stigmatisation that the capitalist states have tried to implement have failed to:

- erase the anger and discontent in part of the working class about the measures taken by the state before the pandemic, especially against the hospital sector, and the fact that during the pandemic part of the working class was sacrificed to face the dangers posed by the disease;.

- erase the indignation and anger over the way the bourgeoisie handled the health crisis, especially with the decision to sacrifice part of the working class such as the old and the sick.

C) The loss of confidence in the capitalist state

While in 2015 the migration crisis and the terrorist attacks led to a reflex within the working class to seek the protection of the capitalist state, the more evident role of the state as the defender of the interests of the ruling class has largely cracked the myth of the benevolent state.

- The minimisation of the pandemic by all governments in all countries (going as far as the denial of its danger by populist governments) in order to delay the taking of health  measures, and then the will to restart economic activity as quickly as possible and at all costs, have shown that the state's concern for public health ("to avoid  the remedy being worse than the disease") did not count for much compared to the necessity to save the profits of the ruling class.

- The state's willingness to sacrifice part of the labour force, first and foremost the nursing and "front-line" personnel (supermarket cashiers, etc.) on the altar of defending national capital (under the constraint of laws or the state of emergency) did not go unnoticed.

- The repeated lies of the governments about the real number of victims, or aimed at masking the negligence of the state (the unpreparedness and improvisation in face of the epidemic, the deplorable state of the hospital system or the shortage of equipment) have deeply fuelled distrust and anger towards the state, which has had to hide behind the screen of “scientific advice” to make its decisions accepted.

So it is quite clear that the working class is not ready to accept the sacrifices that the bourgeoisie is going to ask of it. In spite of the fact that the bourgeois class blames the virus for the terrible effects of the crisis, it will not be able to hide its responsibility in this catastrophe.

D) What prospects for the working class?

The working class finds itself in a complex situation confronted with combined and simultaneous effects:

- Confrontation with an unprecedented situation: the devastating pandemic, product and accelerator of decomposition;

- The vertiginous acceleration of the crisis and the plunge into the abyss of a recession (the worst of which is yet to come) without historical precedent since 1929 and comparable to the Great Depression; and thus the violence of the attacks against the living conditions of the working class;

The explosion of social movements produced by the significant worsening of decomposition, and the increasingly evident tendency of the bourgeoisie to lose control over its system, to maintain social cohesion, is being clearly expressed in the central countries themselves.

a) A change in the objective conditions for the struggle of the proletariat:

In 1989, the consequences for the working class on a world scale were very different in the West and in the East; the development of China was made possible by the irruption of the phase of decomposition, carrying the illusion of a youthful capitalism, capable of really developing. In 2020, the proletariat will be hit everywhere with a worldwide and general tendency to drastic attacks on living conditions, not unlike those of the 1930s and in any case unheard of since the Second World War.

In our analysis of the situation of the proletariat we have constantly put forward:

- the capacity of the bourgeoisie to transfer the effects of the economic crisis to the periphery of its system (which was still the case in 2008);

- its capacity to slow down and to spread out in time the sinking into the economic crisis, planning its attacks by deploying all means to avoid a unified response from the working class and a re-appropriation of the ultimate political goals of its struggle against capitalism.

Today we will have to analyse and understand what is changing or not, to what extent, etc. What is the significance of the fact that, unlike in the past, all parts of the world are affected - even in varying degrees - by the brutal sinking into the crisis (China, USA, Western Europe, emerging countries) and that the bourgeoisie must sooner or later attack the proletariat massively and simultaneously in an accelerated way?

b) The immediate impact of the pandemic and the development of the recession:

- the conditions of the lock-down did not allow for a general development of workers’ struggles, even though in several countries, particularly in the exposed sectors, there were movements demanding means of protection in the workplace.

- At the immediate level when the pandemic struck,  it was a blow against the first signs of awakening of the class, against the beginning of a change of state of mind in Europe in the movements in France, and elsewhere internationally. This does not mean that everything was immediately forgotten - the combativeness, the anger, the reflection, but it was a major blow against the potential for development of the struggle and combativeness at the immediate level.

- The violence of the attacks (drastic wage cuts, rising mass unemployment, decimation of entire sectors, job blackmail) means that the working class response to this situation is likely to be delayed.

c) Impact of the pandemic on consciousness in the working class:

While the working class is not going to develop an immediate response to the attacks, the following must be taken into account:

- The pandemic has exposed the fact that the functioning of the capitalist system is entirely dependent on the "indispensable" work of the class it exploits. The fact that, in order to cope with the dramatic effects of the pandemic, the bourgeoisie was forced to put forward sectors of the working class which until then had been undervalued or considered as mere personnel in health, education, transport etc. could allow the workers of these sectors to begin to understand their irreplaceable role in the life of capitalism. This is, potentially, a first step in the working class' ability to regain its class identity.

- The process of reflection that existed in the class before the pandemic on the lack of perspective offered by capitalism has not been erased by the ideological campaigns aimed at making the working class feel guilty and by the strengthening of state control over the class. This process can only be reinforced by the negligence of the bourgeoisie in managing the pandemic crisis;

- The workers see the capitalist interest of the bourgeoisie in forcing them back to work despite the terrible health conditions. This is a first step towards seeing the conflict between the needs of profit and human need, and thus an element in the subterranean maturation of consciousness. . During the lock-down, a rally by hospital workers raised the slogan “the disease is capitalism, the vaccine is revolution”. The working class is not ready to forget what happened during the pandemic - it is not a class based on revenge but it has seen the criminal negligence of the bourgeoisie and its willingness to risk the lives of the workers. It will not forget those who died.

d) The pandemic as a factor of consciousness?

Employees in the medical sector are aware of acting on the "battlefield" of their own health, but also that of patients. The ethical question arising from the contradiction between what science can or could offer and the miserable "conditions of death" and scarcity offered by capitalism (e.g. the need to triage patients admitted to care, effectively sentencing some to death) means that the struggle can take on this ethical/moral dimension. The ethical question (which is a matter of life and death in the medical sector) can be a factor in raising awareness not only among health care workers but also more widely in the working class.

e) A necessary distinction to be made between the different parts of capitalism:

Faced with the universal problem of the health crisis the different fractions of the working class are confronted with different conditions, so that the impact of the pandemic is different according to the region or country:

- The main aspect is first of all that of the heterogeneity of the class in terms of its experience of the different conditions of exploitation to which it is subjected at the global level. Not all parts of the working class are affected at the same time or in the same way because of the different systems of security and social protection;

- Differences in the conditions of lock-down and its relaxation which are not identical from one country to another.

These are all elements that will tend to weaken the possibility of a simultaneous response.

f) The economic consequences will be catastrophic for a long time to come.

The heterogeneity of situations both at the level of the class (in terms of consciousness and combativeness depending on the country), and at the level of the situation in each country, will have an impact on the response of the working class to the consequences of the crisis which will not be the same everywhere.

In Europe, unemployment is very old, but the welfare state has served as a buffer and has prolonged decomposition by preventing an acute deterioration of conditions.

In China this will be the first time that the working class has been confronted with mass unemployment. Twenty-five years ago, the rust belt in China, under state control, was in trouble and unemployment was high. Then there was a massive surge of economic growth and a resulting labour shortage. The proletariat in China has much less experience of unemployment, although we have seen demonstrations against the high cost of living. Although Chinese capital seems to have coped with the pandemic better than its main rivals, it will still be obliged to demand more and more sacrifices from the working class faced with a mounting world recession.

In the US, there is no welfare state, the explosion of unemployment, evictions, homelessness, etc. are a big challenge; the beginning of a class reaction was immediately confronted with the explosion of social contradictions due to decomposition.

The situation in Latin America and elsewhere is again different. There is not yet a direct confrontation with the effects of the crisis.

3) Obstacles to the capacity of the working class to develop its response

a) The danger of decomposition

The irruption of the pandemic and the stage it represents in the descent into decomposition speeds up the race between, on the one hand, the historical necessity of the development of the revolutionary perspective in the working class, and on the other hand this further advance of decomposition which increasingly undermines the historic conditions for socialism. It underlines the historical responsibility of the proletariat and the urgency of the development of the revolutionary perspective. "We certainly recognise that the longer capitalism sinks into decomposition, the more it is sapping the basis for a more human society. Again this is illustrated most clearly by the destruction of the environment, which is reaching the point where it can accelerate the tendency towards a complete break-down of society, a condition which does not favour the self-organisation and confidence in the future required to make the revolution; and even if the proletariat does come to power on a global scale, it will be faced by a gigantic labour not only to clean up the mess bequeathed by capitalist accumulation, but to reverse a spiral of destruction that it has already set in motion.” (Report on class identity, 23rd ICC Congress)

(b) The impoverishment of other classes or social strata

The very violent crisis hits not only the proletariat but also other sections of the population, a large part of which will become drastically impoverished. This perspective of a general impoverishment - of the proletariat and of other strata - makes inter-classism a dangerous trap for the struggle. Faced with the degradation of its living conditions, the class will necessarily have to develop its response, its combativeness. This development of the class struggle will come up against the danger of inter-classism in the months to come. The perils represented by the present historical period have thus been multiplied by the aggravation of decomposition and thus emphasises what is at stake in the class struggle:

“The struggle for the class autonomy of the proletariat is crucial in this situation imposed by the aggravation of the decomposition of capitalism:

- against inter-classist struggles;

- against partial struggles put forward by all kinds of social categories giving a false illusion of a ‘protective community’;

- against the mobilisations on the rotten ground of nationalism, pacifism, ‘ecological’ reform, etc.” (Resolution on the balance of class forces, 23rd ICC Congress)

c) The situation of the working class in the USA: what role in the resumption of the class struggle?

The movements in the US around the question of race and police violence, which are either posed on the terrain of riots that have no perspective, or directly on a bourgeois political terrain, illustrate the serious immediate dangers facing the class today. They are the kind of movements that the organisation must expect and that will increasingly materialise in the central countries (or in countries such as Lebanon which are on the brink of the abyss) in the period ahead.

The "Black Lives Matter" movement has rapidly gained international resonance and extension to other central states. The latter are fundamentally affected by the same social contradictions, contradictions which have been accumulating over decades and which the bourgeois state is increasingly forced to try to contain through the strengthening of its control and repression. These movements in response to racism have been rapidly absorbed by the organs of the bourgeois left, allow the ruling class to concentrate all attention on the question of race and the demand for a truly democratic system. It is thus able to take full advantage of this movement and use it against the class struggle at a time when the capitalist system as a whole is revealing its total bankruptcy.

In the US, the initial reactions to the police murders took the form of riots. Normally such responses have a limited life-span, although since their underlying causes remain, they can easily flare up again. But in general, they were replaced by more peaceful demonstrations demanding the end of police violence, and these mobilisations will be prolonged by the campaign around the forthcoming presidential elections, which will also have a negative effect.

d) A situation illustrating the difficulties that are emerging for the class:

- It is still difficult to discern the extent of the negative impact of the riots against police violence on the working class in the United States, and in the world.

- Any social (and therefore political) dynamics that are not on a class terrain will have a negative impact.

- The acceleration of decomposition is a major obstacle that tends to become a decisive element in social life; every attempt by the class to take a step forward comes up against the obstacle of the effects of decomposition. This is something we must expect in the period ahead….

*****************************************

This report was written in advance of the Congress of our section in France in October. Since that time the possibility of a second wave of the pandemic has become a reality, especially in the central countries of capitalism. This only underlines a point made at the beginning of the report – that with the pandemic, we are entering unchartered waters, and in this situation it would be foolish to speculate about even the short term perspectives for the class struggle. It is likely that the continuation of the lock-downs will place further obstacles in the way of the revival of open struggles, and even though we can be more certain about the necessity for the bourgeoisie to launch massive attacks on working class living conditions, the scale of these attacks, especially given that they will feature large-scale lay-offs and closures of enterprises could, in an initial period, act as a further factor of inhibiting and intimidating the proletariat. But this report has also shown that the capacity of the working class to respond to the crisis of the system has by no means disappeared; and this implies that sooner or later we will see significant reactions to the onslaught of capital. In the meantime, revolutionaries have a great deal of work to do in fertilising the fragile green shoots of consciousness already visible in small minorities across the world – products of a deeper undercurrent of awareness that the present system of production is profoundly and irreversibly bankrupt.

July 2020

Introduction

The global economic crisis is now worsening sharply. Concretely, and without a doubt, the working class everywhere in the world will suffer the explosion of unemployment, exploitation, precariousness and poverty.

With this new step, capitalism is going further down the road of its decadence, which forces revolutionary organisations to clarify the following questions:

1) What is the historical significance of this developing crisis, the most serious of decadence, including the one that began in 1929?

2) What are the implications of the fact that the effects of the decomposition of society will have a very important weight on the evolution of this new phase of the open crisis?

At the same time, we must beware of an immediatist and economistic vision of the crisis, as the report presented argues: to avoid any hazardous prognoses, having in mind past overestimations on our part concerning the rhythm of the crisis and a certain catastrophist vision with the idea that the bourgeoisie was at an impasse. In addition to a lack of mastery of Rosa Luxemburg's theory, we underestimated the capacity of state capitalism to act faced with the manifestations of the open crisis, to accompanying its deepening historical crisis and thus allow this system to survive. Its weapons: permanent intervention in the economic field, manipulation and cheating of the law of value… In doing so, the bourgeoisie has maintained the illusion within the proletariat that capitalism is not a bankrupt system, its convulsions being only transient, the product of cyclical crises necessarily followed by a period of intensive general development.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, the great capitalist nations were in a frantic race to conquer new markets and territories. But around 1900, they encountered a small problem: the earth was round and not that big. Thus, even before a global economic crisis erupted, imperialist tensions reached their climax, world war broke out and capitalism entered into decadence.

The war of 1914-18 was the manifestation of the most extreme barbarism, the consequence of the fact that “At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production (…) From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters.” (Preface to the Critique of Political Economy, 1859).

It was only at the end of the 1920s that the various national bourgeoisies were to be confronted for the first time with the directly "economic" manifestation of this entry into decline: the crisis of generalised and historical overproduction. Let us quote Marx again:

“The more capitalist production develops, the more it is forced to produce on a scale which has nothing to do with the immediate demand but depends on a constant expansion of the world market (…) [Because] the commodity has to be converted into money. The demand of the workers does not suffice, since profit arises precisely from the fact that the demand of the workers is smaller than the value of their product. The demand of the capitalists among themselves is equally insufficient.” (Theories of Surplus Value Part 2, Chapter 16). “If it is finally said that the capitalists have only to exchange and consume their commodities among themselves, then the entire nature of the capitalist mode of production is lost sight of; and also forgotten is the fact that it is a matter of expanding the value of the capital, not consuming it.” (Capital Volume 3, Chapter 15)

In other words, the crisis of generalised overproduction which appeared in broad daylight in 1929 is not linked to a kind of dysfunction that the bourgeoisie can regulate or overcome. No, it is the consequence of a fundamental and insurmountable contradiction inscribed in the very nature of capitalism.

The national bourgeoisies drew lessons from the catastrophic crisis of 1929: the need to develop state capitalism and establish international organisations in order to manage the crisis so as not to reproduce the error of protectionist policies.

At the end of the Second World War, the bourgeoisie put into practice the lessons of 1929. The post-war boom sowed the illusion that capitalism had recovered prosperity, momentarily erasing the nightmare of the Great Depression of the 1930s and the horrors of war. But, inevitably, the contradictions inherent in the very nature of capitalism remained, as its historic crisis. This is what the return of the open crisis of 1967-1968 reveals.

Since then, from stimulus plans to deeper recessions, the bourgeoisie has been trapped in a headlong rush into indebtedness, in an attempt to constantly push back to the next day the effects of the historic bankruptcy of its system. World debt has become more and more massive, not only absolutely but also compared to the evolution of world GDP. At the same time as this headlong rush, the central countries changed the organisation of the world economy:

1) During the 1970s, the increase in public spending, the end of the Bretton Woods agreements and the policy of Special Drawing Rights, the opening of credits to weaker countries, all allowed a level of growth to be maintained which gave the illusion that, despite the "oil crisis", capitalism remained dynamic;

2) In the 1980s, following the serious recession at the start of the decade, entire sections of production were moved to areas where labour power was inexpensive, such as in China. For this, it took colossal investments made possible by extensive financial "liberalisation" on a global scale. This is the beginning of "globalisation".

3) In the 1990s, after the fall of the Eastern bloc, international organisations were reinforced, giving rise to a structure of "international cooperation" at the monetary and financial level, to coordination of economic policies with the establishment of international production chains, stimulation of world trade by the elimination of customs barriers, etc. This framework is obviously established by and for the strongest countries: to conquer new markets, relocate their production, appropriate more profitable companies from weaker countries...

If this "international cooperation" has been able, to a certain extent and for a time, to slow down and mitigate the effects of everyone-for-themselves economics on states, it has been incapable of stemming the underlying tendency inherent in capitalism’s entry, at the same time, into its phase of decomposition.

4) The systematic recourse by all states to massive indebtedness to respond to the lack of outlets was also a risky policy, causing the financial crisis of 2008 which resulted in even more indebtedness. The "global organisation of production" began to be shaken in the decade from 2010; China, after having benefited greatly from the mechanisms of global trade (WTO), began to develop a parallel economic, commercial and imperialist "circuit" ( the New Silk Road). In July 2017, Germany passed a decree blocking the sale of strategic national companies to foreign investors. The trade war escalated further with the rise to power of Trump. These phenomena undoubtedly demonstrate that capitalism is increasingly encountering major difficulties in pushing ever further the limits of the capitalist mode of production, as was the case with globalisation.

Today, the bourgeoisie has accumulated immense experience in slowing down the effects of its historic crisis, thus prolonging its agony even further. We must therefore be extremely careful about our forecasts and beware of any catastrophism. In the current worsening global economic crisis, it is above all the major underlying historical trends that we must highlight:

From 1929, the bourgeoisie learned to support its declining economy, notably through "international cooperation". Even in 2008, the famous G20 showed this capacity of the big bourgeoisies to maintain a certain cohesion in order to manage the crisis with the least possible damage. The year 2020 marks the growing difficulty of maintaining this world organisation, the irrationality linked to the decomposition hitting the highest summits of the state. Everyone for themselves, which has come to light with the calamitous management of the pandemic, is its most spectacular expression. This centrifugal force has two roots:

1. The inexorable worsening of the global economic crisis is exacerbating the struggle to the death between all rival nations. Note that, unlike 2008, the most affected are the central countries (Germany, China and especially the United States) and that if the bankruptcy of the banks was then mainly caused by real estate speculation, today it is directly productive enterprises that are in danger.

2. Decomposition, which first and foremost affected the nations in their imperialist relations, is also starting to strike at their capacities for managing the economy. This only follows and worsens the perspective emerging from the resolution on the international situation of our last international congress:

"The current development of the crisis through the increasing disruptions it causes in the organisation of production into a vast multilateral construction at the international level, unified by common rules, shows the limits of ‘globalisation’. The ever-increasing need for unity (which has never meant anything other than the imposition of the law of the strongest on the weakest) due to the “trans-national” intertwining of highly segmented production country by country (in units fundamentally divided by competition where any product is designed here, assembled there with the help of elements produced elsewhere) comes up against the national nature of each capital, against the very limits of capitalism, which is irremediably divided into competing and rival nations. This is the maximum degree of unity that it is impossible for the bourgeois world to overcome. The deepening crisis (as well as the demands of imperialist rivalry) is putting multilateral institutions and mechanisms to a severe test” (Point 20).

What we see is that, in response to the pandemic, a very significant advance in measures of "national relocation" of production has begun to develop, the preservation of key sectors in each national capital, development of barriers to the international circulation of goods and people, etc., which can only have very severe consequences for the evolution of the world economy and the overall capacity of the bourgeoisie to respond to the crisis. National decline can only worsen the crisis, leading to a fragmentation of production chains that previously had a global dimension, which in return can only wreak havoc on monetary, financial, trade policies... This could go as far as blockage and even partial collapse of some national economies.

It is too early to measure the consequences of this relative paralysis of the economic apparatus. Most serious and most significant, however, is that this paralysis is taking place internationally.

The current acceleration of the global economic crisis is part of the general evolution of the decadence of capitalism. Beyond the visible phenomena linked to the current "open crisis", what matters to us is to better understand the reinforcement of the deep contradictions of capitalism and therefore the worsening of its historical crisis.

Report on the Economic Crisis

Preamble

With regard to the economic crisis, there are central aspects that we can clearly point out:

1) The crisis that is already looming will be, in its historical scope, the most serious of the period of decadence, surpassing in this respect the one that began in 1929.

2) What is new in the history of capitalism is that the effects of decomposition will have a very important weight on the economy and the evolution of the new open phase of the crisis.

However, beyond the validity of these general forecasts, the unprecedented situation that has opened up will be more than ever dominated by strong uncertainty. More precisely, at the current stage reached by the historical crisis of overproduction, the eruption of decomposition on the economic terrain profoundly disrupts the mechanisms of state capitalism intended to accompany and limit the impact of the crisis. However, it would be false and dangerous to draw the conclusion that the bourgeoisie will not use its political capacities to the maximum to respond, to the best of its abilities, in the face of the global economic crisis that is beginning to unfold. The eruption of the weight of decomposition means moreover that there is a factor of instability and fragility in economic functioning that makes it particularly difficult to analyse the evolution of the situation.

In the past, we have too often fixed our eyes only on those aspects of the situation that were pushing the economic crisis of capital towards its inexorable worsening, forgetting to take sufficient account of all the factors that tended to slow down its development. However, in order to be faithful to the marxist method of analysis, we have to identify, not only the historically important trends  from the perspectives that are opening up, but also the counter-tendencies that the bourgeoisie will activate. It is therefore our duty to identify, as clearly as possible, the general lines of the future evolution, without falling into risky and uncertain forecasts. We must arm ourselves to face the situation, ensuring that we develop and implement our capacity for rapid reflection and response to events of very great importance which are sure to develop. Our method must be inspired by the approach already recalled in our debates:

"Marxism can only trace with certainty the general historical lines and trends. The task of revolutionary organisations must obviously be to identify perspectives for their intervention in the class, but these perspectives cannot be ‘predictions’ based on deterministic mathematical models (and even less so by taking at face value the predictions of the ‘experts’ of the bourgeoisie, whether in the sense of a false ‘optimism’ or an equally mystifying ‘alarmism’)". [quoted by an internal discussion document).

The seriousness of the crisis

The crisis of 2008 was a very important moment for capitalism. The recovery (2013-2018) has been very weak, the weakest since 1967. It was described by the bourgeoisie as a "soft" recovery. In the decade 2010-2020, before the Covid 19 crisis, the Cycle Business Bourse site assessed world growth at slightly less than 3% on an annual average. The economic crisis that came to light with the pandemic had already seen its first clear expressions, especially from 2018. We anticipated this in the report and Resolution on the international situation at the 23rd ICC Congress (2019):

"On the economic level, since the beginning of 2018, the situation of capitalism has been marked by a sharp slowdown in world growth (from 4% in 2017 to 3.3% in 2019), which the bourgeoisie predicts will be worsening in 2019-20. This slowdown proved to be greater than expected in 2018, as the IMF had to reduce its forecasts for the next two years and is affecting virtually all parts of capitalism simultaneously: China, the United States and the Euro Zone. In 2019, 70% of the world economy has been slowing down, particularly in the ‘advanced’ countries (Germany, United Kingdom). Some of the emerging countries are already in recession (Brazil, Argentina, Turkey) while China, which has been slowing down since 2017 and is expected to grow by 6.2% in 2019, is experiencing its lowest growth figures in 30 years." (Point 16 of the Resolution).

It is in this context of slowing growth that the pandemic has become a powerful accelerator of the crisis, bringing to the fore three factors:

- The degree to which public health systems, one of the key elements of state capitalism since 1945, have been undermined. This process of weakening of the health system is linked to the economic crisis and has accelerated considerably with the 2008 crisis. In the vast majority of states the health systems have been unable to cope with the pandemic, which has forced containment measures leading to a brutal economic shutdown never experienced in peacetime. For capitalism, ready to sacrifice the lives of millions of people in imperialist wars, the dilemma was not whether to save lives or maintain production, but how to simultaneously maintain production, economic competitiveness and imperialist rank, since the full blossoming of the pandemic could only seriously damage production and the commercial and imperialist position of each power.

- The growing degree of loss of any sense of responsibility and the negligence of a majority of bourgeois fractions in all countries and especially in the central countries, a factor linked to the decomposition of society.

- The brutal eruption of everyone for themselves on the economic level, a factor also linked to decomposition but having very important consequences on the economic level.

The most important manifestation of the gravity of the crisis is that, unlike 2008, the most central countries (Germany, China and especially the United States) are the most affected; even if they deploy all the means to cushion the crisis, the shock wave they provoke will strongly destabilise the world economy.

The brutal fall in oil prices has hit the USA hard. Before the outbreak of the pandemic crisis, there was a ‘price war’ over oil. As a result, oil prices became negative, perhaps for the first time in history:

"Even the most optimistic energy analysts are predicting the collapse of hundreds of oil companies in the United States. Some have accumulated billions of dollars in debt, much of it high risk. ‘The first hotbed of risk in corporate debt is energy,’ says Capital Economics, although Macadam says it is not a systemic risk. But a chain of defaults in the oil sector would increase the risk of a financial crisis. And if one of the world’s most indebted oil giants - Shell, for example, has a debt of US$77 billion, one of the highest in the world - were to run into trouble, the repercussions would be devastating".[1]

These negative prices are a perfect illustration of the level of irrationality of capital. Overproduction of oil and rampant speculation in this sector has led to the owners of oil companies paying to get rid of oil that can no longer be stored due to lack of space.

While in 2008 the failure of the banks was mainly driven by property speculation, today it is directly productive companies that put them at risk:

"The four largest American lenders, JP Morgan, Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo, have each invested more than $10 billion in the oil fracking sector in 2019 alone, according to Statista. And now these oil companies are at serious risk of becoming insolvent, leaving banks with paperwork on their balance sheets (…)  According to Moody's, 91% of US corporate bankruptcies in the last quarter of last year occurred in the oil and gas sector. Data provided by Energy Economics and Financial Analysis indicates that last year, oil fracking companies were unable to pay $26 billion in debt.”[2] With the pandemic, the situation is seriously worsening: "Rystad Energy Consulting estimates that even if the $20 a barrel were to be recovered, 533 US oil companies could become insolvent by 2021. But if prices remain at $10, there could be more than 1,100 bankruptcies, with virtually all the companies being affected.”[3]

The crisis of the "multilateral" phase of state capitalism

Capitalism - through state capitalism – is making an enormous effort to protect the vital centres of the system and avoid a brutal fall, as the report on the crisis of the 23rd Congress says: "By relying on the levers of state capitalism and drawing the lessons of 1929, capitalism is able to preserve its vital centres (especially the USA and Germany), to follow the evolution of the crisis, to lessen its effects by pushing them back to the weakest countries, to slow down its rhythm by prolonging them in time.”

State capitalism has gone through different phases that we have begun to deal with, notably in a day of study in 2019. Since 1945, the needs of the blocs have imposed a certain coordination of the state management of the economy at the international level, especially in the US bloc, with the creation of international bodies for "cooperation" (OECD, IMF, early EU) and trade organisations (GATT).

In the 1980s, capital in the central countries, overwhelmed by the rise of the crisis and suffering from a sharp fall in profits, tried to move whole sections of production to countries with low-cost labour power such as China. To this end, it required a very strong financial "liberalisation" on a global scale to mobilise capital to make the necessary investments. In the 1990s, after the fall of the Eastern bloc, international organisations were strengthened, giving rise to a structure of "international cooperation" at the monetary and financial levels, for the coordination of economic policies, establishment of international production chains, stimulation of world trade by the elimination of customs barriers, etc. This framework was designed to benefit the strongest countries: they could conquer new markets, relocate their production, and take over the most profitable companies in the weaker countries. The latter were forced to change their own state policy. From now on, the defence of the national interest was not done through the customs protection of key industries but through the development of infrastructure, training the workforce, international expansion of its key companies, capture of international investments, etc.

There was "a vast reorganisation of capitalist production on a global scale between 1990 and 2008 (…) Following the EU's reference model of eliminating customs barriers between member states, the integration of many branches of world production has been strengthened by developing veritable chains of production on a global scale. By combining logistics, information technology and telecommunications, allowing economies of scale, the increased exploitation of the proletariat's labour power (through increased productivity, international competition, free movement of labour to impose lower wages), the submission of production to the financial logic of maximum profitability, world trade has continued to increase, even if less so, stimulating the world economy, providing a “second wind” that has extended the existence of the capitalist system." (Point 8 of the 23rd Congress Resolution).

This "international cooperation" was a very risky and bold policy to alleviate the crisis and mitigate some of the effects of decay on the economy by trying to limit the impact of the capitalist contradiction between the social and global nature of production and the private nature of the appropriation of surplus value by competing capitalist nations. Such an evolution of decadent capitalism is explained in our pamphlet on decadence where, criticising the vision according to which decadence is synonymous with a definitive and permanent blockage of the development of the productive forces, it argues:

"If we defended the hypothesis of the definitive and permanent halt in this development, the deepening of this contradiction could only be demonstrated if the outer bounds of the existing property relations were 'absolutely' receding. However, it happens that the characteristic movement of the different periods of decadence in history (including the capitalist system) tends rather in the direction of expanding these frontiers up to their final limits than towards their restriction. Under the aegis of the state and under the pressure of economic and social necessities, the system's carcass swells while casting off everything that proves superfluous to the relations of production, everything not strictly necessary to the system's survival. The system is reinforced but at its last limits.” This is even truer of capitalism, the most elastic and dynamic mode of production in known history.

As the 23rd Congress Report on the economic crisis and the Resolution on the international situation shows, this "world organisation of production" began to be shaken during the decade from 2010: China, after having profited greatly from the global trade mechanisms (WTO), began to develop a parallel economic, commercial and imperialist mechanism (the New Silk Road); Germany has taken protectionist measures; the trade war has accelerated with the coming to power of Trump... These phenomena clearly express the fact that capitalism increasingly encountered major difficulties in its tendency to enlarge the frontiers cited in our decadence pamphlet.

"Since the 1960s, this indicator [which measures the proportion of exports and imports in each national economy] has followed an upward trend that has slowed down over the last 18 months. Over this period, it has gone from about 23% to a stabilisation at about 60%, and since 2010 it has been falling steadily.”[4]

The brutal irruption of decomposition into the economic terrain

Three factors at the origin of the pandemic crisis show the irruption of the effects of decomposition into the economic terrain: each for themselves, negligence and loss of control. Two of these find their origin directly in capitalist decomposition: each for themselves and loss of control. These are very sensitive factors which the bourgeoisie - at least in the central countries - had succeeded in controlling as best it could, even if with increasing difficulty. At the present stage reached by the development of the internal contradictions of capital, and given the way in which they manifest themselves in the evolution of the crisis, the explosion of the effects of decomposition now becomes a factor of aggravation of the world economic crisis, of which we have only seen the very first consequences. This factor will influence the evolution of the crisis by constituting an obstacle to the effectiveness of state capitalist policies in the current crisis.

"Compared to the responses to the crises of 1975, 1992, 1998 and 2008, we see as perspective a considerable reduction of the capacity of the bourgeoisie to limit the effects of the decomposition on the economic terrain. Up until now, the bourgeoisie has succeeded in preserving the vital terrain of the economy and world trade from the highly dangerous centrifugal effects of decomposition. It has done this through the ‘international cooperation’ of the mechanisms of state capitalism - what has been called ‘globalisation’. At the height of the economic convulsion of 2007-2008 and in 2009-2011, with the ‘sovereign debt’ crisis, the bourgeoisie was able to coordinate its responses, which helped to soften the blow of the crisis a little and guarantee an anaemic ‘recovery’ during the 2013-2018 phase" (from a contribution on the economic crisis to discussion in the ICC).

With the pandemic we've seen how the bourgeoisie tries to unite the population behind the state,   revamping national unity. Unlike 2008, when the nationalist tone was not as strong, now the bourgeoisies across the world have closed their borders, spreading the message: “behind national borders you find protection, borders help to hold back the virus”. This is a way for the different states to try to rally the population behind them; they speak everywhere in martial terms: “we are at war, and war needs national unity”, with the messages “the state will help you”: “we will bail you out”; “by closing the border, we will keep the virus away”; by imposing emergency plans, by organising shutdowns, the states want to convey the message: “a strong state is your best ally”.

“The WHO has been completely inoperative while its action was vital to develop effective medical action. Every state fearing a loss of competitive position has suicidally delayed action in the face of the pandemic. The obtaining of medical equipment saw the staggering spectacle of all kinds of robberies between states (and even within each state). In the EU, where ‘cooperation between states’ has gone as far as possible, we have seen the uncontrolled development of a brutal surge of protectionism and of economic every man for himself: ‘It is not only that the EU does not have any legal possibilities to impose its rules on the EU in the health sector, but above all each country took measures to defend its borders, its supply chains; and we have seen if not for the first time a real blockage of goods, confiscation of health equipment - and the prohibition to deliver them to other European countries’” (another internal contribution).

We have here an illustration, more serious, of the perspective set out in the resolution on the international situation at our last international Congress:

"The current development of the crisis through the increasing disruptions it causes in the organisation of production into a vast multilateral construction at the international level, unified by common rules, shows the limits of ‘globalisation’. The ever-increasing need for unity (which has never meant anything other than the imposition of the law of the strongest on the weakest) due to the ‘trans-national’ intertwining of highly segmented production country by country (in units fundamentally divided by competition where any product is designed here, assembled there with the help of elements produced elsewhere) comes up against the national nature of each capital, against the very limits of capitalism, which is irremediably divided into competing and rival nations. This is the maximum degree of unity that it is impossible for the bourgeois world to overcome. The deepening crisis (as well as the demands of imperialist rivalry) is putting multilateral institutions and mechanisms to a severe test." (Point 20).

What we see is that in response to the pandemic there has been a very significant return to  measures of "national relocation" of production, preservation of key sectors in each national capital, development of barriers to the international circulation of goods and people, etc., which can only have far reaching consequences for the evolution of the world economy and the global capacity of the bourgeoisie to respond to the crisis. The national withdrawal can only worsen the crisis, leading to a fragmentation of production chains that previously had a global dimension, which can only wreak havoc on monetary, financial and commercial policies. This could lead to the blocking and even the partial collapse of some national economies. It is too early to measure the consequences of this relative paralysis of the economic system. However, the most serious and significant is that this paralysis is taking place on an international scale.

The generalised response of states to the pandemic illustrates the validity of an analysis already made in the 23rd Congress Report on the economic crisis:

“One of the major contradictions of capitalism is that arising from the conflict between the increasingly global nature of production and the necessarily national structure of capital. By pushing the economic, financial and productive possibilities of the ‘associations’ of nations to their ultimate limits, capitalism has obtained a significant ‘breath of fresh air’ in its struggle against the crisis that is plaguing it, but at the same time it has put itself in a risky situation. This headlong rush into multilateralism is developing in a context of decomposition, that is, a situation where indiscipline, centrifugal tendencies, entrenchment in the national structure, are increasingly powerful and affect not only fractions of each national bourgeoisie but also lead to large sectors of the petty bourgeoisie and even fringes of proletarians wrongly believing that their interest is attached to the nation. All this crystallises into a kind of ‘nihilist nationalist revolt’ against ‘globalisation’”.

How will the bourgeoisie respond?

We are going to examine the response initiated by the bourgeoisie which will be articulated in 3 parts: 1) continuation of astronomical levels of debt; 2) national withdrawal; 3) brutal attack on workers' living conditions.

Global debt stood at $255,000 billion, or 322% of global GDP, whereas before the 2008 crisis it amounted to $60,000 billion, with global GDP since having progressed only relatively "sluggishly". We have here a picture of the development of private and public debt over the last thirteen years, which has helped sustain what the bourgeoisie has called “sluggish” growth. Faced with the violent acceleration of the economic crisis induced by the pandemic, the bourgeoisie has reacted everywhere in the world by the creation of money issued by the central banks of all the developed and emerging countries. Contrary to the crisis of 2008, no coordination between the world’s main central banks has been implemented. This massive creation of central money and debt has been equal to the anxiety that immediately took over the bourgeois class in the face of the scale of the recession which seems to be opening up before it.  Taking an average of the figures given by the bourgeoisie at the end of May, we have the following forecasts of falls in growth:

- 6.8% of GDP for the EU as a whole and 11 to 12% for the southern Mediterranean countries...

- For the United States the figures given express the difficulty or ideological perfidy of the bourgeoisie in its evaluation, giving figures ranging from 6.5% to 30%! In statistical terms this has never been seen before. The Philadelphia FED even put forward the figure of 35%.

- China announced a drop in its GDP of 3.5% and a 13% drop in its industrial activity.

If we take the lowest hypothesis put forward by the bourgeoisie and in the absence of a second wave of the pandemic, world growth in 2020 is expected to experience a sharp contraction of at least 3%, a much sharper decline than during the 2008-2009 crisis.

Here is a summary of the uncertain outlook expressed by the IMF (which is in line with the average of the forecasts made by official bodies at the international level):

Country	2019	2020
Advanced countries	2.9	-3
Euro zone	1.7	-6.1
Germany	0.6	-7
France	1.3	-7.2
Italy	0.3	-9.1
Spain	2	-8
Japan	0.7	-5.2
UK	1.4	-6.5
China	6.1	1.2
India	4.2	1.9
Brazil	1.1	-5.3
Russia	1.3	-5.5
World Total	2.4	-4.2

Volume of world trade

	2019	2020
Imports by advanced countries	1.5	-11.5
Imports by emerging and developing countries	0.8	-8.2
Exports by emerging and developing countries	0.8	-9.6

These tables provide an overview not only of the envisaged recessionary process, but also of the expected level of contraction in world trade.

A synthesis of our discussion gives the following figures, which are quite telling:

“The situation is only sustainable because state debts and their repayment are taken over by the central banks; thus the FED is injecting into the US economy $625 billion per week, while the Paulson Plan launched in 2009 to stop bank failures was globally $750 billion (although it is true that other plans to buy back debts by the FED will be launched in the following years)". "The most striking response of all has come from Germany, although it is only part of a wider European reaction to the acceleration of the economic crisis. The reason that the projected measures of the German government are of especial importance is explained in an article in the Financial Times of Monday 23rd March: ‘The measures proposed by Olaf Scholtz, finance minister, represent a decisive break with the government's strict adherence to the “schwarze Null” or "black zero" policy of balanced budgets and no new borrowing”[5] (…) “Since February, 14,000 billion dollars have been released, to avoid collapse. All this takes place in a completely different context from the past. How have these ‘expansionist’ policies, which have overcome differences between central banks and states, the recovery, rescue plans - how can they be effective?"[6].

A less well-known example concerns China, which is one of the most indebted countries in the world, even if it also has significant advantages that should not be underestimated. China's global debt in 2019 is equal to 300% of its GDP, or $43,000 billion. In addition, 30% of businesses in China are categorised as “zombie companies”. This is the highest percentage in the world. It is also in this country that the rate of production capacity utilisation is the lowest; in fact all the developing countries are experiencing this phenomenon of excess production capacity. Officially, the industrial capacity utilisation rates of the world's two leading powers - and this before Covid-19 - were 76.4% in China and 78.2% in the United States. The stimulus package implemented in China would amount to $64,000 billion, which is pharaonic and probably intended largely for ideological propaganda. The stimulus package is planned for a minimum of five to twenty years, and regardless of what the reality will be, it cannot be unrelated to China's economic and imperialist hegemonic aims. The US stimulus package has reached $10,000 billion. In comparison the EU's recovery plan appears almost ridiculous, since it reportedly amounts to $1290 billion in the form of loans, financed partly by the financial markets and partly directly by the ECB. In reality, the money injected by the ECB into the entire economy, private and shadow banks and businesses, amounts to several billion euros. The states, especially Germany, will guarantee by mutualisation part of this plan which will be in the form of subsidies and loans repayable between 2028 and 2058! In reality the bourgeois class is admitting that much of the world’s debt will never be repaid. Which brings us to the aspects we are going to discuss now.

We cannot describe in the framework of this report all the monetary creations in progress in all their extent, nor to detail all the recovery plans. If all this seems beyond imagination, the fact remains that capitalism is using this astronomical money creation to invest and make its goods. From this point of view, central and private money creation must grow exponentially (in different forms) to allow accumulation as much as possible to be maintained and, as far as the present situation allows, to curb the plunge into depression. This depression contains within it the danger of deflation but above all of stagflation. The devaluation of currencies even beyond the current monetary war is inscribed in the perspective of the crisis of capitalism. The acceleration of the current crisis is a very significant step in this direction. The crux of the question is: in each country, more and more, global capital is mortgaging the future value to be produced and realised in order to allow current growth and continue accumulation. It is therefore largely thanks to this anticipation that capitalism manages to capitalise and invest. This process materialises the fact that, more and more, the colossal debt issued is less and less covered by the surplus value already produced and realised. This opens up the prospect of ever greater financial crashes and destruction of financial capital. Logically, this process implies that the internal market for capital cannot grow infinitely, even if there is no fixed limit in the matter. It is in this context that the crisis of overproduction at the current stage of its development poses a problem of profitability for capitalism. The bourgeoisie estimates that around 20% of the world’s productive forces are unused. The overproduction of means of production is particularly visible and affects Europe, the United States, India, Japan, etc.

This is important if we want to establish how state capitalism must absolutely strengthen itself in the face of the looming crisis, but also how the recovery plans contain very strong limits and contain growing perverse effects. And how “everyone for themselves”, in this context, is the product of decomposition, but also of the growing economic stalemate, a trend which capitalism cannot escape, but which is also historically a deadly dynamic. It will be important in this sense, in the period to come, to study and compare the history of the open crises of capitalism, in particular those of 1929, 1945, 1975, 1998, 2008.

National withdrawal

The situation that is opening up with the very deep acceleration of the current crisis brings back to the fore the role of states (and therefore of their central banks, because the myth of their  independence is over). It would be interesting to show what the economic policies, the role of states and Keynesianism were in concrete terms in the periods 1930 and 1945, then to show the difference with the way in which the bourgeoisie faced the situation in 2008. There are during all of this period differences of very great importance: for example there is the question of the  existence of markets and extra-capitalist zones, but also the extent of the world economy and the great imperialist and economic powers, plus the question of the blocs , etc. But in this crisis, the recovery plans have been made in the form of public deficit and state debt and not, as in the 1930s and 1940s, by tapping off most of the surplus value already realised and hoarded, to which was added a share of debt having nothing in common with that of today. The current stimulus packages will prove increasingly difficult to sustain in their financing, as the levels of debt they require and the growth they will generate will diverge. However, a number of questions are posed.

The lessons of the 1929 crisis led the bourgeoisie, despite and against its own "nature", to move towards greater cooperation in order to slow down as much as possible the development of its crisis either by Keynesian policies or by the orchestration of globalisation by states. Even if, in the current situation, there will indeed be a return to Keynesian-type policies, in the context of a growing trend towards everyone for themselves, their effectiveness, with regard to the means implemented, will not be comparable with past periods.

We must see in this regard the tendency to a greater weight, compared to the previous period, of isolated responses by the bourgeoisie at the national level. For example, the new tendency consisting of closing the borders to stop passenger transport from one continent to another, or to close national borders, as if the virus respected national isolation; all this is much more a reflection of helplessness and a state of mind than a scientifically-based decision to quarantine intended to ward off the virus. In what way is there more risk of catching the virus in an international train between Stuttgart and Paris rather than between Stuttgart and Hamburg in a national train? Closing national borders is of no help; it expresses the "limits" of the means of the bourgeoisie.

The repatriation of production to central countries is increasing: with the pandemic 208 European companies have decided to bring back production from China:

"According to a recent survey of 12 global industries, 10 of them - including the automotive, semiconductor and medical equipment industries - are already moving their supply chains, mainly out of China. Japan is offering $2 billion to companies to move their factories out of China and back to the Japanese archipelago.” [7] A president like Macron, who seems to be a proponent of multilateralism, has said that ’delegating’ food and medical supplies is ‘crazy’. His finance minister, Bruno Le Maire, calls for ‘economic patriotism’ so that the French consume national products”.[8]

In all countries local economic plans are favoured, preferably consuming local or national products. It is a withdrawal into oneself that tends to break the industrial, food and other production chains, designed on a global scale, and which have greatly reduced costs.

It can therefore be concluded that these centrifugal, ‘each-for-himself’ tendencies have reached a new level, while at the same time every country, the state and each national bank has pumped or promised to pump gigantic sums (unlimited in the case of Germany) into industry. None of these measures have been adopted and harmonised by the ECB or the IMF; it must be added that it was not only the populist Trump who acted as a champion of each for himself; Germany – with the agreement of the main parties – has acted in the same direction, as has Macron. Thus, whether populist or not, all governments have acted in the same direction; retrenching behind national borders, ‘each for himself’ - with only a minimum of international or European coordination.

The consequences of these actions seem counterproductive for every national capital and even worse for the world economy:

"Between 2007 and 2008, due to a fateful convergence of unfavourable factors - poor harvests, rising oil and fertilizer prices, a boom in biofuels, etc. - the world economy has been hit hardest by the crisis. - 33 countries limited their exports to protect their ‘alien sovereignty’. But the cure was worse than the disease. The restrictions increased the prices of rice (116%), wheat (40%) and maize (25%), according to World Bank estimates (...). The example of China, the first country affected by the epidemic, does not bode well: the threats to global supply chains have already led to a 15% and 22% increase in food in this Asian country since the beginning of the year".[9]

Counter tendencies to national withdrawal

The bourgeoisie is sure to react. At the EU level, Germany has finally agreed to “debt pooling”, which shows that counter-tendencies are at work in the face of this surge of decomposition. Perhaps the US bourgeoisie will sack Trump in the next elections in favour of the Democrats who are traditional supporters of "multilateralism".[10] In addition, "On April 22, the 164 member countries of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), which account for 63% of world agri-food exports, pledged not to intervene in their markets. At the same time, the agriculture ministers of 25 Latin American and Caribbean countries signed a binding agreement to guarantee supplies to 620 million people".[11]

With the "ecological transition" plan and the promotion of a "green economy", efforts to reorganise the economy - at least at an EU level - will be made: with the massive development of telecommunications, the application of robotics and IT, new and much lighter materials, biotechnology, drones, electric cars etc., traditional heavy industry based on fossil fuels is tending to become obsolete, including in the military field. Imposing "new standards" for economic organisation is becoming an asset for the central countries, especially Germany, the United States and China.

The bourgeoisie will fight step by step against this tide of national fragmentation of the economy. But it comes up against the increased force of its historical contradiction between the national nature of capital and the global nature of production. This tendency of each bourgeoisie to want to save its economy at the expense of others is an irrational tendency which would be disastrous for all countries and for the whole world economy, even if there will be differences between countries.  The tendency of each for themselves may be even irreversible and the irrationality which accompanies it puts into question the lessons drawn from the crisis of 1929 by the bourgeoisie.

As the 1919 Manifesto of the Communist International stated, "The end result of the capitalist mode of production is chaos". Capitalism has resisted this chaos in many ways during its decadence and has continued to resist during its phase of decomposition. Counter-tendencies will continue to emerge. However the situation that is opening up today is one of a significant aggravation of chaos, especially on the economic terrain, which is very dangerous from the historic point of view.

A nightmare for the proletariat of all countries, but especially in the central countries

The 23rd Congress Resolution on the international situation gave the following framework:

"Concerning the proletariat, these new convulsions can only result in even more serious attacks against its living and working conditions at all levels and in the whole world, in particular:

- by strengthening the exploitation of labour power by continuing to reduce wages and increase rates of exploitation and productivity in all sectors;

- by continuing to dismantle what remains of the welfare state (additional restrictions on the various benefit systems for the unemployed, social assistance and pension systems); and more generally by ‘softly’ abandoning the financing of all forms of assistance or social support from the voluntary or semi-public sector;

- the reduction by states of the costs represented by education and health in the production and maintenance of the proletariat's labour power (and thus significant attacks against the proletarians in these public sectors);

- the aggravation and further development of precariousness as a means of imposing and enforcing the development of mass unemployment in all parts of the class.

- attacks camouflaged behind financial operations, such as negative interest rates which erode small saving accounts and pension schemes. And although the official rates of inflation for consumer goods are low in many countries, speculative bubbles have contributed to a veritable explosion of the cost of housing.

- the increase in the cost of living notably of taxes and the price of goods of prime necessity.” (Point 23)

This framework has been strongly confirmed but the situation has also seriously aggravated with the outbreak of the pandemic. At the core of the economic situation is the attack on the conditions of the proletariat all over the world.

High-speed pauperisation.

In 2019, according to the UN, 135 million people were suffering from hunger; in April 2020, with the outbreak of the pandemic, the UN project that 265 million people will be in this situation. The World Bank stated in March that the poor population would reach 3.5 billion people with a sudden acceleration of more than 500,000 per month. Since then this pace appears to have continued, particularly in Central and South America, as well as in Asia including the Philippines, India and China. The impoverishment of workers will accelerate. According to the Report of the International Labor Organisation (ILO), "the pressure on incomes resulting from the decline in economic activity will have a devastating effect on workers who are near or below the poverty line". Between 8.8 and 35 million more workers will be in poverty worldwide, compared to the initial estimate for 2020 (which predicted a decrease of 14 million worldwide).

Mass unemployment.

In India and China, the number of proletarians being made unemployed is counted according to the IMF in the hundreds of thousands. Business Bourse speaks of several million workers having lost their jobs in China.  All these figures really need to be taken with great caution as they often vary from one news site to another. What is true here is the massive aspect of this phenomenon and its rapid extension due to the containment and shutdown of a large part of global activity. During the same period, mass unemployment has reached 35 million people in the United States and, despite the exceptional state aid, the queues at food distribution points are growing longer and longer, resembling images of the 1930s in the United States. The same phenomenon is taking place in Brazil, where the unemployed are no longer even officially registered. In France unemployment could rise to 7 million within a few months. The explosion of mass unemployment is taking the same pace in Italy and Spain. At the moment, plans for mass redundancies are starting to arrive, as in aviation and aircraft construction but also in the automobile industry, oil production etc. The list will grow longer and longer in the coming period.

Generalised precariousness.

In an initial assessment of the consequences of the pandemic, the ILO estimated that the pandemic would cause the permanent loss of 25 million jobs worldwide, while precariousness would increase sharply: "Under-employment is also expected to increase exponentially, as the economic consequences of the virus epidemic are reflected in reductions in working hours and wages. In developing countries, restrictions on the movement of people (e.g. service providers) and goods may this time cancel out the buffer effect that self-employment has had in these countries.”[12] In addition, in the informal economy tens of thousands of workers - who do not fit into any statistics and who do not qualify to receive financial support from the state – are out of work. For the moment it is too early to have an idea of the level of overall deterioration in living standards.

Attacks on all levels

Wage cuts, increased working hours, lower pensions and social benefits. It also appears, as in France, that the bourgeoisie is trying to extend real working time. But it is also lowering direct wages, in particular by means of new taxes, as a pretext. The European Union, for example, is seriously considering a Covid tax, a whole programme!

The debt is always more and more colossal, necessarily involving a quid pro quo: the intensification of austerity measures against workers. It is within this framework that we must examine the meaning of universal basic income as a means of containing social tensions and dealing a major blow to living conditions as a state-organised step towards universal impoverishment.

In the central countries and especially in Western Europe, the bourgeoisie will try to administer the attacks as judiciously as possible and to ensure they are applied in a "political" way, by provoking the greatest divisions within the proletariat. Although the bourgeoisie's margin of manoeuvre on this terrain will tend to shrink, we must not forget that:

“At the same time, the most developed countries, in northern Europe, the USA and Japan, are still very far from such a situation. One the one hand, because their national economies are better able to resist the crisis, but also, and above all, because today the proletariat of these countries, and especially in Europe, is not ready to accept such a level of attacks on its conditions. Thus one of the major components of the evolution of the crisis escapes from a strict economic determinism and moves onto the social level, to the rapport de forces between the two major classes in society, bourgeoisie and proletariat.” (20th Congress Resolution on the international situation)

 

Our previous issue of the International Review was entirely dedicated to the significance and implications of the outbreak of Corona Virus. We highlighted the historical relevance of this event, the most important since the collapse of the Eastern bloc in 1989, as well as its significance as a new stage in the downwards spiral of capitalism in the current phase of its decadence, that of decomposition. We also looked at the implications of the pandemic for the economic crisis – that a considerable acceleration of the economic crisis is leading to an even deeper recession than that of the 1930s – and its effect on the class struggle, creating increased difficulties for the working class because of the disruptive effects decomposition has on the daily life of society. This event makes it clear that the rhythm of development of the class struggle, compared to that of decomposition, is not currently at a sufficient level for a victorious revolution of the proletariat to take place where it would have to build a new society on the ruins of the existing society, which has been ravaged by more than a century of capitalist decadence.
The present issue of the Review continues our intervention on the pandemic from different angles and it includes some other articles.

A first article, “The Covid-19 pandemic reveals the dilapidated state of world capitalism”, highlights the very great difficulties for the bourgeoisie faced with the first wave of contagion from the virus, and shows that the new waves have left the bourgeoisie in a desperate state, unable to contain the pandemic and its social consequences. And its unpreparedness when the pandemic broke out is symptomatic of capitalism, especially in the final phase of decadence: no real anticipation of the acknowledged threat of pandemics before one of them – Covid-19 – broke out; the health care systems neglected because they are unprofitable from a capitalist point of view; and an exacerbation of every man for himself between national factions of the world bourgeoisie and inside national frontiers too... and all of this in the midst of the global trade war made worse by the crisis. The social balance sheet, attributable to capitalism and not to the pandemic, is that millions of workers have been thrown out of employment worldwide and that widespread poverty has spread and worsened dramatically. Confronted with the dangers of contagion and the reality of unemployment and being plunged into poverty, large sections of the world's population, large masses living in very precarious conditions, are descending into the depths of despair.

In this regard, alongside this article, we are publishing a historical testimony, “Health Conservation in Soviet Russia” on how the proletariat of Soviet Russia showed an ability to deal with the health problem in the years 1918 and 1919, in extremely difficult conditions when the country was under attack on its own territory from the international coalition of the bourgeoisie, in the form of the white armies, whose objective was to weaken and destroy the power of the proletariat.

As this presentation shows, the ICC has made an important theoretical effort to understand the historical significance of this pandemic, which cannot be reduced to a mere endless repetition of the laws of capitalism, but is both an expression of and an aggravating factor in the current phase of the decomposition of capitalism. The situation in the United States has vividly confirmed the weight of decomposition on the life of capitalism, and in particular with the episode at the Capitol Building when “a mob attempted to violently prevent the democratic succession, encouraged by the sitting president himself – as in a banana republic as George W Bush recognised.” Our article “The US and World Capitalism on the road to nowhere” shows how the current political crisis of US democracy, symbolised by the attack on Capitol Hill, comes on top of the chaotic and self-destructive consequences of US imperialist policy, and shows more clearly that the US, which is still the world's most powerful nation, is today playing the leading role in the development of the decomposition of capitalism.

Also in this presentation of the Review we can point to the fact that in order to increase and sustain the audience for our intervention, we produced a leaflet, “The COVID-19 Pandemic: Generalised Capitalist Barbarism or World Proletarian Revolution”, which was physically distributed on the few occasions presented to us and which we have also tried distribute as much as possible on the internet.

It is evident that the Covid-19 virus could have been transmitted from animal to man particularly because of certain characteristics of the decomposition of capitalism: excessive deforestation, uncontrolled urbanisation, man and animals living in close proximity, making the transmission of viruses more possible, and poor hygiene standards... Confronted with all the aberrations of capitalism in its final phase, we think it is fitting to publish an article which shows what would be the approach taken by the dictatorship of the proletariat: “The communist programme in the phase of decomposition of capitalism: Bordiga and the Big City”, an article built on the basis of our own reflections and those prompted by an article by Bordiga entitled “The immediate programme of the revolution”, written in 1953. As our article says, Bordiga's text “retains considerable interest from its attempt to understand what would be the main problems and priorities of a communist revolution that would take place, not at the dawn of the decadence of capitalism, as in 1917-23, but after a whole century in which the slide towards barbarism has continued to accelerate, and in which the threat to the very survival of humanity is far greater than it was a hundred years ago”. In relation to the current pandemic, the article shows the limits of all existing health services, even in the most powerful capitalist countries, not least because they do not escape the logic of competition between national capitalist states. Faced with such a situation, there is a need for medicine, health care and research that is not controlled by the state, but truly socialised, and not national, but extending “beyond borders”: in short, a global health service.

In this issue of the Review, we are continuing our series which was started on the occasion of the “100 years after the foundation of the Communist International in 1919”. The founding congress had been a real step forward for the unity of the world proletariat, nevertheless the method adopted at the time, privileging the majority viewpoint rather than the clarity of positions and political principles, did not arm the new world party. Worse still, it made it vulnerable to the opportunism rampant within the revolutionary movement. Contrary to what Lenin and the Bolsheviks had predicted, opportunism within the party deepened and, with the degeneration of the revolution, it ended up holding a dominant place, precipitating the end of the CI as a class party. This is illustrated in this third part of this series.

The last article published in this issue of the Review, “The difficult evolution of the proletarian political milieu since May 1968” is the continuation of a series of two, the first of which was published in International Review nº 163. It covered the period 1968-1980, which had seen the most important developments within the international proletarian milieu, following the events of 1968 in France. If the resurgence of the class struggle had given a significant impetus to the revival of the proletarian political movement, and thus to the regrouping of its forces, this dynamic had begun to face some difficulties from the beginning of the 1980s. Already at this time, the proletarian political milieu was going through a major crisis, marked by the failure of the International Conferences of the Communist Left, the splits within the ICC and the implosion of the Bordigist International Communist Party (Programme Communiste). The general failure of the class to politicise its struggles also meant that the very significant growth of the proletarian political milieu at the end of the 1960s and in the 1970s had begun to slow down or stagnate. In this second part, we highlight the negative impact on the evolution of the proletarian milieu of a number of factors, in particular the decomposition of society and the development of political parasitism.

The revolutionary minority, as part of the class, is not unaffected by the pressures of a disintegrating social system that clearly has no future and gives rise to a flight towards seeking individual solutions, a loss of confidence in collective activity and the mistrust of revolutionary organisations and despair about the future.

Moreover, in the early 2000s, the ICC had been faced with a serious internal crisis behind which was a clan comprising militants who slandered certain comrades and spread rumours that one member of the organisation was a state agent manipulating the others. This clan would give rise to a totally parasitic organisation, the “Internal Fraction of the ICC”, whose members were expelled from the ICC for behaviour unacceptable from communist militants, including the theft of the organisation's funds and the publication of sensitive internal information that could have put our militants at risk from the police.

Since then, this group, which subsequently changed its name to the International Group of the Communist Left, has provided new evidence showing it embodies a form of parasitism so despicable that it is impossible to distinguish its activities from those of the political police. Unfortunately, this situation has not produced an appropriate response from within the proletarian camp, one that expresses solidarity and the concern to exclude these practices (and those who engage in them), foreign to the workers' movement, from the proletarian camp.

The period 2004-2011 had seen the emergence of new forces seeking revolutionary answers to explain the impasse of the social order. The ICC reacted to these developments as broadly as was possible, which was absolutely necessary, as without passing on the legacy of the communist left to a new generation, there can be no hope of a movement towards the future party. But there were important weaknesses in our intervention at that time and, in particular, opportunist ones, illustrated in particular by the hasty integration of those comrades who were to form the Turkish section of the ICC in 2009 and would then leave the ICC in 2015. This example has provided a significant lesson from which the organisations of the communist left camp should be able to benefit in its future integrations, as should be the case with all the lessons of its experiences since the historic revival of May 1968.

Despite the very concrete dangers of this final phase of capitalist decadence, we don't think that the working class has said its last word or made its last response. A number of factors currently testify to a process of communist politicisation within a small but significant minority which is turning towards the positions of the communist left.

14 02 2021

 

ICC Introduction

We publish below an article relating to the evolution of the health situation in Soviet Russia in July 1919, one year after the establishment of the Public Hygiene Commissariat. It was in a very unfavourable context that this health policy was then implemented since, after the seizure of power by the proletariat in October 1917, Russia had suffered the counter-revolutionary activities on its territory supported by the Entente governments. Thus, at the beginning of 1919, Russia was completely isolated from the rest of the world and confronted with the activities of both the white armies and the troops of the "western democracies". Despite all this, in the most difficult material conditions that it is possible to imagine, the method implemented by the proletariat - our method, in every way opposed to that of the bourgeoisie today confronted with the coronavirus pandemic - achieved results which, at the time, were a considerable step forward. If it seems appropriate to us to underline how the two methods are opposed, - that of the proletariat and of the bourgeoisie - it is not only to highlight the incapacity of the bourgeoisie to bring humanity out of the barbarism into which it plunges the world. It is also to defend the honour and the achievements of the revolutionary working class when it set out to conquer the world during the first world revolutionary wave, when since its defeat, the lies of the Stalinist and democratic bourgeoisie have never ceased, each in their own way, to soil and distort its objectives.

Certainly, there are concepts and formulations appearing in the article which we don’t share today: for example, the idea of nationalisation as a step towards socialism or even the claim that capitalist exploitation had already been abolished in Russia, as well as some of the “medical” language (“abnormal” or “retarded” children etc). The measures taken by the Soviet power in this period were essentially of an emergency character and they could not on their own escape the pressures of a still dominant capitalist world system. But despite this the determination of the new Soviet power to centralise, repair and rapidly improve health services, to take them out of the hands of the exploiters and make them freely available to the entire population, flowed from a fundamentally proletarian method which remains valid today and for the future. 

I. General working conditions of the Public Hygiene Commissariat

The Public Hygiene Commissariat, created by the decree of the Council of People's Commissars on 21 July 1918, drew up a balance sheet of its annual work in July 1919.

The unfavourable external conditions in which the work of the People's Commissariats is accomplished has had visible repercussions on the most sensitive apparatus intended to protect what is dearest to man: his life and his health. The heavy legacy bequeathed to us by the capitalist regime and the imperialist war, while hampering the work of soviet creation, has weighed very heavily on the medical and health organisation. The difficulties encountered in supply, economic disorganisation, the blockade of Soviet Russia by the imperialists, the civil war - all these have painfully thwarted measures taken to prevent and cure diseases. It is difficult to implement preventive health measures when insufficient food weakens the human organism and predisposes it to diseases, when the population lacks the things most essential to the accomplishment of the elementary proscriptions of hygiene; or to organise a rational medical treatment, when, thanks to the blockade maintained by the "allies", we are deprived of the most essential drugs, and the difficulties in the food supply do not allow us to organise dietetic treatment.

And nevertheless, the state of health of Soviet Russia is at this moment just as good and even much better than that of those bordering territories under the yoke of White Guard "supreme governors", countries abundantly supplied and largely provided with products of all kinds, in drugs and medical personnel. This summer, Soviet Russia had almost no cases of cholera; while in Denikin's satrapy, cholera, comparable to a large torrent, wreaked havoc. Soviet Russia this summer almost completely came to an end of the typhus epidemic. In Siberia, in the Urals, in the territories we liberated from Kolchak, the typhus is raging; almost all prisoners of Kolchak's army are infected with epidemic diseases. We easily endured the Spanish flu epidemic, much more easily even than Western Europe; the cholera epidemic of the past year was relatively short, and only the typhus epidemic last winter assumed a fairly serious character. The reasons why we have fought with some success - in spite of difficult conditions, against epidemics and diseases, those inevitable by-products of imperialist slaughter - consist in the new methods applied by the Soviet power.

Epidemics, at all times and in all places, wreak their devastation above all among the poor, among the labouring classes. The Soviet power is the power of the workers. By defending the interests of the underprivileged class, it at the same time protects the health of the people. The abolition of capitalist exploitation made it possible to establish regulations for occupational health protection: it made it possible to use the most effective measures for the protection of motherhood and childhood; the abolition of movable and landed property made it possible to fairly resolve the question of housing: the monopoly of bread resulted in allowing the distribution of the reserves available first of all to the working classes; the nationalisation of pharmacies made it possible to distribute fairly and economically the meagre reserves of drugs, snatching them from the hands of speculators, etc ... It can be said that no other provider in the present difficult circumstances could have overcome the immeasurable and apparently invincible obstacles which existed in the field of public health protection. However, there is one more circumstance which facilitated our work in these conditions: it is the concentration of all the medical services in the hands of a single duly authorised body: the Public Hygiene Commissariat. A single body had been created which led the struggle according to a unified plan with the greatest economy of force and means. This organ replaced the disorderly and fragmented work of the various institutions, the ill-combined actions of the various organs which dealt with the health of the people. Science and medical practice have long demonstrated the need for such centralisation of work in a single competent body. This subject was especially hotly debated before the war in Russian and international specialist works. Thus, the French doctor Mirman wrote in 1913 in Hygiene:

“Very often it happens that a prefect is interested in public health and wants to help. Wishing to gain the support of the government, he had to visit all the ministries in Paris and meet with all the heads of service of a dozen administrations. It takes great perseverance not to give up the journey, not to throw the handle after the axe, so much does one end up being made desperate by all these formalities. This mainly concerns the fight against social diseases, tuberculosis and alcoholism, for example. Let us see in which ministerial department the fight against tuberculosis can be prepared, started and organised. It currently depends on: the Ministry of Labour (low-cost housing, mutual insurance, hygiene of workshops and shops), the Ministry of Agriculture (food hygiene and milk analysis), the Ministry of the Interior (sanitary requirements for municipalities and disinfection), the Ministry of Public Education (medical inspection of schools). When the government is questioned on the measures it intends to undertake for the defence of the race against its most bitter enemy, four ministers will have to take part in the debates (not counting the army, the navy and the colonies); in short, as a result of the distribution of public health services between different ministries and administrations, there is no one among the members of the government who is directly responsible for hygiene and public health. The organisation of a Ministry of Public Health will bring order to this chaos and create a system instead of the current arbitrariness.”

This centralisation of medical work was carried out in Russia by the decree of the Soviet government of 21 July 1918. This created "the Commissariat of Public Hygiene" endowed with all the rights of an independent ministry and comprising the following sections: Sanitary-Epidemiological Section, Medical Treatment Section, Pharmaceutical Section, Medical and General Supplies Section, Social Disease Control Section (Venereal Diseases, Prostitution and Tuberculosis), Child Protection Section (school health inspection, special care for abnormal children, organisation of physical culture, etc ...), Section of military health services and communication routes, etc ...

The practical administration of all medical and health work is in the hands of the workers’ organisations of the Soviets of Workers' Deputies and Red Army Deputies. All the fundamental health measures are carried out with the energetic assistance of the workers' organisations (let us recall, for example, the work known to the Commissariat, work which has rendered the most invaluable services in the liquidation of cholera and typhus).

These are the fundamental causes, creating new conditions in health and medicine work and which, despite the particularly difficult external conditions, facilitate the work. In the next chapter, we will give a brief overview of the work of the Commissariat. Here, we will compare, as a concrete example, the medical and health organisation of the city of Moscow before the October revolution with this same organisation in its current state, after two years of existence of the Soviet power.

Number of hospital beds (exclusively for civil population). Before the October revolution: Around 8,000. Current: Around 22,000
Medical beds before: around 100,000. Current: around 150,000;
Ambulances before: around 15,000. Current: around 46,000;
Sanitary doctors before: around 20,000. Current around 34,000;
Assistants to these doctors before: none. Current 50,000;
Food inspector doctors before: around 10,000. Current 29,000;
School sanitary doctors before: around 31,000. Current 37,000. Etc.

To this must be added the new medical and health organisations created by the Soviet power for the use of the poorest population; free home assistance (this question was on the agenda for 10 years and before October 1917 it was still under discussion). Currently, 80 doctors and nearly 160 nurses are engaged in this assistance and are distributed across the various districts of the city; it is also necessary to cite first aid stations for urgent cases, and for this purpose permanent medical services and medical vehicles have been established. Let us also mention the recent struggle against tuberculosis and syphilis, as social diseases; an important action, intended to popularise health knowledge; free and widely organised assistance for dental treatment (10 ambulances with 25 chairs); making psychiatric assistance available to the population (treatment by means of rays); the management of nationalised pharmacies, as well as the good distribution of their products, etc ...

And this enumeration of examples does not yet exhaust all that was newly created by the Soviet power in Moscow in the field of public health during its two-year existence. What has just been mentioned relates to the quantity. As for the quality, it has been equalised by the fact that the use which divided medicine into two classes has been eliminated: that known as “first order” for the rich and “third order” for the poor. The best specialists in Moscow now receive patients in city hospitals; and it can be said that there is not a great specialist - doctor or professor - who any inhabitant of the Soviet capital cannot turn to for free advice.

This medical aid is organised on a similar basis, but naturally on a different scale, in all the other towns. This is how the Soviet power was able to organise medico-sanitary work during the past two years, in the midst of essentially unfavourable conditions.

II. A year of work

The development of the work of the Public Hygiene Commissariat, its organising work and the fight against the epidemics which followed one after the other, were simultaneous. Last summer, a wave of the Spanish flu swept through Russia. Commissions were sent to various places to study this still little-known disease, as well as to combat it effectively; a whole series of scientific conferences were organised and surveys were carried out on the spot. As a result of these studies, it was possible to establish the relationship of the Spanish flu to influenza (flu); special works were published dealing with this disease in a scientific and popular form.

The Spanish flu epidemic passed very quickly and relatively well. Much longer and much more difficult was the fight against the typhus epidemic which spread widely, especially during the winter of 1918-1919. Suffice it to say that before the summer of 1919 nearly a million and a half people were affected by this disease. This epidemic having been foreseen, the Public Hygiene Commissariat was not caught unawares. As early as the autumn of 1918, a series of consultations with representatives of local sections and with specialist bacteriologists took place; the plan of the struggle was sketched out, which made it possible to send precise instructions to the provinces. A decree on measures to be taken in the fight against typhus was submitted for ratification by the Council of People's Commissars. Scientific meetings were organised at the same time as experiments were attempted with the application of a serum to prevent and treat typhus. Numerous scientific pamphlets, popular books, and typhus literature were published. The cholera epidemic which had spread noticeably in the summer and autumn of 1918 and which was expected in 1919 did not spread widely that year, in spite of the direct danger of contamination which came to us from the troops of Denikin where cholera was raging. As a preventive measure drinking water was purified (chlorination), at the same time as cholera vaccinations were carried out on a larger scale. Finally, a decree on compulsory vaccination was promulgated and confirmed by the Council of People's Commissars[1] on 10 April 1919, thus filling a major gap in our health legislation. The purpose of this decree was to prevent an epidemic of smallpox which threatened to develop in 1918-1919; to implement this decree, instructions were drawn up for local institutions, regulations on maintenance, stables for the rearing of young calves intended for the preparation of the vaccine. Nearly 5.5 millions were assigned to carry out this decree and nearly 5 million vaccines were distributed against smallpox.

It was materially impossible in our republic, isolated from Europe, to obtain medical vaccines and serums. The Commissariat of Public Hygiene promptly nationalised all the important bacteriological institutes, as well as the stables where the calves intended for the preparation of the vaccine were raised; special stables were created (especially in the Saratov region): they were provided with everything necessary, their work was extended; the supply of these institutions with the necessary material was centralised and organised so that, during epidemics, the country did not lack either serum or vaccine.

It should above all be emphasised that the whole practical fight against epidemics was carried out on new principles, namely, on the principles of the direct participation of the whole population and above all, of the working masses and peasants. Even the correspondents of the bourgeois newspapers staying in Russia had to admit that the Soviet power was fighting against epidemics in a completely new way, by mobilising the whole population for it. Irreplaceable and inestimable services were rendered during the fight against epidemics by the commissions, known as "Workers' Commissions", made up of representatives of unions, factory and factory committees and other proletarian and peasant organisations. The Workers' Commissions, assigned to the sections of the Public Hygiene Commissariat, actively watched over the maintenance of cleanliness, took energetic measures for the organisation of steam baths and laundry rooms for the use of the population, facilitated the possibility of get boiling water during the cholera epidemic, and worked on health propaganda.

The Commissariat of Public Hygiene, in order to lend financial support to its collaborators on the spot, assigned 292 million roubles to the local Executive Committees for the fight against epidemics from 1 October 1918 to 1 October 1919.

In order to prevent the development of diseases and epidemics, the Commissariat took care of the sanitary monitoring of water, air and soil; it devised and applied measures accordingly, dealt with questions of food hygiene, etc. The care concerning the accommodation intended for the working population was of particular importance here. The Commissariat of Public Hygiene had the Council of People's Commissars ratify the decree on the sanitary inspection of dwellings, prepared inspections and regulations relating to housing, and organised courses for the preparation of housing inspectors.

All the anti-epidemic and sanitary work was carried out in parallel with the most energetic sanitary propaganda within the popular masses; pamphlets were published in Moscow and in the provinces; museums of social hygiene and exhibitions on health conservation were organised. A scientific institute of public hygiene is being prepared and will be opened very soon. Scientific questions of hygiene and the fight against contagious diseases will be studied in this institute.

In the field of medical treatment, the Commissariat took care last year to centralise all the medical institutions, separated up until then in the various ministries and departments. In spite of all the unfavourable conditions for the development of this kind of treatment, it was organised according to a uniform system, and in several places not only did not suffer from this, but on the contrary, improved and expanded; much was done, in particular, to obtain free and accessible medical treatment.

The fight against venereal diseases and tuberculosis was the object of particular attention by the Public Hygiene Commissariat: it created special bodies in the provinces, provided ambulances or hospitals for the sick, intensified the production of special preparations for the treatment of syphilis (more than 60 kilograms of 606 were used), increased the number of sanatoria in the centre as well as in the provinces to fight tuberculosis, organised ambulances  and dispensaries in several places and paid special attention to infantile tuberculosis. But the main point was the undertaking on a large scale of the work of health propaganda, which made it possible to establish a living link with the workers' organisations, which is of very great importance in the fight against social diseases. Denikin cut us off from the main spa towns in the South; all the other spa towns, Lipez, Staraïa-Roussa, Elton, Sergievsk, etc., were widely used by workers. Where previously the bourgeoisie treated themselves for obesity and the consequences of debauchery, where they burned their candles at both ends - the workers and peasants of Soviet Russia now find refuge and relief.

We know that Russia received all its medicines from abroad (especially from Germany). We had almost no pharmaceutical industry. It is easy to understand the catastrophic situation Soviet Russia was put in by the imperialist blockade. The Commissariat of Public Hygiene promptly nationalised the pharmaceutical industry and trade and, thanks to this measure, saved the pharmaceutical supplies from plunder and speculation. In collaboration with the Superior Council of the National Economy, new factories were quickly organised, where the production of drugs was intensified. The remedies were requisitioned by tens and hundreds of kilograms from speculators. Over a period of 10 months (September 1918-June 1919) the central depot of the Commissariat of Public Hygiene sent to the provinces, just for the civilian population, 24.5 million medicines, 9 million dressings, 1.5 million surgical instruments, almost 1 million of all kinds of equipment for the treatment of patients, 1.5 million vaccines and serums, 300,000 roubles of Rœntgen devices, etc. And each month the delivery of supplies increases.

The military medical service in this war, unlike the others, was organised on a new basis. The State power having adopted as a principle the creation of a medical service organised on a uniform plan, logically included the military health service in the general organisation of the Commissariat of Public Hygiene, by withdrawing military health services from the immediate and exclusive jurisdiction of the organs of the military administration, as it had been until then. By such an organisation, a uniform direction of all the medico-sanitary work of the Republic is ensured by the Commissariat of Public Hygiene. A united health front is being created in the country, which is essential above all for the systematic accomplishment of anti-epidemic measures.

Such a structure made it possible to save the army from the ravages of epidemic diseases that reigned in the country (famine typhus, abdominal typhus, recurrent typhus, smallpox, dysentery, cholera and other diseases), despite the extremely difficult general conditions of the transitional period we are going through. There were in the army 20 to 30 cases of cholera; cases of famine typhus reached, before the autumn, a maximum of 4 to 5% in the entire army; cases of dysentery 0.01%; recurrent typhus nearly 0.5%. The military health service was in a position to prepare a large number of sick beds, well provided materially, the proportion[2] of which in relation to the strength of the Red Army is 1 to 7. All evacuation points with more than 2,000 sick beds have hospitals or sections for different kinds of special assistance. The principle of using doctors according to their specialty is being realised day by day.

All evacuation points are equipped with chemico-bacteriological laboratories. Almost all have a cabinet for Rœntgen radiation treatment.

General sanitary and hygienic measures are applied on a regular basis.

The vaccination campaign against cholera and typhus equalled, in percentage terms, the results of the 1914-1917 campaign.

For the treatment of soldiers with venereal diseases, there are 11 special hospitals with 4,630 places; further, in 49 hospitals, sections for these patients are installed; ambulatory treatment was created for venereal patients and the First Ambulatory model of the Military Department for the treatment of skin and venereal diseases was opened. In order to fight against the spread of venereal diseases, an active campaign is being carried out, by means of light projections, to make known the nature and the dangers of these diseases.

For the first time, dental assistance is widely organised in the army. In the military districts 68 ambulances for dental treatment were opened and 62 on the front. In addition, special workshops were created for the preparation of dentures. The centralisation of all the medico-sanitary work in a single special and autonomous commissariat made it possible to rationally organise medical treatment and sanitary work during the year without causing any damage to the interests of the civilian population. This principle was so widely realised that, even during the mobilisation of medical personnel, the interests of the civilian population were carefully protected, and essential medical workers were exempted from military service. Nearly 25% of the doctors were thus released in cases where they were recognised as essential.

The number of doctors mobilised and sent to the front provides one doctor for 300 or 400 soldiers of the Red Army.

The work of health propaganda is the object of particular attention. In all the organs of military health administration, sections or persons responsible for the health education of the corps of troops have been introduced. A large quantity of health propaganda literature is distributed, courses, popular conferences are organised, as well as mobile and permanent health and hygiene exhibitions. The preparation of junior and secondary medical personnel, primarily Sisters of Charity and Red Nurses, is being carried out on a large scale.

Nowhere is the preservation of children's health more prominent than in Soviet Russia. Not only doctors but the entire population are invited to join this work. A Council for the Conservation of Children's Health was created in November 1917. It was made up of doctors from the Public Hygiene Commissariat and representatives of proletarian organisations (trade unions, factory committees), the Communist Youth Union and representatives of the working masses.

The interest in preserving the health of children was greatly strengthened among doctors and educators thanks to the two All-Russian Congresses of School Sanitary Hygiene (in March and August). Everywhere - not only in the centre, but also in the provincial towns - sub-sections for the conservation of children’s health were opened, sub-sections attached to the public health sections of governments and to most district sections.

The work of preserving children’s health is divided into three main branches: 1. sanitary inspection in all children's institutions, schools, day-care centres, nursery schools, nurseries, etc.; 2. physical culture; 3. classification of children according to the state of their health and their distribution among medico-educational institutions (forestry schools and auxiliary schools, colonies for morally defective children, etc.).

In order that all the tasks concerning the preservation of children’s health, tasks which the Soviet Republic has set itself, are accomplished according to a definite plan, twelve model medico-educational institutions were organised in the center, close to the Section, to inform the provinces of scientific and practical developments of issues and measures in the conservation of children’s health. In October 1918, a physical education institute with experimental schools (urban and suburban) was opened for physically and morally healthy children. This institute is a laboratory for children's work and physical exercises (sports and gymnastics) and at the same time an instructor of socialist workers' education for the younger generations. All experiments on schoolchildren are carried out at this institute where work processes are practically developed in the unique school of work of Soviet Russia. Courses for physical education instructors are also given there.

Children's (school) ambulances are bodies for investigating children as well as treatment bodies. These ambulances classify children whose condition requires treatment or relief from the education programme: a) sick children are placed in hospitals and sanatorium schools; b) weak and tuberculous children are directed to open-air schools (forestry schools, steppe schools); c) another part is sent to auxiliary schools and to medico-educational colonies. Where there are sufficient resources, dental treatment is given in special children's ambulances. In a special ambulance, children with tuberculosis are examined by a group of doctors (tuberculosis control group). Dispensaries: we study the family life of the proletarian child at the same time as we give them the care they need; food (refectory clubs are installed for this purpose), clothes, shoes, medicines, cod liver oil, etc.

The Section for the Conservation of Childhood Health takes as an unchanging principle of its action that no child who has fallen ill should remain without receiving an educational direction in a corresponding medico-educational institution. All the institutions intended to fight against defects, physical (deafness, blindness), intellectual and moral, are united around a general centre - the Institute for weak and retarded children. This institute has an experimental observation section and five other institutions, namely: an auxiliary school for minor intellectual defects, a school-hospital for profound intellectual defects, a school-sanatorium for psychiatrically ill and neurotic children, a medical and educational colony, and a deaf-mute institute. In these institutions, doctors and specialist teachers educate future teachers about the education of abnormal children.

For the first time in the whole world, and only in Soviet Russia, it was decreed from the beginning of 1918 that children under the age of 18 who had broken the law could not be recognised as criminals, although they may be socially dangerous or even harmful to society. These children are the tragic victims of the abnormal conditions of the past, of bourgeois society, and simply need re-education. The offenses of these juvenile delinquents cannot be judged by ordinary judges and must be submitted - exclusively - to the Commission for juvenile delinquents, with the obligatory participation of a psychiatrist and a teacher, having the same rights as justice representatives. Such Commissions with a staff of home educator-inspectors are now being created everywhere, both in government towns and in district towns. Distribution and evacuation points are placed near these Commissions. Child delinquents are, from these points, returned to their parents or sent to medical and educational colonies. In general, like all other medico-educational institutions, establishments for debilitated and retarded children are opened in government towns and in district towns.

Currently there are in many government cities: infant ambulances (schools), auxiliary schools and colonies for morally defective children. Forest schools and sanatorium schools are found more rarely. The infant (school) ambulance is the most common type of medico-educational institution in district towns.

How can we achieve the preservation of children's health in the food crisis that Russia is going through at the moment? The Child Health Conservation Section attached to the Public Hygiene Commissariat paid the most serious attention to the solution of this question from the outset. At the beginning of 1918, the first convoy of children from Petrograd was sent by this section to the colonies. The Section started from the principle that in urban conditions it was necessary above all to ensure food for the child and then to place them in hygienic conditions. Three Commissariats were called on to collaborate in this great task by the Soviet power. They are: the Commissariat of Public Instruction, the Commissariat of Supply and the Commissariat of Public Hygiene (organisation of dietary canteens for sick children and those recovering from serious illnesses). The Council of People's Commissars instituted free food for infants by its decree of 17 May 1919. Free food for children under 10 is in force in the two capitals and in the industrial districts of non-producer governments. This decree gave birth to the socialist distribution of products among children. But without waiting for this decree, the Section for the Conservation of Child Health had received 50,000,000 roubles in 1919 for free feeding of children.

In November 1918 the Section obtained for this purpose the levying of a special tax.

If we take a look back at what had been done before the revolution in Russia for the conservation of children’s health, we can say that it all boiled down to nothing or almost nothing. The state budget did not even have a special paragraph. After the revolution, the young socialist country set about organising this new action with energy. Over the course of two years, in the centre as well as in the provinces, the need for the most careful preservation of children's health was recognised. This result was achieved despite the difficult conditions created by economic disorganisation. Children’s health should be the work of the workers themselves - this is the principle of Soviet Russia, and it is no less dear to the workers than to the peasants. The Workers’ and Peasants State’ takes the preservation of the health of children to the highest degree, realising fully that the young communists are the pledge of the future Socialist Russia - and that only a generation healthy in body and mind can preserve the conquests of the Great Socialist Revolution of Russia and bring the country to a complete realisation of the communist regime.

We are publishing this international statement of the ICC on the current Covid-19 crisis in the form of a "digital leaflet" because under the conditions of the lock-down it is clearly not possible to distribute a printed version in large numbers. We are asking all our readers to use all the means at their disposal to disseminate this text - social media, internet forums, and so on - and to write to us with information about any of the reactions and discussions that this provokes, and of course with their own views on the article. It is more than ever necessary for all who fight for the proletarian revolution to express their solidarity with each other and maintain their connections. While we have to isolate ourselves physically for the time being, we can still come together politically!

Thousands are dying every day, the hospitals are on their knees, there is a horrible “triage” between the young and the old among the sick, health workers are exhausted, infected, and some are dying. Everywhere a lack of medical equipment. Governments involved in a terrible competition in the name of the “war against the virus” and the “national economic interest”. Financial markets in free fall, surreal heists in which states are robbing each other of deliveries of masks. Tens of millions of workers thrown into the hell of unemployment, a torrent of lies from the state and its media…this is the awful spectacle offered by the world of today. This pandemic represents one of the most serious health catastrophes since the Spanish flu of 1918-19, even though, since that time, science has made extraordinary steps forward. Why such a disaster? How did it come to this?

We are told that this virus is different, that it’s much more contagious than the others, that its effects are much more pernicious and deadly. All that is probably true but it doesn’t explain the scale of the catastrophe.  The underlying responsibility for this planet-wide chaos, for the hundreds of thousands of deaths, lies with capitalism itself. Production for profit and not for human need, the permanent search for cost effectiveness at the price of ferocious exploitation of the working class, the increasingly violent attacks on the living conditions of the exploited, the frenzied competition between companies and states – it is these basic characteristics of the capitalist system which have come together to culminate in the present disaster.

The criminal negligence of capitalism

Those who run this society, the bourgeois class with its states and its media, tell us with a concerned air that this epidemic could not have been predicted. This is a lie on the same level as those put forward by the climate change deniers. Scientists have been warning about the threat of pandemics like Covid-19 for a long time now. But governments have refused to listen to them. They even refused to listen to a report by the CIA in 2009 (“What will tomorrow’s world be like?”) which describes with startling accuracy the characteristics of the present pandemic. Why such blindness on the part of the states and the bourgeois class they serve? For a very simple reason: investments have to produce profits, and as quickly as possible. Investing in the future of humanity doesn’t pay, and just depresses share prices. Investments also have to reinforce the positions of each national bourgeoisie against others on the imperialist arena. If the crazy sums which are invested into military research and spending had been devoted to the health and well-being of the populations, such an epidemic would never have been able to develop. But instead of taking measures against this predictable health disaster, governments have not stopped attacking health systems, both at the level of research and of technical and human resources.

If people are dying like flies today, at the very heart of the most developed countries, it is in the first place because everywhere governments have cut budgets destined for research into new diseases. Thus in May 2018 Donald Trump got rid of a special unit of the National Security Council, composed of eminent experts and created to fight against pandemics. But Trump’s attitude is only a caricature of what all the leaders have been doing. Thus, scientific research into the coronavirus were abandoned everywhere 15 years ago because of the development of a vaccine was judged not to be “cost effective”!

Similarly, It is totally disgusting to see the bourgeois leaders and politicians, on the right and the left, weeping over the saturation of the hospitals and the catastrophic conditions in which health workers are forced to work, when the bourgeois states have been methodically imposing the norms of profit  over the last 50 years, and particularly since the great recession of 2008. Everywhere they have been limiting access to health services, reducing the number of hospital beds, and intensifying the work load of health workers. And what are we to make of the generalised scarcity of masks and other protective garments, disinfectant gel, testing equipment, etc? Over the last few years, most states have got rid of stocks of these vital items in order to save money. In the last few months, they have not been anticipating the rapid spread of Covid-19, even though, since November 2019, some of them have been claiming that masks are of no use to non-carers – in order to hide their criminal irresponsibility.

And what about chronically deprived regions of the world like the continents of Africa or Latin America? In Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, 10 million inhabitants can count on 50 ventilators! In Central Africa, leaflets were given out giving advice on how to wash your hands when the population doesn’t have enough water to drink! Everywhere the same cry of distress: “we lack everything in the face of this pandemic!”

Capitalism is the war of each against all

The fierce rivalry between each state in the world arena is blocking the minimum cooperation to contain the virus. When it first got going, the Chinese bourgeoisie judged it more important to do all it could to hide the gravity of the situation, in order to protect its economy and its reputation. The state didn’t hesitate to persecute the doctor who tried to sound the alarm, and left him to die. Even the semblance of international regulation which the bourgeoisie has set up to deal with the lack of equipment has fallen apart: the World Health Organisation has been unable to impose its directives while the European Union has been incapable of introducing concerted measures. This division is considerably aggravating the chaos and the loss of control over the evolution of the pandemic. The dynamic of “every man for himself|” and the exacerbation of generalised competition have become the dominant feature of the reactions of the ruling class.

The “war of the masks”, as the media call it, is an edifying example of this. Each state is grabbing the material it can through speculation, bidding wars, and even out-and-out theft. The US has been nabbing planeloads of Chinese masks promised to France. France has confiscated cargoes of masks heading by air for Sweden. The Czech Republic has seized at its customs barriers ventilators and masks destined for Italy. Germany has made masks heading for Canada disappear. This is the true face of the “great democracies”: thieves and gangsters of the worst kind!

Unprecedented attacks on the exploited

For the bourgeoisie “profits are worth more than our lives” as striking car workers shouted in Italy. In all countries, it delayed as long as possible putting in place measures of confinement to protect the population in order to keep national production going at any cost. It was not the threat of a sharply rising death toll which in the end led to the lock-downs. The many imperialist massacres that have been going on for over a century, fought in the name of the national interest, have definitively proved the contempt that the ruling class has for the lives of the exploited. No, our rulers don’t care about our lives! Especially when the virus has the “advantage”, as far as the bourgeoisie is concerned, of mowing down the sick and the elderly, those it sees as “unproductive”. Letting the virus spread and do its “natural” work in the name of “herd immunity” was actually the initial choice of Boris Johnson and other leaders. In each country, what tipped the scales in favour of the lock-downs was the fear of the disorganisation of the economy and, in certain countries, the threat of social disorder, the mounting anger in response to the negligence and the rising death tolls. What’s more, even if they involve half of humanity, the social isolation measures are in many cases a total farce: millions of people have been obliged to crowd together every day on trains, tubes and buses, in the factories and supermarkets. And already the bourgeoisie is looking to end the lock-downs as quickly as possible, at the very time when the pandemic is hitting hardest, trying to find ways to provoke the least discontent by sending workers back to work sector by sector, firm by firm.

The bourgeoisie is perpetuating and planning new attacks, even more brutal conditions of exploitation. The pandemic has already thrown millions of workers into unemployment: ten million in three weeks in the US. Many of them, who have irregular, precarious or temporary jobs, will be deprived of any income. Others, who have some meagre social benefits to live on, are faced with no longer being able to pay rent and the costs of medical care. The economic ravages have started to accelerate the world recession which was already looming: explosion in the food prices, massive lay-offs, wage cuts, growing job insecurity etc. All states are adopting measures of “flexibility” by calling for sacrifices in the name of “national unity in the war against the virus”.

The national interest that the bourgeoisie is invoking today is not our interest. It’s this same defence of the national economy and this same generalised competition which has, in the past, led it to carry out budget cuts and attacks against the living conditions of the exploited. Tomorrow, it will serve up the same lies when, following the economic devastation caused by the pandemic, it will call on the exploited to pull their belts in further, to accept even more poverty and exploitation. This pandemic is an expression of the decadent character of the capitalist mode of production, of the many expressions of the rotting of present day society, along with the destruction of the environment, pollution and climate change, the proliferation of imperialist wars and massacres, the inexorable descent into poverty of a growing portion of humanity, the number of people obliged to become migrants or refugees, the rise of populist ideology and religious fanaticism, etc (see our text “Theses on the decomposition of capitalism” on our internet site: https://en.internationalism.org/ir/107_decomposition [12]) It’s an indicator of the dead-end that capitalism has reached, showing the direction in which this system is leading humanity: towards chaos, misery, barbarism, destruction and death.

Only the proletariat can change the world

Certain governments and media argue that the world will never be the same as it was before this pandemic, that the lessons of the disaster will be drawn, that in the end states will move towards a more humane and better managed form of capitalism. We heard the same refrain after the 2008 recession: with hand on their hearts, the states and leaders of the world declared “war on rogue finance”, promising that the sacrifices demanded to get out of the crisis would be rewarded. You only have to look at the growing inequality in the world to recognise that these promises to “reform” capitalism were just lies to make us swallow a new deterioration in our living conditions.

The exploiting class cannot change the world and put human lives and social needs above the pitiless laws of its economy: capitalism is a system of exploitation, in which a ruling minority draws its profits and its privileges from the work of the majority. The key to the future, the promise of another world, a truly human world without nations or exploitation, lies solely in the international unity and solidarity of the workers in struggle!

The wave of spontaneous solidarity within our class in response to the intolerable situation inflicted on the health workers is being derailed by the governments and politicians of the whole world into the campaign of applause on doorsteps and balconies. Of course this applause will warm the hearts of the workers who, with courage and dedication, in dramatic working conditions, are looking after the sick and saving lives. But the solidarity of our class, of the exploited, can’t be reduced to a five minute round of applause. It means, in the first place, denouncing the governments of all countries, no matter their political colouring. It means demanding masks and all the necessary protective equipment. It means, when it’s possible, going on strike and affirming that, as long as health workers don’t have the material they need, as long as they are being hurled towards their deaths with uncovered faces, the exploited who are not in the hospitals will not work.

Today, while the lock-down lasts, we can’t wage massive struggles against this murderous system. We can’t gather together to express our anger and our solidarity through massive struggles, through strikes and demonstrations. Because of the lock-down, but not only that. Also because our class has to recover its real source of strength, which it has shown so many times in history but which it has since forgotten: the potential for uniting in struggle, for developing massive movements against the ruling class and its monstrous system.

The strikes that broke out in the automobile sector in Italy or in supermarkets in France, in front of New York hospitals or those in the north of France, the enormous indignation of workers refusing to serve as "virus fodder", herded together without masks, gloves or soap, for the sole benefit of their exploiters, can today only be scattered reactions and cut off from the strength of an entire united class. Nonetheless, they show that the workers are not prepared to accept, like some kind of inevitability, the criminal irresponsibility of those who exploit us.

It’s this perspective of class battles that we have to prepare for. Because after Covid-19 there will be the world economic crisis, massive unemployment, new “reforms” which are nothing but further sacrifices. So, right now, we must prepare our future struggles. How? By discussing, exchanging experiences and ideas, on different internet channels on forums, on the phone, as much as possible. Understanding that the greatest scourge is not Covid-19 but capitalism, that the solution is not to rally behind the killer state but to stand against it; that hope resides not in the promises of this or that politician but in the development of workers’ solidarity in the struggle; that the only alternative to capitalist barbarism is the world revolution!

 

THE FUTURE BELONGS TO THE CLASS STRUGGLE!

International Communist Current, 10.4.20

www.internationalism.org [46]

The Trump administration had already caused a series of humiliating but lethal fiascos for the US bourgeoisie – not least by actively worsening the Covid pandemic 2020 - but there was always hope among the saner factions of the American ruling class that having an incompetent narcissist in supreme power was only a passing nightmare, from which they would soon awake. But the electoral victory of the Democratic Party wasn’t the landslide that was hoped for – either for the new administration of Joe Biden or for the new Congress.

Worse still, a televised riot took place in the Capitol, the sacred venue of US democracy, incited by the outgoing head of state who rejected the official, validated, results of the presidential election! A mob attempted to violently prevent the democratic succession, encouraged by the sitting president himself – as in a banana republic as George W Bush recognised. Truly it is a politically defining moment in the decomposition of world capitalism. The populist self-harming of the UK through Brexit may look merely absurd to other countries, because Britain is a secondary power, but the threat of instability represented by the insurrection on Capitol Hill of the US has caused shock and fear throughout the international bourgeoisie.

The subsequent attempt to impeach Trump for a second time may well fail again, and in any case it will galvanise the millions of his supporters in the population, including a large part of the Republican party.

The inauguration of the new President on January 20th, usually an occasion for a show of national unity and reconciliation, won’t be: Trump will not attend, contrary to the custom with outgoing presidents, and Washington DC will be under military lockdown to prevent further armed resistance from Trump supporters. The perspective then is not the smooth, long term re-establishment of traditional democratic order and ideology by a Biden administration, but an accentuation - of an increasingly violent nature – of the divisions between classical bourgeois democracy and populism, the latter not disappearing with the end of the Trump regime.

The US – from the world‘s biggest superpower to the epicentre of decomposition

Since 1945 US democracy has been the flagship of world capitalism. Having played a decisive role in the Allied victory in World War II, and making a major contribution to reducing Europe and Japan to ruins, it was then able to drag the world out of the rubble and reconstruct it in its own image during the Cold War. In 1989, with the defeat and disintegration of the rival totalitarian Russian bloc, the US seemed to be at the apex of its global dominance and prestige. George Bush Snr announced the coming of a New World Order after the collapse of the Russian bloc in 1989. Washington thought it could maintain its supremacy by preventing any new power emerging as a serious contender for its world leadership. But instead, the assertion of its military superiority has accelerated a world disorder with a series of pyrrhic victories (Kuwait, the Balkans in the 1990s) and expensive foreign policy failures in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. The US has increasingly undermined the alliances on which its former world leadership rested and this has encouraged other powers to act on their own account.

Moreover US power and wealth has been unable to attenuate the increasing convulsions of the world economy: the spark of the 2008 crisis emanated from Wall Street and engulfed the US and the world in the most serious downturn since the open crisis re-emerged in 1967.

The social and political consequences of these US reverses, and the absence of alternatives, is that the divisions and disarray in the bourgeois state, and in the population generally, has been increased, leading to the growing discredit of the established political norms of the US democratic political system.

The previous presidencies of Bush and Obama failed to forge a lasting consensus for the traditional democratic order among the population as a whole. Trump’s ‘solution’ to this problem was not to resolve this disunity but to accentuate it even more with a raucous and incoherent policy of vandalism that further shredded the political consensus domestically and ripped up military and economic agreements with its former allies on the world stage. All this was done under the banner of ‘America First’ - but in reality it served to increase the USA‘s loss of status.

In a word, the ongoing political crisis of US democracy, symbolised by the storming of the Capitol, complements the chaotic and self-destructive consequences of US imperialist policy and makes it clearer that the still-strongest world power is at the centre of, and the major player in, the decomposition of world capitalism at all levels.

China can’t fill the vacuum

China, despite its increasing economic and military power, won’t be able fill the vacuum of world leadership created by the disorientation of the US. Not least because the latter is still capable of and determined to prevent the growth of Chinese influence as a major objective with or without Trump. For example one of the plans of the Biden Administration will be to step up this anti-China policy with the formation of a D10, an alliance of the democratic powers (the G7 plus South Korea, India, and Australia). The role this will play in the worsening of imperialist tensions need hardly be explained.

But these tensions cannot be channeled into the formation of new blocs for obvious reasons. The worsening decomposition of capitalism makes the possibility of a generalised world war increasingly unlikely.

The dangers for the working class

In 1989 we predicted that the new period of the decomposition of capitalism would bring increased difficulties for the proletariat.

The recent events in the US vindicate this prediction again.

The most important of these in relation to the present US situation is the danger that sections of the working class will be mobilised behind the increasingly violent contests of the opposing factions of the bourgeoisie, ie, not just on the electoral terrain but in the streets. Parts of the working class can be misled into choosing between populism and the defence of democracy, the two false alternatives offered by capitalist exploitation.

Connected to this is the fact that in the present situation other layers of the non-exploiting population are increasingly propelled into political action by a whole series of factors: the effects of the economic crisis, the worsening of the ecological catastrophe, the strengthening of state repression and its racist nature, which leads them to act as a conduit for bourgeois campaigns such as the Black Lives Matter movement, or as a medium for inter-classist struggles.

Nevertheless the working class internationally in the period of decomposition has not been defeated as in the manner of the 1930s. Its reserves of combativity remain intact and the further economic attacks on its living standards that are coming - which will include the bill for the economic damage done by the Covid pandemic - will oblige the proletariat to respond on its class terrain.

The challenge for revolutionary organisations

The revolutionary organisation has a limited but very important role to play in the current situation because, while it has little influence yet, and even for a lengthy period to come, the situation of the working class as a whole is nevertheless bringing a small minority to revolutionary class positions, notably in the US itself.

The successful work of transmission to this minority rests on a number of needs. Significant in the present context is the combination, on the one hand, of a long term programmatic rigour and clarity, linked on the other hand to the ability of the organisation to have a coherent, developing analysis of the entire world situation: its historical setting and perspectives.

The world situation over the past year has increasingly broken new records in the putrefaction of world capitalism - the covid pandemic, the economic crisis, the political crisis in the US, the ecological catastrophe, the plight of refugees, the destitution of ever-larger parts of the world population. The dynamic of chaos is speeding up and becoming more unpredictable, offering new, more frequent challenges to our analyses and requiring an ability to change and adapt them according to this acceleration without forgetting our fundamentals.

 ICC, 16.01.2021

 

Baku Congress, 1920: "support for colonial revolutions" really meant grave concessions to nationalism by the Comintern

In the previous parts of this article, we began by identifying the conditions in which the Third or Communist International was formed in March 1919. In a very complicated context, the revolutionaries of that time did not manage to clarify all the new questions and challenges facing the proletariat.

Furthermore, the process of regroupment of revolutionary forces was marked by the lack of a firm attitude to revolutionary principles at the foundation of the International. This is one of the lessons which the Italian Fraction of the communist left grouped around the review Bilan, and then above all by the Gauche Communiste de France (Internationalisme) drew from the experience of the CI: “the ‘broad’ method, with its concern above all to rally the greatest possible numbers straight away at the expense of precise principles and programme, led to the formation of mass parties, real giants with feet of clay, which were to fall under the sway of opportunism”[1].

While the founding Congress was a real step forward in the unification of the world proletariat, the evolution of the CI in the years that followed was marked essentially by regressions which disarmed the revolution in the face of the counter-revolutionary forces which were more and more gaining ground. The rampant opportunism within the ranks of the party was not eliminated as Lenin and the Bolsheviks envisaged. On the contrary, with the degeneration of the revolution, it ended up taking a preponderant place and hastened the end of the CI as a class party. This opportunist dynamic, already visible by the Second Congress, only deepened after that, both on the programmatic and organisational levels, as we will try to show in this article.

1920-21: The retreat of the revolutionary wave

Following the Third Congress of the CI[2], revolutionaries were beginning to understand that the revolution would be more difficult than they had thought. A few days after the end of the Congress, Trotsky analysed the situation thus:

“The Third Congress took note of the further falling apart of the economic foundations of bourgeois rule. But it has at the same time forcibly warned the advanced workers against any naive conceptions that this will lead automatically to the death of the bourgeoisie through an uninterrupted offensive by the proletariat. Never before has the bourgeoisie’s class instinct of self-preservation been armed with such multiform methods of defence and attack as today. The economic preconditions for the victory of the working class are at hand. Failing this victory, and moreover unless this victory comes in the more or less near future, all civilisation is menaced with decline and degeneration. But this victory can be gained only by the skilled conduct of battles and, above all, by first conquering the majority of the working class. This is the main lesson of the Third Congress.”[3]

This is far removed from the overweening enthusiasm of the Founding Congress, where, in his closing speech, Lenin asserted that “the victory of the proletarian revolution on a world scale is assured. The founding of an international Soviet republic is on the way”. In the intervening period, the assaults launched by the proletariat in a number of countries had come up against the riposte of the bourgeoisie. And in particular we saw the failure of the attempt to take power in Germany in 1919, whose significance was underestimated by revolutionaries.

As the great majority in the ranks of the CI saw it, the crisis of capitalism and its fall into decadence could only hurl the masses onto the road of revolution. However, a consciousness of the scale of the goal to be attained and the means to reach it was well below the level required. This situation was particularly visible after the Second Congress, marked by a series of difficulties which were further isolating the proletariat in Russia:

• In western Europe, workers’ struggles had not achieved the hoped-for victories. In Italy the bourgeoisie had succeeded in channelling and sterilising the movement. In Germany, the adventurist action of March 1921[4], piloted by the KPD with the support of the CI, ended in a crushing and demoralising failure;
• On the military level, the offensive of the Red Army in Poland ended in defeat and the retreat from Warsaw, preventing the establishment of a bridge between the working class in Russia and the working class in western Europe;
• In Russia itself, the civil war had given rise to serious food shortages and a dramatic economic and social situation which made it necessary to put an end to the war economy and its nationalisations and restore a certain level of commodity exchange. The New Economic Policy (NEP) was adopted in March 1921;
• At the same moment, the repression of the uprising of the Kronstadt sailors took place. An error which had disastrous consequences for the relations between the masses and the Communist Party in Russia.

If the international bourgeoisie did not succeed in totally annihilating the proletarian revolution at this point, it was nevertheless the case that the heart of the revolution, Russia of the Soviets, was particularly isolated. Although Lenin described the situation as “a state of equilibrium which, although highly unstable and precarious, enables the Socialist Republic to exist—not for long, of course—within the capitalist encirclement”[5], with hindsight we can affirm that the multiple failures and difficulties which appeared between 1920 and 1921 already heralded the defeat of the revolutionary wave. It is in this particularly difficult context that we propose to analyse the policies of the CI. Policies which, on a number of points, expressed an increasingly opportunist retreat.

1. The disastrous consequences of support for “national liberation movements”

A. A question that had not yet been settled in the workers’ movement

The national question was one of the unresolved questions in the revolutionary movement at the time the CI was constituted. While it is true that during the ascendant period of capitalism revolutionaries had sometimes supported national struggles, this was not a matter of principle. The debate had arisen again in the years preceding the First World War. Rosa Luxemburg was one of the first to understand that the entry of capitalism into its phase of decadence also meant that every nation state had an imperialist nature. Consequently, the struggle of one nation to liberate itself from another aimed only at defending the interests of one bourgeoisie against another and in no way the interests of the working class.

The Bolsheviks adopted a position which was that of the social democratic centre, since the right of peoples to self-determination had appeared in the 1903 programme. “The tenaciousness with which the Bolsheviks clung to this position, despite opposition from without and from within, is best explained by the fact that Tsarist Russia was the perpetrator of national oppression par excellence (‘the prison-house of nations’) and that as a mainly ‘Great Russian’ party in geographical terms the Bolsheviks considered that granting nations oppressed by Russia the right to secede as the best way of winning the confidence of the masses in these countries. This position, though it proved to be erroneous, was based on a working class perspective. In a period in which the Social Imperialists of Germany, Russia, and elsewhere were arguing against the right of peoples oppressed by German or Russian imperialism to struggle for national liberation, the slogan of national self-determination was put forward by the Bolsheviks as a way of undermining Russian and other imperialisms and of creating the conditions for a future unification of the workers in both oppressing and oppressed nations.”[6]. While Lenin considered that the “right of nations to self-determination” had become an obsolete demand in the western countries, the situation was different in the colonies where the blossoming of national liberation movements was part of the formation of an independent capitalism which contributed to the appearance of a proletariat. In these conditions, national self-determination remained a progressive demand in the eyes of Lenin and the majority of the Bolshevik party.

Understanding that imperialism was not simply a form of pillage perpetrated by the developed countries at the expense of backward nations but the expression of the totality of capitalist relations on a global scale, Rosa Luxemburg was able to develop the most lucid critique of national liberation struggles in general and the position of the Bolsheviks in particular. In opposition to the fragmented vision of the Bolsheviks which considered that the proletariat could have different tasks in a given geographic location, Rosa Luxemburg adopted an approach which described a global process, in the context of a world market which would increasingly come up against insurmountable obstacles: “In this context it was impossible for any new nation state to enter into the world market on an independent basis, or to undergo the process of primitive accumulation outside this barbaric global chessboard”[7]. Consequently, “In the contemporary imperialist milieu there can be no wars of national defence”[8]

This ability to grasp the fact that any national bourgeoisie could only operate inside the imperialist system led her to criticise the national policy of the Bolsheviks after 1917, when the Soviets accepted the independence of Ukraine, Finland, Lithuania, etc, in order to “win over the masses”. The following lines admirably prophesy the consequences of the national policy of the CI in the 1920s: “One after another, these ‘nations’ used the freshly granted freedoms to ally themselves with German imperialism against the Russian revolution as its mortal enemy, and under German protection, to carry the banner of counter-revolution into Russia itself.”[9]

B. The Baku Congress

The national question was raised for the first time in the CI during the Second World Congress. Beginning from the erroneous conception of imperialism held by the Bolsheviks in particular, the Congress considered that “a policy must be pursued that will achieve the closest alliance, with Soviet Russia, of all the national and colonial liberation movements. The form of this alliance should be determined by the degree of development of the communist movement in the proletariat of each country, or of the bourgeois-democratic liberation movement of the workers and peasants in backward countries or among backward nationalities.”[10].

The Congress of the Peoples of the East, held in Baku between the 1st and the 8th of September 1920, was given the task of putting into practice the orientations of the Second World Congress which had finished a few weeks earlier. Nearly 1900 delegates, coming mainly from the Near East and Asia, met together. While nearly two thirds of the organisations represented proclaimed themselves to be communist, their adherence was extremely superficial. “The national elites were more attracted to the organisation and effectiveness of the modes of action proposed by the Bolsheviks than by communist ideology”[11]. This is why the assembly was a grand bazaar made up of multiple classes and social strata, coming for all sorts of reasons, but very few with the firm intention of working consciously for the development of the world proletarian revolution. The description of the composition of the Congress given by Zinoviev to the Executive Committee of the CI after his return from Baku needs no comment: “The Baku Congress was composed of a communist fraction and a much bigger non-party fraction. The latter was in turn divided into two groups: one effectively made up of non-party elements, including the representatives of the peasants and the semi-proletarian population of the towns, the other formed by people who defined themselves as non-party but in fact belonged to bourgeois parties”[12].

For a number of delegations, the building of a revolutionary communist movement in the East was secondary and even of no interest. For many of them, it was a question of ensuring the aid of Soviet Russia in order to kick out British colonialism and realise their own dreams of national sovereignty.

What was the attitude of the representatives of the CI towards these evidently bourgeois demands? Instead of defending proletarian internationalism with the greatest firmness, the CI delegation insisted on its support for bourgeois nationalist movements, and called on the peoples of the East to join “the first truly Holy war, under the red banner of the Communist International”, in order to wage a crusade against “the common enemy, British imperialism”.

The important concessions accorded to the nationalist parties and the whole policy carried out at Baku was already dictated by the need to defend the Soviet Republic rather than by the interests of the world revolution.  This central position of the CI, established at the Second Congress, showed how far the opportunist tendency had gained ground. There were of course criticisms of these attempts to reconcile nationalism and proletarian internationalism: Lenin warned against “painting nationalism red”, and John Reed, who had been present at Baku, also objected to “this demagogy and this parade”, but “such responses failed to address the roots of the opportunist course being followed, remaining instead on a centrist terrain of conciliation with more open expression of opportunism, and hiding behind the Theses of the Second Congress, which, to say the least, covered a multitude of sins in the revolutionary movement”[13]

C. Little by little, the CI becomes an instrument of Russian imperialism

The retreat of the revolution in western Europe and the isolation of the proletariat in Russia in the most dramatic conditions gradually led the CI to become an instrument of Bolshevik foreign policy – the Bolsheviks themselves, as the years passed, turning into the administrators of Russian capital[14]. While this fatal evolution was partly linked to the Bolsheviks’ erroneous ideas about the relationship between class, party and state in the period of transition, the main reason lay in the irreversible degeneration of the revolution from the 1920s on.[15]

It was first and foremost in the name of the defence of the Soviet State that the Bolsheviks and the CI would make alliances with or directly support national liberation movements. From 1920, the world party gave its support to the movement of Kemal Atatürk , whose interests were very far from the policies of the International, as Zinoviev admitted. But this alliance was a means to push the British out of the region. Even though this nationalist movement would shortly execute the leaders of the Communist Party of Turkey, the CI continued to see potential in it, and maintained its alliance with a country whose geographical position was strategically important to the Russian state. This didn’t stop Kemal from turning on his ally and making an alliance with the Entente in 1923.

If the policy of support for national liberation movements was, for a certain period, an erroneous position within the workers’ movement, by the end of the 1920s it had become the imperialist strategy of a capitalist power like all the others. The CI’s support for the Kuomintang nationalists in China which led to the massacre of the workers of Shanghai in 1927 was a decisive episode in this process of degeneration. Before that, the CI had supported the nationalist movement led by Abd El-Krim in the war of the Rif (1921-26) and the Druze in Syria in 1926. Consequently “such overt acts of treason demonstrated that the Stalinist faction, which had by then won almost complete dominion over the CI and its parties, was no longer an opportunist current within the workers’ movement but a direct expression of the capitalist counter-revolution”[16]

II Winning the masses at the expense of principles

1. The formation of “mass” Communist Parties in the West

As we showed in the first part of this study[17], only a handful of properly constituted Communist Parties were present at the Founding Congress of the CI in March 1919. In the weeks that followed, the International undertook a whole work aimed at forming Communist Parties: “The Communist International does not aim to form small communist sects seeking to exert influence on the working masses through propaganda and agitation. Rather, from the earliest days after its formation, it has clearly and unambiguously pursued the goal of taking part in the struggles of the working masses, leading these struggles in a communist direction, and, through the struggle, forming large, tested, mass revolutionary Communist Parties”.[18] This orientation was based on the conviction that there would be a rapid extension of the revolution in western Europe, and consequently that there was a pressing need to equip the working class in different countries with parties that would make it possible to guide the revolutionary action of the masses.

Thus the Bolsheviks pushed not only for the formation of mass Communist Parties as quickly as possible, but also on the basis of a compromise between the left wing of the workers’ movement and the centrist current which had not broken with the views and weaknesses of the Second International. In the majority of cases, these parties were not engendered out of nothing but emerged from a decantation within the Socialist Parties of the Second International. This was notably the case with the Communist Party of Italy, formed at the Livorno Congress of January 1921, or of the French Communist Party which saw the light of day at the Tours Congress of December 1920. Thus, from their inception, the parties carried within themselves a whole series of organisational detritus and weaknesses which could only further compromise the capacity of these organisations to give a clear orientation to the masses. While Lenin and the main animators of the International were fully aware of these concessions being made and the danger this could represent, they counted on the capacity of the parties to fight against them. In reality, Lenin seriously underestimated the danger. The adoption of the 21 conditions for joining the CI at the Second World Congress, which was rightly considered a step forward in the struggle against reformism, was not really followed up. Lenin’s whole approach was based on the idea that the march towards the revolution could not be interrupted, that the development of the CI at the expense of the Second International and the Two and Half International was more or less an accomplished fact[19] .

In a situation where the masses were not yet ready to take power, “the Communist Parties’ current task consists not in accelerating the revolution, but in intensifying the preparation of the proletariat.”[20]. For these reasons, one of the orientations of the Second Congress was to “unite the scattered Communist forces, to form a single Communist Party in every country (or to reinforce or renovate the already existing Party) in order to increase tenfold the work of preparing the proletariat for the conquest of political power—political power, moreover, in the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The ordinary socialist work conducted by groups and parties which recognise the dictatorship of the proletariat has by no means undergone that fundamental reorganisation, that fundamental renovation, which is essential before this work can be considered communist work and adequate to the tasks to be accomplished on the eve of proletarian dictatorship.”[21] A correct orientation but based on an erroneous practice.

This explains the aberration of the fusion between the USPD[22] and the KPD at the Halles Congress of 12 October 1920. The most significant example is probably the creation of the French Communist Party (PCF). The latter was formed in December 1920 following a split with the SFIO (Socialist Party) whose main leaders had rallied to the “Union Sacrée” during the First World war. Its birth was the result of a compromise, encouraged by the CI, between the left (a weak minority) and a centrist current which was strongly in the majority. As we have shown in our pamphlet How the PCF passed over to the service of capital[23], “this tactic was a disaster because membership was not – unlike all the other European CPs – based on the Twenty One conditions for joining the CI, which demanded in particular a complete and definitive break with the opportunist policy of centrism towards reformism, social patriotism and pacifism, but on much less selective criteria. The objective of this tactic of the CI was to draw the majority to separate from the right wing of social democracy, an openly patriotic party which had participated in capitalist governments…The centrist majority of the new party was infested with opportunists, who had more or less ‘repented’ of having joined the Union Sacrée… At the same time, the party was also joined by another important component, saturated with anarchist-type federalism (represented in particular by the Federation of the Seine), which on every occasion, on the organisational level, lined up with the centre against the left to oppose international centralisation and above all the orientations of the CI towards the young French party”. Gangrened by opportunism, the PCF would submit fully to the degeneration of the CI, which began to weigh heavily at the Third Congress. It was to become one of the principal agents of Stalinism[24]. It was the same in Italy since, following a split with the Socialist Party of Italy at the Livorno Congress, the CP of Italy was made up of a marxist, communist left wing resolutely committed to the struggle against opportunism in the CI, and a centre led by Gramsci and Togliatti, incapable of understanding the political role of the soviets as centralised organs of power, and underestimating the political role of the party. The centre of the party was then to act as the support for the CI in the exclusion of the left during the period of “Bolshevisation”.

Finally, the most caricatural example was perhaps that of the CP of Czechoslovakia, formed around the Šmeral tendency which had supported the Hapsburg monarchy during the imperialist war of 1914-18.

How can we explain such compromises? How can we explain that the Bolsheviks, who for years had waged a hard battle to preserve intransigent principles, came to accept such concessions? The Communist Left of Italy attentively examined this episode and put forward an initial response: “It is evident that this was not a sudden conversion of the Bolsheviks to another approach towards the formation of Communist Parties, but essentially based on a historic perspective which envisaged the possibility of avoiding the difficult path that led to the foundation of the Bolshevik Party. In 1918-20, Lenin and the Bolsheviks were counting on the immediate outbreak of the world revolution and, because of this, saw the foundation of Communist Parties in different countries as so many support bases for the revolutionary action of the Russian state, which seemed to them to be the essential element in the overthrow of the capitalist world”[25].

Undoubtedly, the halt in the advance of the revolution during this period and the desperate efforts to deal with it led Lenin and the Bolsheviks to lower their guard on the defence of principles and so to fall into opportunism. But it was also the persistence of errors on the tasks of the party and its relationship to the class which contributed to forcing the formation of CPs on a totally confused basis in a period marked by the first retreats of the proletariat.

B. The creation of “phantom” Communist Parties in the East

The opportunist method through which its member parties were formed found its ultimate expression in the birth of Communist Parties in the colonial world.

After the Baku Congress, the Executive of the CI set up a central bureau for Asia, in charge of work towards the Middle East and as far as India. This organ, composed of Sokolnikov, Grefor Safarov and MN Roy, was installed in Tashkent in Uzbekistan. Then in January 1921, a CI secretariat of the Far East was set up in Irkutsk. Thus, faced with the retreat of the revolution in western Europe, the CI wanted to give itself the means to “accelerate” the revolution in the East. With this objective, between 1919 and 1923, in the East and the Far East, Communist Parties were formed on extremely fragile theoretical and political bases.

Before this period, CPs had arisen in Turkey, Iran, Palestine and Egypt, but as the Trotskyist historian Pierre Broué observed, “There was no lack of problems between the International and these Communist Parties who knew nothing about communism and represented countries where properly proletarian strata were insignificant. Which didn’t prevent their leaders from claiming a doctrinal purity and a rigorously workerist schema for the revolution which they believed to be at hand”[26].

In India, the elements who were moving towards the International all had a nationalist past. The best know was MN Roy. The CI ordered the group formed around the latter to enter into the nationalist Congress Party led by Gandhi, initially by making an alliance with the so-called “revolutionary” and “communist” left wing, then with all the factions opposed to Gandhi following the violent clashes that took place on 4 February 1922 during a campaign of civil disobedience launched by Gandhi himself[27]. Roy was led to defend an openly opportunist programme within the Congress Party: national independence, universal suffrage, abolition of large landed property, nationalisation of public services. What’s more, the goal was not to get its programme adopted but to provoke its rejection by the leadership of the party which would thus “unmask” itself. This enterprise ended in utter failure. Roy’s programme didn’t receive any favourable echo and the life of the “communist” group very quickly degenerated into internal quarrels. After that the communists were very harshly repressed. They were arrested and then convicted of conspiracy, which put an end to the policies of the CI in India[28].

In east Asia, the CI more or less adopted the same irresponsible approach. The structuring of a communist movement in China was led by the Far Eastern Bureau through making contact with intellectuals and students who had been won over to “Bolshevism”. The Communist Party of China was constituted at a conference held in Shanghai in July 1921. Made up of a few dozen militants it then went through a significant phase of growth, reaching nearly 20,000 members in 1927. While this numerical reinforcement did express the revolutionary spirit which animated the Chinese working class in a period of intense social struggles, it nevertheless remained the case that militants joined the party on very superficial theoretical and political bases. Again, the same irresponsible method opened the door to the disarming of the party faced with the opportunist policy of the CI towards the Kuomintang. In January 1922, the Conference of the Peoples of the East held in Moscow laid the bases for class collaboration through an “anti-imperialist bloc”. At the instigation of the CI’s Executive, the Chinese CP launched the slogan of a the “anti-imperialist united front with the Kuomintang” and called for communists to join the latter as individuals. This policy of class collaboration was the result of secret negotiations between the USSR and the Kuomintang. In June 1923 the Third Congress of the Chinese CP voted for its members to join the Kuomintang. At first this policy of subordinating itself to a bourgeois party met with opposition from within the young party, and this included part of its leadership[29]. But the political fragility and inexperience of this opposition rendered it incapable of effectively combating the erroneous and suicidal directives of the International. And so “this policy had disastrous consequences for the working class movement in China. While strike movements and demonstrations arose spontaneously and impetuously, the Communist Party, merged with the Kuomintang, was incapable of orientating the working class, of putting forward independent class politics, despite the incontestable heroism of the communist militants who were frequently found in the front ranks of the workers’ struggles. Equally bereft of unitary organisations of political struggle, such as the workers’ councils, at the demand of the CPC itself the working class put its confidence in the Kuomintang, in other words in the bourgeoisie.”[30]

We could give many more examples of Communist Parties formed in backward countries where the working class was very weak and which, in the wake of defeats, very quickly became bourgeois organisations. For now it’s necessary to insist that the formation of “mass parties”, in the West as well as the East, was a factor aggravating the difficulties of the proletariat to face up to the reflux of the revolutionary wave, making it impossible to conduct a retreat in good order.

C. The policy of the United Front

At its Third Congress, the CI adopted the policy of the “Workers’ United Front”[31]. This involved making alliances with the organisations of social democracy, carrying out common actions with similar demands, with the idea that this would unmask the counter-revolutionary role of these organisations in the eyes of the masses.

This orientation was fully concretised at the Fourth Congress and marked a complete about-turn with regard to the founding Congress, in which the new International announced its clear determination to fight against all the forces of the social democratic current, inviting “the workers of all countries to struggle energetically against the Yellow International and protect the broad masses from this lying and fraudulent organisation”[32]. What was it that, only two years later, pushed the CI to adopt a policy of alliances with parties which had been turned into the most effective agents of the counter-revolution?

Had they made an honourable amends and repented of their former crimes? Quite obviously not. Here again it was a question of “not cutting ourselves off from the masses”: “The argument of the CI to justify the necessity for the United Front was based mainly on the fact that the reflux had reinforced the weight of social democracy, and that, to fight against it, it was necessary not to cut yourself off from the masses who were prisoners of this mystification. It was necessary to work towards a denunciation of social democracy via alliances with it, in the case of the strongest Communist Parties (In Germany, the CP came out in favour of a unified proletarian front and recognised the possibility of supporting a united workers’ government), or via entrism for the weaker parties (‘The British Communists must launch a vigorous campaign for their admittance to the Labour Party’, as it said in the Theses on the United Front from the Fourth Congress)”[33].

This opportunist line was combated and sharply denounced by the groups on the left of the CI. The KAPD began the struggle at the Third Congress prior to being expelled from the CI shortly afterwards. The left of the CP of Italy followed it at the Fourth Congress, declaring that the party would not accept “being part of organisms made up of different political organisations…it would thus avoid participating in joint declarations with political parties when these declarations contradicted its programme and are presented to the proletariat as the result of negotiations aiming at finding a common line of action” [34] Miasnikov’s Workers’ Group also rejected the United Front. In its Manifesto it defended a position towards the parties of the Second International that was clearly in conformity with the interests of the revolution: “It will not be the United Front with the Second International or the Two and a Half International which will lead to the victory of the revolution, but the war against them. That is the slogan of the future world social revolution”. History would confirm the foresight and intransigence of the groups of the left. With the inversion of the balance of forces, the dominant ideology regained its hold over the masses. In these circumstances, the role of the party was not to follow the direction of the class but to defend the revolutionary programme and principles within it. In the period of the decadence of capitalism, the return to a “minimum programme”, even on a temporary basis, had become impossible. This was another lesson drawn later on by the Communist Left of Italy: “In 1921, the change in the situation did not alter the fundamental characteristic of the epoch as the revolutionary turbulence of 1923, 1925, 1927 and 1934 (to name only the most important) was to fully confirm… Such a change in the situation would obviously have consequences for the Communist Parties. But the problem was the following: was it necessary to modify the substance of the politics of the Communist Parties, or to deduce from the unfavourable circumstances the need to call on the masses to come together around partial struggles while remaining oriented to a revolutionary outcome[35], once the defeats suffered made it impossible to call directly for the insurrection? The Third Congress, the Enlarged Executive of 1921 and more overtly the Fourth Congress gave a solution to this problem which was prejudicial to the interests of the cause. This was above all through the question of the United Front”[36]

Conclusion

As we have just seen, the period from the Second to that after the Third Congress was marked by a significant penetration of opportunism into the ranks of the Comintern. This was the direct consequence of the erroneous policy of “conquering the masses” at the price of compromises and concessions: support for national liberation struggles, alliance with the traitor parties of the IInd International, participation in parliament and the trade unions, formation of mass parties…The CI was turning its back on what had been the strength of the left fractions within the IInd International: the intransigent defence of communist principles and programme. This is what Herman Gorter pointed out to Lenin in 1920: “Now you are working in the Third International differently from the time when you were the party of maximalism. The latter was kept very ‘pure’ and perhaps it still is. Whereas according to you we must now welcome into the International all those who are half, quarter, maybe even one eighth communists…The Russian revolution triumphed through ‘purity’, through the firmness of its principles… Instead of now applying this proven tactic to all the other countries, and thus strengthening the Third International from within, now you are making a volte-face and just like social democracy of yesterday, are going over to opportunism. This is what we are now told to enter: the unions, the Independents, the French centre, a portion of the Labour Party”[37].

The fundamental error of the Communist International was to consider that, merely by its own efforts, it was possible to “conquer” the working masses, to free them from the influence of social democracy and thus raise their level of consciousness and lead them to communism.

From this flowed the policy of the United Front to unmask and denounce social democracy; participation in parliament to make use of the divisions among the bourgeois parties; work in trade unions in order to bring them back to the proletarian camp and the side of the revolution[38]. None of the attempts had the hoped-for results. On the contrary, they only precipitated the CI towards betraying the proletarian camp. Instead of raising class consciousness, these tactics simply spread confusion and disorientation among the masses, rendering them more vulnerable to the traps of the bourgeoisie. Although the groups on the left of the CI never managed to unite, they all agreed on the suicidal nature of this policy which they saw as leading to the defeat of the workers’ movement and the death of the revolution. At root these groups defended a very different vision of the relationship between party and class[39]. The role of the party was not to fuel the illusions in the class and still less to embroil it in dubious and dangerous tactics but rather to raise its level of consciousness through a defence of proletarian principles and to ensure that no concessions were made on matters of principle. This was the only real compass that could point in the direction of revolution at a time when the wave unleashed by October 1917 in Russia was going through its first retreats. (to be continued)

Najek, 16 June 2020

“Bright lights, big city, gone to my baby’s head” - Jimmy and Mary Reed, 1961

Introduction

This article is being written in the midst of the global Covid-19 crisis, a startling confirmation that we are living through the terminal phase of capitalist decadence. The pandemic, which is a product of the profoundly distorted relationship between humanity and the natural world under the reign of capital, highlights the problem of capitalist urbanisation which previous revolutionaries, notably Engels and Bordiga, have analysed in some depth. Although we have looked at their contributions on this question in previous articles in this series[1], it thus seems opportune to raise the issue again. We are also nearing the 50th anniversary of Bordiga’s death in July 1970, so the article can also serve as part of our tribute to a communist whose work we value very highly, despite our disagreements with many of his ideas. With this article, we begin a new “volume” of the series on communism, specifically aimed at looking at the possibilities and problems of the proletarian revolution in the phase of capitalist decomposition

Revolution in the face of capitalist decomposition

In an earlier part of this series, we published a number of articles which looked at the way that the communist parties which emerged during the great revolutionary wave of 1917-23 had tried to take the communist programme from the abstract to the concrete – to formulate a series of measures to be taken by the workers’ councils in the process of taking power out of the hands of the capitalist class  [2]. And we think that it is still perfectly valid for revolutionaries to pose the question: what would be the fundamentals of the programme that the communist organisation of the future – the world party – would be obliged to put forward in an authentic revolutionary upsurge? What would be the most urgent tasks confronting the working class when it is moving towards the taking of political power on a global scale? What would be the key political, economic and social measures to be implemented by the dictatorship of the proletariat, which remains the necessary political precondition for the construction of a communist society? 

The revolutionary movements of 1917-23, like the world imperialist war which fuelled them, were clear proof that capitalism had entered its “epoch of social revolution”, of decadence. Henceforward the progress and even survival of humanity would be increasingly under threat unless the capitalist social relation was overcome on a world scale. In this sense the fundamental aims of a future proletarian revolution are in full continuity with the programmes that were put forward at the onset of the period of decadence. But this period has now lasted over a century and in our view the contradictions accumulated over this century have opened up a terminal phase of capitalist decline, the phase we call decomposition, in which the continuation of the capitalist system contains the growing danger that the very conditions for a future communist society are being undermined. This is particularly evident at the “ecological” level: in 1917-23 the problems posed by pollution and the destruction of the natural environment were far less developed than they are today. Capitalism has so distorted the “metabolic exchange” between man and nature that at the very least, a victorious revolution would have to dedicate an enormous amount of human and technical resources simply to cleaning up the mess that capitalism will have bequeathed to us. Similarly, the whole process of decomposition, which has exacerbated the tendency towards social atomisation, towards the attitude of “every man for himself” inherent in capitalist society, will leave a very damaging imprint on the human beings who will have to construct a new community founded on association and solidarity. We also have to recall a lesson from the Russian revolution: given the certainty that the bourgeoisie will resist the proletarian revolution with all its might, the victory of the latter will involve a civil war which could cause incalculable damage, not only in terms of human lives and further ecological destruction, but also at the level of consciousness, since the military terrain is not at all the most propitious for the flowering of proletarian self-organisation, consciousness and morality. In Russia in 1920, the Soviet state emerged victorious in the civil war, but the proletariat had largely lost control over it. Thus, when trying to understand the problems of communist society “just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally and intellectually, still stamped with the birth marks of the old society from whose womb it emerges"[3], we must recognise that these birthmarks will probably be far uglier and potentially more damaging than they were in the days of Marx and even of Lenin. The first phases of communism will thus not be an idyllic waking up on a May morning, but a long and intense work of reconstruction from the ruins.  This recognition will have to inform our understanding of all the tasks of the transitional period, even if we continue to base our anticipations of the future on the conviction that the proletariat can indeed carry out its revolutionary mission – despite everything. 

The historic context of Bordiga’s “The immediate programme of the revolution”

Throughout this long series we have tried to understand the development of the communist project as the fruit of the real historical experience of the class struggle, and of the reflection on that experience by the most conscious minorities of the proletariat. And in this article we want to proceed with this historical method, by looking at an attempt to elaborate an updated version of the “immediate programmes” of 1917-23, one which has itself become part of the history of the communist movement.  We refer to the text written by Amadeo Bordiga in 1953 and published in Sul Filo del Tempo, “The immediate programme of the revolution”, which we have already mentioned in a previous article in this series[4] with the promise of returning to it in more detail. In our view, it is essential that any future attempts to formulate such an “immediate programme” bases itself on the strengths of these previous efforts while radically criticising their weaknesses. The whole text, which has the merit of being very succinct, now follows.

1. With the resurgence of the movement which occurred on a world scale after the First World War and which was expressed in Italy by the founding of the PCI, it became clear that the most pressing question was the seizure of political power, which the proletariat could not accomplish by legal means but through violence, that the best opportunity for reaching that end was the military defeat of one’s own country, and that the political form after victory was to be the dictatorship of the proletariat, which in turn is the first precondition for the following task of socio-economic overthrow.

2. The “Communist Manifesto” clearly pointed out the different measures are to be grasped as gradually possible and "despotic" - because the road to complete communism is very long - in dependence upon the level of development of the productive forces in the country in which the proletariat first attains victory and in accordance with how quickly this victory spreads to other countries. It designates the measures which in 1848 were the order of the day for the advanced countries and it emphasizes that they are not to be treated as complete socialism but as steps which are to be identified as preliminary, immediate and essentially “contradictory”.

3. Later in some countries many of the measures at that time considered to be those of the proletarian dictatorship were implemented by the bourgeoisie itself: i.e. free public education, a national bank etc.

This was one of the aspects which deceived those who did not follow a fixed theory, but believed it required perpetual further development as a result of historical change.

That the bourgeoisie itself took these specific measures does not mean that the exact laws and predictions on the transition from the capitalist to the socialist mode of production have to be changed in their entire economic, political and social configuration; It only means that the first post-revolutionary, the lower and final higher stages of socialism (or total communism) are still antecedent periods, which is to say that the economics of transition will be somewhat easier.

1. The distinguishing mark of classical opportunism was to make believe that the bourgeois democratic state could accomplish all these measures from first to last if only the proletariat brought enough pressure to bear, and that it was even possible to accomplish this in a legal manner. However these various “corrections” - insofar as they were compatible with the capitalist mode of production - were in that case in the interest of the survival of capitalism and their implementation served to postpone its collapse, while those which were not compatible were naturally not applied.

2. With its formula of an always more widely developed popular democracy within the context of the parliamentary constitution contemporary opportunism has taken up a different and more evil duty.

Not only does it make the proletariat think that a state standing over classes and parties is capable of carrying out some of its own fundamental tasks (which is to say it diffuses defeatism with regards to dictatorship - like social democracy before it), it deploys the masses it organizes in struggles for “democratic and progressive” social arrangements in diametrical opposition to those which proletarian power has set as its goal since 1848 and the “Manifesto”.

1. Nothing better illustrates the full magnitude of this retrogression then a listing of the measures to take after the seizure of power in a country of the capitalist West. After a century these “corrections” are different from those enumerated in the “Manifesto”, however their characteristics are the same.

2. A listing of these demands looks like this:

   1. “De-investment of capital”: means of production are assigned a smaller proportion in relation to consumer goods.

   2. “Increase of production costs” - so that as long as wages, money and the market still exist - more remuneration is exchanged for less labour time.

   3. “Drastic reduction of labour time” - by at least half as unemployment and socially useless and damaging activities will shortly become things of the past.

   4. A reduction in the mass of what is produced through an “under-production plan” which is to say the concentration of production on what is necessary as well as an “authoritarian regulation of consumption” by which the promotion of useless, damaging and luxury consumption goods is combated and activities which propagate a reactionary mentality are violently prohibited.

   5. Rapid “dissolution of the boundaries of the enterprise” whereby decisions on production are not assigned to the workforce, but the new consumption plan determines what is to be produced.

   6. “Rapid abolition of social services” whereby the charity hand-outs characteristic of commodity production are replaced by a social (initial minimum) provision for those incapable of work.

   7. “Construction freeze” on the rings of housing and workplaces around major and small cities in order to spread the population more and more equally throughout the land area of the country. With a ban on unnecessary transportation, limitation of traffic and speed of transportation.

   8. “A decisive struggle against professional specialization” and the social division of labour though the removal of any possibility of making a career or obtaining a title.

   9. Immediate politically determined measures to put the schools, the press, all means of communication and information, as well as the entire spectrum of culture and entertainment under the control of the communist state.

2. It is not surprising that the Stalinists and those akin to them, together with their parties in the West today demand precisely the reverse - not only in terms of the “institutional” and also political-legal objectives, but even in terms of the “structural” which is to say socio-economic objectives.

The cause of this is their coordination with the party which presides over the Russian state and its fraternal countries, where the task of social transformation remains that of transition from pre-capitalist forms to capitalism: With all the corresponding ideological, political, social, and economic demands and pretensions in their baggage aiming towards a bourgeois zenith - they turn away with horror only from a medieval nadir.

Their Western cronies remain nauseating renegades insofar as the feudal danger (which is still material and real in insurgent areas of Asia) is non-existent and false with regards to the bloated super-capitalism across the Atlantic and for the proletarians who stagnate under its civilised, liberal and nationalist knout it is a lie.

The text was published in the year after the split in the Internationalist Communist Party which had been formed in Italy during the war following an important wave of workers’ struggles[5]. The split, however – like the dissolution of Marc’s group the Gauche Communiste de France, which also took place in 1952 – was an expression of the fact that, contrary to the hopes of many revolutionaries, the war had not given rise to a new proletarian upsurge but to the deepening of the counter-revolution. The disagreements between the “Damenists” and the “Bordigists” in the Partito Comunista Internazionalista in Italy were partly about different appreciations of the post-war period. Bordiga and his followers tended to have a better grasp of the fact that the period was one of mounting reaction[6]. And yet here we have Bordiga formulating a list of demands that would be more suited to a moment of open revolutionary struggle. This text thus appears more as a kind of thought experiment than a platform to be taken up by a mass movement. This might to some degree explain some of the more obvious weaknesses and lacunae in the document, although in a deeper sense they are the product of contradictions and inconsistencies which were already embedded in the Bordigist world view.

Reading the remarks that introduce and conclude the text, we can also see that it was written as part of a broader polemic against what the Bordigists describe as the “reformist” currents, in particular the Stalinists, those false inheritors of the tradition of Marx, Engels and Lenin. The main reason that the Bordigists described the official Communist parties as reformist was not so much that they shared the illusions of the Trotskyists that these were still workers’ organisations, but more because the Stalinists had increasingly become partisans of forming national fronts with the traditional bourgeois parties and were advocating a gradual “transition” to socialism  through the formation of “popular democracies” and various parliamentary coalitions. Against these aberrations, Bordiga reaffirms the fundamentals of the Communist Manifesto which takes as its starting point the necessity for the violent conquest of power by the proletariat (in retrospect, we can also point out here the gulf that separates Bordiga from many who “speak in his name”, notably the “communisation” currents who often cite Bordiga but who gag on his insistence on the need for the proletarian dictatorship and a communist party). At the same time, still with his sights trained on the Stalinists, Bordiga makes it clear that while the specific “transitional” measures advocated at the end of the second chapter of the 1848 Manifesto - heavy progressive income tax, formation of a state bank, state control of communication and key industries etc – may form the backbone of the economic programme of the “reformists”, they should not be seen as eternal verities: the Manifesto itself emphasised that they were “not to be treated as complete socialism but as steps which are to be identified as preliminary, immediate and essentially contradictory”, and corresponded to the low level of capitalist development at the time they were drawn up; and indeed quite a few of them have already been implemented by the bourgeoisie itself.

You might be forgiven for taking this to be a refutation of invariance, the idea that the communist programme has remained essentially unchanged since at least 1848. In fact, Bordiga castigates the Stalinists because they “did not follow a fixed theory, but believed it required perpetual further development as a result of historical change”. And again, he argues that his proposed “corrections” to the immediate programme “are different from those enumerated in the ‘Manifesto’; however their characteristics are the same”. We find this contradictory and unconvincing. While it’s true that certain key elements of the communist programme, such as the necessity for the proletarian dictatorship, do not change, historical experience has indeed brought profound developments in the understanding of how this dictatorship can come about and the political forms that will compose it. This has nothing to do with the “revisionism” of the social democrats, the Stalinists or others who may indeed have used the excuse of “changing with the times” to justify their desertion of the proletarian camp. 

Many cons, but some important pros

Examining Bordiga’s “corrections” to the measures proposed by the Manifesto, you might also be forgiven for only seeing their weaknesses, most notably:

• Despite all the lessons of the revolutionary movements of 1905-23, there is no indication at all of the forms of proletarian political power most suited to implementing the transition to communism. No reference to the soviets, no attempt to build on examples like the KPD programme of 1918 which lays particular emphasis on the need to dismantle the institutions of the bourgeois state, local and central, and to install in their place the power of the workers’ councils; no lessons drawn from the degeneration of the Russian revolution about the relationship between party and class, or party and state. Indeed the only mention of any form of political power following the revolution is the “communist state”, an atrocious contradiction in terms, as the previous article in this series argued via the contributions of Marc Chirik[7]. Again, we are faced with the underlying weaknesses of the Bordigist “doctrine” here: organisational forms are not important, what matters is the content injected by the party, which is destined to exercise the dictatorship of the proletariat on behalf of the masses. Furthermore, while Bordiga is of course right to insist in point 5 that production and consumption will be based on a global plan, his ignoring of the question of how the working class will take and hold power in its own hands at every level, from the most local to the most global, implies a top-down vision of centralisation. This is most evident with the paragraph dealing with the spheres of education and culture, where a kind of state monopoly is clearly advocated. We can contrast this with Trotsky’s view that the post-revolutionary state should have an “anarchist” approach on the question of art and culture – by which he meant that the state should interfere as little as possible in questions of artistic style, taste or creativity, and should not demand that all art should serve as propaganda for the revolution. More generally, there is little sign in his list of measures of the need for a vast political, moral and cultural struggle to overcome the habits and attitudes inherited not only from capitalism but from thousands of years of class society. He does talk about the need to struggle against “professional specialisation and the social division of labour”, but such a struggle demands something more than a ban on titles, while the call to remove “the possibility of making a career” only makes sense in the context of a wholesale reorganisation of production and the elimination of the wage system.
• Bordiga was perfectly aware that abolishing “wages, money and the market” is a central characteristic of communism[8], and we know that it will not be possible to dispense with them all overnight. But apart from advocating “more remuneration for less labour time”, Bordiga gives us no indication of what measures can be taken – and taken from the very start of the revolution – that will lead towards the elimination of these key categories of capitalism. In this sense Bordiga’s corrections fail to build on, or coherently criticise, the proposals made by Marx in the Critique of the Gotha Programme (the system of labour time vouchers, which we will have to return to in another article).

And yet the document retains considerable interest for us in trying to understand what would be the principal problems and priorities facing a communist revolution that would be taking place not at the dawn of capitalism’s decadence, as in 1917-23, but after an entire century in which the slide towards barbarism has continued to accelerate, and the threat to humanity’s very survival is far greater than it was a hundred years ago.

The methods of communist reconstruction

Bordiga’s document makes no attempt to draw a balance sheet of the successes and failures of the Russian revolution at the political level, and indeed only makes a cursory reference to the revolutionary wave that followed the First World War. However, in one respect, it does seek to apply an important lesson from the economic policies adopted by the Bolsheviks: Bordiga’s proposals are pertinent because they recognise that the road to material abundance and a classless society cannot be based on a programme of “socialist accumulation”, in which consumption is still subject to “production for production’s sake” (which is actually production for the sake of value), living labour subjected to dead labour. To be sure, communist revolution has become a historic necessity because capitalist social relations have become a fetter on the development of the productive forces. But from the communist point of view, the development of the productive forces has a very different content from its application in capitalist society, where it is driven by the profit motive and thus the urge to accumulate. Communism will certainly make full use of the scientific and technological advances achieved under capitalism, but it will turn them to human use, so that they become servants of the real “development” posited by communism: the full flowering of the productive, i.e. the creative powers of the associated individuals. One example will suffice here: with the development of computerisation and robotisation, capitalism has promised us an end to drudgery and a “leisure society”. In reality, these potential boons have brought the misery of unemployment or precarious work to some, and an increased work-load to others, with the mounting pressure on employees to carry on working at their computers anywhere and at any time of the day.

In concrete terms, the first four points of his programme involve: a demand to stop focusing on the production of machines to produce more machines, and the gearing of production towards direct consumption. Under capitalism, of course, the latter has meant the production of ever more “useless, damaging and luxury consumption goods” – exemplified today in the production of more and more sophisticated computers or mobile phones which are designed to fail after a limited period and cannot be repaired, or by the immensely polluting automobile and fast fashion industries, in which “consumer demand” is driven to the point of frenzy by advertising and social media. For the working class in power the reorientation of consumption will focus on the urgent need to provide all human beings, across the planet, with the fundamental necessities of life. We will have to return to these questions in other articles but we can mention some of the most obvious: 

• Nourishment. Capitalism in decay has presented humanity with a gigantic contradiction between the possibilities of producing enough food for all, and the real and permanent undernourishment that haunts large parts of the planet, including sectors of the population in the most advanced countries, while both in the central and more peripheral countries millions suffer from obesity and poor quality diet deliberately maintained by the food producing and marketing corporations, which also contribute enormously to global carbon emissions, deforestation and other threats to the world’s ecology such as plastic pollution. The world’s supply of water has also become a fundamental problem exacerbated by global warming. The working class will thus have to feed the world but without resorting to the capitalist methods that have led us to this impasse, not least contemporary “factory farming” with its disgusting cruelty to animals and its probable connection to pandemic disease. It will have to resolve the antagonism between plentiful food and healthy eating. And all this on the basis of a social-economic transformation that cannot be solved immediately: it is one thing, for example, to expropriate the big “agri-business” and state-owned sources of food production, another to integrate the small-holding farmers or peasants into cooperative and then associated production, which will take time and will make it impossible to immediately overcome exchange relations between the socialised sector and the small holders.
• Housing: homelessness has become endemic in all capitalist countries, not least the cities of the capitalist centre; millions are herded together in the vast slums that surround the cities of the “global south” (and again, also in parts of the “global north”); and in the last few decades the proliferation of war and ecological destruction has created a refugee problem of proportions not seen since the end of the Second World War, with further millions living in desperate conditions in camps which provide little protection from the elements, from disease, and from all kinds of exploitation, including modern forms of slavery. At the same time, the great cities of the world have engaged in a frenzy of building mainly devoted to speculation, luxury apartments and economic activities which would have no place in a communist society. Large scale expropriation of such misused and misconceived buildings can provide a temporary solution to the worst expressions of homelessness, but in the long term the housing of communist humanity cannot be based on patching up already inadequate and increasingly dilapidated housing stock where residents are squeezed into cage-like compartments. The re-housing of much of the world population poses a much greater challenge: the overcoming of the contradiction between town and country, which has nothing in common with the untrammelled expansion of the cities that we are witnessing in this phase of capitalism. We will return to this below.
• Health care: health, as every report on public health concludes, is a social, class question. Those who are poorly fed and badly housed, with limited access to healthcare, die much sooner than those who eat well, have decent housing and can receive adequate medical treatment when they are ill. The current Covid-19 pandemic, however, is exposing the limits of all existing “health services”, even in the most powerful capitalist countries, not least because they cannot escape the logic of competition between national capitalist units, whereas a pandemic has no respect for national borders and underlines the necessity for something that can only be a nightmare for “Big Pharma” and the Trumps of this world, but also for that left wing version of nationalism which does not want us to see beyond “our National Health Service”: medicine, healthcare and research that is not state-run, but truly socialised, and not national but “without borders”: in short, a planetary health service.

Waste not, want not

But at the same time, these admittedly immense tasks, which are merely the starting point for a new human culture, cannot be envisaged as the result of a brutal increase in the working day. On the contrary, they must be linked to a drastic reduction in labour time, without which, we should add, the direct participation of the producers in the political life of general assemblies and councils will not be feasible. And this reduction is to be achieved to a large extent by the elimination of waste: the waste of unemployment and of “socially useless and damaging activities”.

Already at the beginning of capitalism, in a speech at Elberfeld in 1845, Engels stigmatised the way that capitalism could not avoid a terrible mis-use of human energy and insisted that only a communist transformation could solve the problem.

“From the economic point of view the present arrangement of society is surely the most irrational and unpractical we can possibly conceive. The opposition of interests results in a great amount of labour power being utilised in a way from which society gains nothing, and in a substantial amount of capital being unnecessarily lost without reproducing itself. We already see this in the commercial crises; we see how masses of goods, all of which men have produced with great effort, are thrown away at prices which cause loss to the sellers; we see how masses of capital, accumulated with great effort, disappear before the very eyes of their owners as a result of bankruptcies. Let us, however, discuss present-day trade in a little more detail. Consider through how many hands every product must go before it reaches the actual consumer. Consider, gentlemen, how many speculating, swindling superfluous middlemen have now forced themselves in between the producer and the consumer! Let us take, for example, a bale of cotton produced in North America. The bale passes from the hands of the planter into those of the agent on some station or other on the Mississippi and travels down the river to New Orleans. Here it is sold — for a second time, for the agent has already bought it from the planter — sold, it might well be, to the speculator, who sells it once again, to the exporter. The bale now travels to Liverpool where, once again, a greedy speculator stretches out his hands towards it and grabs it. This man then trades it to a commission agent who, let us assume, is a buyer for a German house. So the bale travels to Rotterdam, up the Rhine, through another dozen hands of forwarding agents, being unloaded and loaded a dozen times, and only then does it arrive in the hands, not of the consumer, but of the manufacturer, who first makes it into an article of consumption, and who perhaps sells his yarn to a weaver, who disposes of what he has woven to the textile printer, who then does business with the wholesaler, who then deals with the retailer, who finally sells the commodity to the consumer. And all these millions of intermediary swindlers, speculators, agents, exporters, commission agents, forwarding agents, wholesalers and retailers, who actually contribute nothing to the commodity itself — they all want to live and make a profit — and they do make it too, on the average, otherwise they could not subsist. Gentlemen, is there no simpler, cheaper way of bringing a bale of cotton from America to Germany and of getting the product manufactured from it into the hands of the real consumer than this complicated business of ten times selling and a hundred times loading, unloading and transporting it from one warehouse to another? Is this not a striking example of the manifold waste of labour power brought about by the divergence of interests? Such a complicated way of transport is out of the question in a rationally organised society. To keep to our example, just as one can easily know how much cotton or manufactured cotton goods an individual colony needs, it will be equally easy for the central authority to determine how much all the villages and townships in the country need. Once such statistics have been worked out — which can easily be done in a year or two — average annual consumption will only change in proportion to the increasing population; it is therefore easy at the appropriate time to determine in advance what amount of each particular article the people will need — the entire great amount will be ordered direct from the source of supply; it will then be possible to procure it directly, without middlemen, without more delay and unloading than is really required by the nature of the journey, that is, with a great saving of labour power; it will not be necessary to pay the speculators, the dealers large and small, their rake-off. But this is still not all — in this way these middlemen are not only made harmless to society, they are, in fact, made useful to it. Whereas they now perform to the disadvantage of everyone else a kind of work which is, at best, superfluous but which, nevertheless, provides them with a living, indeed, in many cases even with great riches, whereas they are thus at present directly prejudicial to the general good, they will then become free to engage in useful labour and to take up an occupation in which they can prove themselves as actual members, not merely apparent, sham members, of human society, and as participants in its activity as a whole”[9].

Engels then goes to enumerate other examples of this wastage: the need, in a society based on competition and inequality, to maintain vastly expensive but entirely unproductive institutions such as standing armies, police forces and prisons; the human labour poured into servicing what William Morris termed “the swinish luxury of the rich”; and last but not least the huge waste of labour power engendered by unemployment, which rises to particularly scandalous levels during the periodic “commercial” crises of the system. He then contrasts the wastefulness of capitalism with the essential simplicity of communist production and distribution, which is calculated on the basis of what human beings need and the overall time needed for the labour that will satisfy this need.

All these capitalist ailments, observable during the period of rising and expanding capitalism, have become far more destructive and dangerous during the epoch of capitalist decline: war and militarism have increasingly seized hold of the entire economic apparatus, and constitute such a menace to humanity that certainly one of the most urgent priorities facing the proletarian dictatorship (one which Bordiga doesn’t mention, even though the “atomic age” had already clearly dawned by the time he wrote this text) will be to rid the planet of the weapons of mass destruction accumulated by capitalism – especially because there is no guarantee that, faced with its definitive overthrow by the working class, the bourgeoisie or factions of it will prefer to destroy humanity than sacrifice their class rule.

A militarised capitalism can also only operate through the cancerous growth of the state, with its own standing army of bureaucrats, policemen and spies. The security services, in particular, have swollen to gigantic proportions, as have their mirror image, the mafia gangs which enforce their brutal order in many countries of the capitalist periphery

Similarly, capitalist decadence, with its vast apparatus of banking, finance and advertising which are more than ever essential to the circulation of actually produced goods, has vastly inflated the number of people involved in fundamentally pointless forms of daily activity; and successive waves of “globalisation” have made the absurdities involved in the planet-wide circulation of commodities even more apparent, not to mention its mounting cost at the ecological level. And the amount of labour devoted to the demands of what is today called the “super rich” is no less shocking than it was in Engels’ day - not only in their inexhaustible need for servants but also in their thirst for truly useless luxuries like private jets, yachts and palaces. And at the opposite pole, in an epoch in which the economic crisis of the system has itself tended to become permanent, unemployment is less a cyclical scourge than a permanent one, even when it is disguised through the proliferation of short-term jobs and underemployment. In the so-called third world, the destruction of traditional economies has resulted in some areas of intensive capitalist development, but it has also created a gigantic “sub-proletariat” living the most precarious existence as shack-dwellers in the townships of Africa or the “favelas” of Brazil and Latin America.

Thus Bordiga – even if he was not coherent in his understanding of the decadence of the system – had understood that implementing the communist programme in this epoch does not mean advancing towards abundance through a very rapid process of industrialisation, as the Bolsheviks had tended to assume, given the “backward” conditions they faced in Russia after 1917. Certainly, it will require the development and application of the most advanced technologies, but it will initially take shape as a planned dismantling of everything that is harmful and useless in the existing apparatus of production, and a global reorganisation of the real human resources which capitalism continually squanders and destroys. 

The communist movement today – even if it has been late in recognising the scale of the problem – cannot help but be aware of the ecological cost of capitalist development in the past century, and above all since the end of the Second World War. It is more evident to us than it was to the Bolsheviks that we can’t arrive at communism through the methods of capitalist industrialisation, which sacrifices both human labour power and natural wealth to the demands of profit, to the idol of self-expanding value. We now understand that one of the primary tasks facing the proletariat is that of halting the threat of runaway global warming and clearing up the gigantic mess that capitalism will have bequeathed to us: the wanton destruction of forests and wilderness, the poisoning of the air, land and water by the existing system of production and transportation. Some parts of this “inheritance” will take many years of patient research and labour to overcome – the pollution of the seas and food chain by plastic waste is just one example. And as we have already mentioned, satisfying the most basic needs of the world population (food, housing, health, etc) will have to be consistent with this overall project of harmonisation between man and nature.

It is to Bordiga’s credit that he was already becoming aware of this problem in the early 1950s: his intuition of the centrality of this dimension is shown above all in his position on the problem of the “great cities”, which is fully in line with the thinking of Marx and especially of Engels. 

Breaking up the megacities

The city and civilisation derive from the same roots, historically and etymologically. Sometimes the term “civilisation” is extended back to include the entirety of human culture and morality[10]: in this sense the hunter gatherers of Australia or Africa also constitute a civilisation. But there is no question that the transition to living in cities, which is the more generally used definition of civilisation, represented a qualitative development in human history: a factor in the advancement of culture and the recording of history itself, but also the definitive beginnings of class exploitation and the state. Even before capitalism, as Weber shows, the city is also inseparable from trade and the money economy[11]. But the bourgeoisie is the urban class par excellence, and the mediaeval cities became the centres of resistance to the hegemony of the feudal aristocracy, whose wealth was above all based on land ownership and the exploitation of the peasants. The modern proletariat is no less an urban class, formed from the expropriation of the peasants and the ruin of the artisans. Driven into the hastily constructed conurbations of Manchester, Glasgow, or Paris, it was here that the working class first became aware of itself as a distinct class opposed to the bourgeoisie and began to envisage a world beyond capitalism.

At the level of man’s relationship with nature, the city presents the same dual aspect: the centre of scientific and technological development, opening up the potential for liberation from scarcity and disease. But this growing “mastery of nature”, taking place in conditions of mankind’s alienation from itself and from nature, is also inseparable from the destruction of nature and from a series of ecological catastrophes. Thus, the decay of the Sumerian or Mayan city cultures has been explained as the result of the city overreaching itself, exhausting the surrounding milieu of forests and agriculture, the collapse of which delivered terrible blows to the hubris of civilisations which had begun to forget their intimate dependence on nature. So too the cities, to the extent that they pressed human beings together like sardines, failed to solve the basic problem of waste disposal, and inverted age-old relationships between humans and animals, became the breeding ground for plagues such as the Black Death in the period of feudal decline or the cholera and typhus which ravaged the industrial cities of early capitalism. But again, we have to consider the other side of the dialectic: the rising bourgeoisie was able to understand that the diseases which strike down its wage slaves could also reach the capitalists’ doorsteps and undermine their whole economic edifice. It was thus able to begin and carry through astonishing feats of engineering in the construction of sewage systems that are still operating today, while rapidly evolving medical expertise was applied to the elimination of hitherto chronic forms of illness.

In the work of Friedrich Engels in particular, we can find the fundamental elements for a history of the city from a proletarian standpoint. In The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, he charts the dissolution of the old “gens”, the tribal organisation based on kinship ties, to the new territorial organisation of the city, which marks the irreversible division into antagonistic classes and with it the emergence of the state power, whose task is to prevent these divisions tearing society apart. In The Condition of the Working Class in England, he draws a picture of the hellish living conditions of the young proletariat, the day-to-day dirt and disease of the Manchester slums, but also the stirrings of class consciousness and organisation which would, in the end, play the decisive role in compelling the ruling class to grant meaningful reforms to the workers.

In two later works, the Anti-Duhring and The Housing Question, Engels embarks on a discussion about the capitalist city in a phase when capitalism has already triumphed in the heartlands of Europe and the USA and is about to conquer the entire globe. And it is noticeable that he already concludes that the great cities have overreached themselves and will have to disappear in order to fulfil the demand of the Communist Manifesto: abolition of the separation between town and country. Here we should recall that by the 1860s, Marx was also becoming increasingly concerned about the destructive impact of capitalist agriculture on the fertility of the soil, and noted, in the work of Liepig, that the annihilation of forest cover in parts of Europe was having an impact on the climate, raising local temperatures and decreasing rainfall[12]. In other words: just as Marx discerned signs of the political decadence of the bourgeois class after its crushing of the Paris Commune, and, in his correspondence with Russian revolutionaries towards the end of his life was looking for ways that the regions where capitalism was yet to triumph fully could avoid the purgatory of capitalist development, both he and Engels had started to wonder whether, as far as capitalism was concerned, enough is enough[13]. Perhaps the material foundations for a global communist society had already been laid, and further “progress” for capital would have an increasingly destructive result? We know that the system, through its imperialist expansion in the last decades of the 19th century, would prolong its life for several more decades and provide the basis for a staggering phase of growth and development, leading some elements in the workers’ movement to question the marxist analysis of the inevitability of capitalist crisis and decline, only for the unresolved contradictions of capital to explode into the open in the war of 1914-18 (which Engels had also anticipated). But the searching questions about the future that they had begun to pose precisely when capitalism had reached its zenith were perfectly valid at the time and are more than ever relevant today.

In “The transformation of social relations”, IR 85, we looked at how the revolutionaries of the 19th century – particularly Engels, but also Bebel and William Morris – had argued that the growth of the big cities had already reached the point where the abolition of the antagonism between town and country had become a real necessity, hence that the expansion of the great cities must come to an end in favour of a greater unity between industry and agriculture and the more even distribution of human dwellings across the Earth. It was a necessity not only to solve pressing problems such as waste disposal and the prevention of overcrowding, pollution and disease, but also as the basis for a more human pace of life in harmony with nature.

In “Damen, Bordiga and the passion for communism”, IR 158, we showed that Bordiga – perhaps more than any other Marxist in the 20th century – had remained loyal to this essential aspect of the communist programme, citing for example his 1953 article “Space Versus Cement”[14], which is a passionate polemic against the contemporary trends in architecture and town planning (an area in which Bordiga himself was professionally qualified), which were driven by capital’s need to herd as many human beings as possible into increasingly restricted spaces – a trend typified by the rapid construction of tower blocks supposedly inspired by the architectural theories of Le Corbusier. Bordiga is merciless about the purveyors of modern town planning ideology:

“Anyone who applauds such tendencies should not be considered only as a defender of capitalist doctrines, ideals and interests, but as an accomplice in the pathological tendencies of the supreme stage of capitalism in decay and dissolution” (no hesitations about decadence here, then!). Elsewhere in the same article he affirms:

“Verticalism, this deformed doctrine is called; capitalism is verticalist. Communism will be ‘horizontalist’”. And at the end of the article he joyfully anticipates the day when “the cement monsters will be ridiculed and suppressed” and the “giant cities deflated” in order to “make the density of life and work uniform over the inhabitable land”.

In another work, “The Human Species and the Earth’s Crust”[15], Bordiga cites extensively from Engels’ On the Housing Question, and we cannot avoid the temptation to do the same. This is from the last section of the pamphlet, where Engels lays into Proudhon’s follower Mülberger for claiming that it is utopian for wanting to overcome the “inevitable” antagonism between town and country:

“The abolition of the antithesis between town and country is no more and no less utopian than the abolition of the antithesis between capitalists and wage workers. From day to day it is becoming more and more a practical demand of both industrial and agricultural production. No one has demanded this more energetically then Liebig in his writings on the chemistry of agriculture, in which his first demand has always been that man shall give back to the land what he takes from it, and in which he proves that only the existence of the towns, and in particular the big towns, prevents this. When one observes how here in London alone a greater quantity of manure than is produced by the whole kingdom of Saxony is poured away every day into the sea with an expenditure of enormous sums, and when one observes what colossal works are necessary in order to prevent this manure from poisoning the whole of London, then the utopian proposal to abolish the antithesis between town and country is given a peculiarly practical basis. And even comparatively insignificant Berlin has been wallowing in its own filth for at least thirty years.

On the other hand, it is completely utopian to want, like Proudhon, to transform present-day bourgeois society while maintaining the peasant as such. Only as uniform a distribution as possible of the population over the whole country, only an integral connection between industrial and agricultural production together with the thereby necessary extension of the means of communication – presupposing the abolition of the capitalist mode of production – would be able to save the rural population from the isolation and stupor in which it has vegetated almost unchanged for thousands of years”[16].

Several strands of thought are suggested in this passage, and Bordiga is well aware of them. First, Engels insists that overcoming the antagonism between town and country is intimately linked to overcoming the general capitalist division of labour – a theme developed further in Anti-Dühring, in particular the division between mental and manual labour which appears to be so unbridgeable in the capitalist production process. Both these separations, no less than the division between the capitalist and the wage worker, are indispensable to the emergence of a fully rounded human being. And contrary to the schemes of the backward-gazing Proudhonists, the abolition of the capitalist social relation does not involve the preservation of the small-scale property of peasants or artisans; transcending the city-country, industry-agriculture divides will rescue the peasant from isolation and intellectual vegetation as much as it will free the city-dwellers from overcrowding and pollution.

Second, Engels raises here, as he does elsewhere, the simple but oft-avoided problem of human excrement. In their first, “savage” forms, the capitalist cities made almost no provision for dealing with human waste, and very rapidly paid the price in the generation of epidemic disease, notably dysentery and cholera – scourges which still haunts the shanty towns of the capitalist periphery, where basic hygiene facilities are notoriously absent. The construction of the sewage system certainly represented a step forward in the history of the bourgeois city. But simply flushing away human waste is itself a form of waste since it could be used as a natural fertiliser (as indeed it was in the earlier history of the city).

Looking back to the London or Manchester of Engels’ day, one might easily say: they thought these cities had already grown much too large, much too separated from their natural environment. What would they have made of the modern avatars of these cities? It has been estimated by the UN that around 55% of the world’s population now inhabit big cities, but if the current growth of the cities continues this figure will rise to around 68% by 2050[17]

This is a true example of what Marx already posited in the Grundrisse: “development as decay”, and Bordiga was prescient in seeing this in the period of reconstruction after the Second World War. The anthropologists who to seek define the opening of the period of what they call the “Anthropocene Era” (which basically means the era in which human activity has had a fundamental and qualitative impact on the planet’s ecology) usually trace it back to the spread of modern industry in the early 19th century – in short to the victory of capitalism. But some of them also talk about a “Great Acceleration” which took place after 1945, and we can see the juggernaut speeding up even more after 1989 with the rise of China and other “developing” countries.

The consequences of this growth are well-known: the contribution of the megacity to global heating through untrammelled construction, energy consumption, and the emissions of industry and transport, which are also making the air unbreathable in many cities (already noted by Bordiga in the “The Human Species and the Earth’s Crust”: “As for bourgeois democracy, it has stooped so low as to renounce the freedom to breathe”). The uncontrolled spread of urbanisation has been a primary factor in the destruction of natural habitats and species extinction; and last but not at all least, the megacites have revealed their role as incubators of new pandemic diseases, the deadliest and most contagious of which – Covid-19 -  is at the time of writing paralysing the world economy and leaving a world-wide trail of death and suffering. Indeed the last two “contributions” have probably come together in the Covid-19 epidemic, which is one of a number where a virus has jumped from one species to another. This has become a major problem in countries like China and in many parts of Africa where animal habitats are being obliterated, leading to a considerable expansion in the consumption of “bush meat”, and where the new cities, built to serve China’s frenzy of economic growth, have minimal hygiene controls. 

Overcoming the antagonism

In the list of revolutionary measures contained in Bordiga’s article, point 7 is the most relevant to the project of abolishing the antagonism between city and country: 

“’Construction freeze’ on the rings of housing and workplaces around major and small cities in order to spread the population more and more equally throughout the land area of the country. With a ban on unnecessary transportation, limitation of traffic and speed of transportation”.

This point seems especially contemporary today, when virtually every city is the theatre of relentless “vertical” elevation (the construction of huge skyscrapers, particularly in city centres) and “horizontal” extension, eating up the surrounding countryside. The demand is simply this: stop. The bloating of the cities and the unsustainable concentration of the population within them is the result of capitalist anarchy and is therefore essentially unplanned, un-centralised. The human energy and technological possibilities currently engaged in this cancerous growth must, from the very beginning of the revolutionary process, be mobilised in a different direction. Even though the world population has grown considerably since Bordiga calculated, in Space versus Cement, that “on average our species has one square kilometre for every twenty of its members”[18], the possibility of a far more rational and harmonious spreading of the population across the planet remains, even taking into account the necessity to preserve large areas of wilderness – a need understood better today because the immense importance of preserving bio-diversity across the planet has been scientifically established, but it was something already envisaged by Trotsky in Literature and Revolution[19].

The abolition of the city-country antagonism was distorted by Stalinism into meaning: pave over everything, build “workers’ barracks” and new factories over every field and forest. For authentic communism it will mean cultivating fields and planting forests in the middle of cities, but also that viable communities can be located in an astonishing variety of locations without destroying everything around them, and they will not be isolated because they will have at their disposal the means of communication which capitalism has indeed developed at bewildering speed. Engels had already referred to this possibility in The Housing Question and Bordiga takes it up again in “Space versus Cement”:

“The most modern forms of production, using networks of stations of all kinds, such as hydroelectric power stations, communications, radio, television, increasingly give a unique operational discipline to workers spread out in small groups over enormous distances. Combined work remains, in ever larger and more marvellous weaves, and autonomous production disappears more and more. But the technological density mentioned above is constantly decreasing. The urban and productive agglomeration remains therefore not for reasons dependent on the optimum of production, but for the durability of the profit economy and the social dictatorship of capital”.

Digital technology, of course, has further advanced this potential. But under capitalism the overall result of the “internet revolution” has been to accelerate the atomisation of the individual, while the trend towards “working from home” - particularly highlighted by the Covid-19 crisis and the accompanying measures of social isolation – has not at all reduced the tendency towards urban agglomeration. The conflict between, on the one hand, the desire to live and work in association with others, and on the other hand the need to find space in which to move and breathe, can only be resolved in a society where the individual is no longer at odds with the community.

Reduce your speed

As with the construction of human habitations, so it is with the mad rush of modern transport: stop, or at least, slow down!

Here again, Bordiga is ahead of his time. The methods of capitalist transportation on land, sea and air, based overwhelmingly on the burning of fossil fuels, account for over 20% of global carbon dioxide emissions[20], while in the cities, they have become a leading source of heart and lung disease, particularly affecting children. The yearly world death toll from traffic accidents stands at a staggering 1.35 million, more than half of them “vulnerable” road users: pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists.[21]And these are only the most obvious disadvantages of the present system of transport. The constant noise it generates gnaws away at the city dweller’s nerves, and the subordination of town planning to the needs of the car (and the car industry, so central to the existing capitalist economy) produces cities that are endlessly fragmented, with residential areas divided from each other by the ceaseless flow of traffic. Meanwhile social atomisation, an essential characteristic of bourgeois society and of the capitalist city in particular, is not only illustrated but reinforced by the lone car owner and driver competing for road space with millions of similarly separated souls.

Of course, capitalism has had to take measures to try to mitigate the worst effects of all this: “carbon offsetting” to make up for excessive flights, “traffic calming” and car-free walk-ways in city centres, the move towards the electric car.

None of these “reforms” go anywhere near solving the problem because none of them address the capitalist social relationship which lies at its root. Take the electric car for example: the car industry has seen the writing on the wall and is tending to switch more and more towards this form of transport. But even setting aside the problem of extracting and disposing of the lithium needed for the batteries, or the need to increase electricity production to power these vehicles, all of which has a substantial ecological cost, a city full of electric vehicles would be marginally quieter and somewhat less polluted but still dangerous to walk in and carved up by roads.

It’s possible that communism will indeed make extensive (though doubtless not exclusive) use of electric vehicles. But the real issue lies elsewhere. Capitalism needs to operate at break-neck speed because time is money and transport is driven by the needs of accumulation, which includes “turnover” time and thus transportation in its overall calculations. Capitalism is equally driven by the need to sell as many products as possible, hence the constant pressure for each individual to have their own personal possession – again typified by the private car which has become a symbol of personal wealth and prestige, the key to the “Freedom of the Road” in an era of incessant traffic jams.

The pace of life in today’s cities is far greater (even with the traffic jams) than it was in the second part of the 19th century, but in Woman and Socialism, first published in 1879, August Bebel was already looking forward to the city of the future, where “the nerve-racking noise, crowding and rushing of our large cities with their thousands of vehicles of all sorts ceases substantially: society assumes an aspect of greater repose" (p 300).

The rushing and congestion that make city life so stressful can only be overcome when the drive to accumulate has been suppressed, in favour of production planned to freely distribute necessary use values. In working out the transport networks of the future, a key factor will obviously be to greatly keep carbon emissions and other forms of pollution to a minimum, but the need to achieve “greater repose”, a certain degree of peace and quiet both for residents and travellers, will certainly be factored in to the overall plan. Since there is much less pressure to get from A to B at the quickest possible rate, travellers will have more time to enjoy the journey itself: perhaps, in such a world, the horse will return to parts of the land, sailboats to the sea, airships to the sky, while it will also be possible to use much faster means of transport when needed[22]. At the same time, the volume of traffic will be greatly reduced if the addiction to personal ownership of vehicles can be broken, and travellers can have access to free public transport of various kinds (buses, trains, boats, taxis and ownerless self-drive vehicles). We should also bear in mind that, in contrast to the many western capitalist cities where half of all apartments are occupied by single owners or tenants, communism will be an experiment in more communal forms of living; and in such a society travelling in the company of others can become a pleasure rather than a desperate race between hostile competitors.

We should also bear in mind that many of the journeys that clog up the transport system, those that involve travelling to pointless jobs such as those linked to finance, insurance or advertising, will have no place in a moneyless society. The daily rush hour will be a thing of the past. At the same time, production of useful objects can be re-designed and re-located to avoid the need for transporting products over long distances, which under capitalism is very often only determined by the aim of finding lower paid workforces or other advantages (for capital) such as lack of environmental regulation. The entire production and distribution of the use values we need will be reorganised and so many journeys between places of production and dwellings will no longer be necessary.

Thus the streets of a town where the angry roar of traffic has been reduced to a purr will regain some of their older advantages and uses– as playgrounds for children for example.

Again, we don’t underestimate the magnitude of the tasks involved here. Although the possibility of living in a more communal or associated way is contained in the transition to a communist mode of production, the egoistic prejudices that have been greatly exacerbated by several hundred years of capitalism, will not disappear in an automatic manner and will indeed often operate as serious obstacles to the process of communisation. As Marx put it,

"Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it, when it exists for us as capital or when we directly possess, eat, drink, wear, inhabit it etc, in short when we use it. Although private property conceives all these immediate realizations of possession only as means of life, and the life they serve is the life of private property, labour and capitalization. Therefore all the physical and intellectual senses have been replaced by the simple estrangement of all these senses - the sense of having" (Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, chapter on ‘Private property and communism’)

Rosa Luxemburg always maintained that the struggle for socialism was not just about “bread and butter” issues but that “morally … the working-class struggle denotes the cultural renovation of society”[23]. This cultural and moral aspect of the class struggle, and above all the fight against the “sense of having”, will certainly continue throughout the transition to communism.

CDW

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

 

Despite the difficulties resulting from the pandemic, the ICC held its 24th International Congress and we can draw a positive balance sheet from it. As we have always done, and in conformity with the practice of the workers’ movement, we are providing a general overview of its work through this article and through a number of documents which will orient our activity and intervention in the two years ahead – reports and resolutions which have been on our website for several months[1]. The Congress took place with a full recognition of the gravity of the current historical situation, characterised by one of the most dangerous pandemics in history, which is far from having been overcome.

The worst thing to do would be to under-estimate this situation at a time when governments are proclaiming that "everything is under control" and that "we are back to normal", while at the same time a horde of Covid deniers and anti-vaxxers (the other face, equally lying, of the government lies) who  downplay reality with their talk of "conspiracies" and "dark manoeuvres"; who use a real fact - the strengthening of the totalitarian control of the state - to take things to absurd levels in the name of “the defence of democratic freedoms”, thus denying the very real dangers to human life that the pandemic entails.

The most serious thing about the pandemic has been how all the states have responded: in a completely irresponsible way, taking contradictory and chaotic measures, without the slightest plan, without any coordination, playing more cynically than ever with the lives of millions of people[2]. And this did not happen in the states usually labelled as "rogue states", but in the United States, Germany, Britain and France, the "most advanced" countries, where there is supposedly "civilization and progress". The pandemic has brought to light the decadence and decomposition of capitalism, the rottenness of its social and ideological structures, the disorder and chaos emanating from its very relations of production, the “no future” of a mode of production gripped by increasingly violent contradictions that it cannot overcome.

Worse: the pandemic is the harbinger of new and deeper convulsions in all countries, imperialist tensions, ecological destruction, economic crisis ... The world proletariat cannot be fooled by vague promises of a "return to normal". It needs to look reality in the face, to understand that the face of barbarism has been clearly outlined by the pandemic and will be defined with even more virulence in the times to come.

The acceleration of capitalist decomposition

The 24th Congress of the ICC took place, like the congresses of revolutionary organisations throughout history, in a framework of fraternity and profound debate. It had the responsibility of confirming the framework of analysis of the decomposition of capitalism, rectifying possible errors or insufficiently elaborated appreciations. The Congress had to answer a series of necessary questions:

• Does the notion of decomposition and its progressive elaboration fully accord with the method of marxism?
• How are the effects of decomposition, its acceleration and intensification, and its interference on other planes of social life, mainly the economy, manifesting themselves?
• How does decomposition affect the class struggle and what is the perspective for its future development?
• Finally, what is the role of the organisation in this situation? How does it prepare for the future in the face of these challenges?

 

The method of analysis of capitalist decomposition

This Congress confirmed that the analysis of decomposition is in continuity with marxism. In 1914, with the outbreak of the First World War, marxists identified capitalism’s entry into its epoch of decadence, an analysis confirmed in 1919 by the platform of the Communist International, which spoke of “epoch of the breakdown of capital, its internal disintegration”. Faithful to this approach, the ICC more than three decades ago identified a specific and terminal phase of the decadence of capitalism: its decomposition. This phase of decomposition is the accumulation of a series of contradictions that capitalist society has been unable to resolve, as described in point 3 of the Theses of Decomposition [3]:

“To the extent that contradictions and expressions of decadent capitalism that mark its successive phases do not disappear with time, but continue and deepen, the phase of decomposition appears as the result of an accumulation of all the characteristics of a moribund system, completing the 75-year death agony of a historically condemned mode of production. Concretely, not only do the imperialist nature of all states, the threat of world war, the absorption of civil society by the state Moloch, and the permanent crisis of the capitalist economy all continue during the phase of decomposition, they reach a synthesis and an ultimate conclusion within it".

This analysis, first developed 30 years ago, has been powerfully confirmed in all its gravity, leading us to conclude in the Resolution on the International Situation from the 24th ICC Congress "most of the important events of the last three decades have confirmed the validity of this framework, as witnessed by the exacerbation of the every man for himself at the international level, the ‘rebound’ of the phenomena of decomposition to the core areas of world capitalism through the growth of terrorism and the refugee crisis, the rise of populism and the loss of political control by the ruling class, the growing rot of ideology through the spread of scapegoating, religious fundamentalism and conspiracy theories…The current Covid-19 pandemic is a distillation of all the key manifestations of decomposition, and an active factor in its acceleration" [4].

Since our Congress completed its work, events have succeeded each other with an unprecedented virulence, clearly confirming our analysis: imperialist wars in Ethiopia, Ukraine, Yemen, Syria; intensification of the confrontation between the USA and China; huge imprint of the ecological crisis around the world, notably through the multiplication of catastrophic floods and wildfires. Today, the pandemic is seeing a new surge of infections and the very dangerous threat of the Omicron variant; at the same time, the economic crisis is aggravating… The defence of the marxist framework of decomposition is today more necessary than ever faced with the blindness of other groups of the Communist Left and the infiltration into the revolutionary milieu of all kinds of modernist, sceptical, nihilist positions, which close their eyes to the reality of the situation. At this moment, we are seeing the unfolding in a number of countries of combative workers’ struggles which more than ever need the strength and lucidity of this framework of analysis.

Accumulation and acceleration of the effects of decomposition

The 24th Congress was able to identify the acceleration of capitalist decomposition by examining in depth the roots and consequences of the pandemic, “the first on such a scale since the Spanish flu outbreak of 1918… the most important moment in the evolution of capitalist decomposition since the period definitively opened up in 1989. The inability of the ruling class to prevent the resulting death toll of between 7 and 12 million confirms that the capitalist world system, left to itself, is dragging humanity towards the abyss of barbarism, towards its destruction; and that only the world proletarian revolution can halt this slide and lead humanity to a different future". The pandemic has demonstrated and confirmed the following realities:

• While capitalism is the first system in history whose relations of production have extended themselves and are dominant on a planetary scale, it is nonetheless the case that its rule is eminently chaotic because it is based on deadly competition for the domination of the world market between capitalist states. The world-wide character of capitalism does not enable it to achieve organised and coordinated action on a world scale – which would be the only rational and effective response to phenomena like the Covid pandemic - because it is not unified and centralised on a world-wide scale. On the contrary, the deadly competition for markets and for imperialist control of the globe has led to more and more aberrant and dangerous forms of behaviour on the part of the states, who have left populations defenceless against the pandemic and have even dramatically worsened it. China kept silent about the initial source of the pandemic in Wuhan; after that, big countries like the US, out of fear of their economies being paralysed, took a long time to react, which exacerbated the risks involved in the pandemic, then obliged them to take hasty, extreme and disorganised measures like the lock-downs.
• The capitalist states, without exception, acted in the same way against the working class: restrictions without any kind of planning and based essentially on repression; closing of supply centres without bothering about the economic conditions of the workers; maintenance of production and service sectors without caring about the lives of the workers, as happened with the health workers in all countries (according to Amnesty International, 17000 workers in this sector have died because of Covid and in America alone 570000 were infected [5]).
• After the Second World War, the WHO (World Health Organisation) was founded, which allowed a certain coordination between states to fight epidemics; however, in the face of the pandemic, the WHO has been ignored, each state has gone its own way, which has increased contagions and deaths and prevented any organised action. This is a clear expression of the advance of capitalist decomposition[6].
• The disputes over the production and distribution of the vaccine express the chaos and rottenness of the bourgeoisie. In the face of the economic crisis, such conflicts of interest within the ruling class will become more and more vicious. 

The 24th Congress concluded that the pandemic cannot be reduced to a "calamity" or seen only as a health crisis (in the style of those that occurred periodically in pre-capitalist modes of production and in capitalism itself during the 19th century). It is a global crisis, manifesting itself at many levels: sanitary, economic, social and political, as well as moral and ideological. It is a crisis of capitalist decomposition: a product of the accumulation of contradictions of the system of the last 30 years, as expressed in our Report on Pandemic and Decomposition for the 24th Congress[7]. Specifically, the pandemic is the result:

• of the dismantling of the health system in all the countries of the world. Since the beginning of the 21st century the capitalist states have known about the proliferation of epidemics such as EBOLA, SARS, etc. However, budgets have been decreased in health services and scientific research. This contrasts with the exorbitant increase in arms budgets and in the beefing up of the repressive forces.
• Viral diseases, such as Covid-19, are also the result of the living conditions of large sections of the working class in all countries, forced to live in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions.
• The irrationality of capitalist production that exclusively privileges profit devastates forests, rivers, and oceans. In particular, the destruction of forests dangerously alters the “biological links” between animals, plants and humans, with unforeseeable consequences… The majority of scientists attribute the emergence of Covid to this factor.

“The ICC is more or less alone in defending the theory of decomposition. Other groups of the communist left reject it entirely, either, as in the case of the Bordigists, because they do not accept that capitalism is a system in decline (or at best are inconsistent and ambiguous on this point); or, for the Internationalist Communist Tendency, because talking about a ‘final’ phase of capitalism sounds far too apocalyptic, or because defining decomposition as a descent into chaos is a deviation from materialism, which, in their view, seeks to find the roots of every phenomenon in the economy and above all in the tendency of the rate of profit to fall" (Resolution on the International Situation, 24th Congress). The Activities Resolution of the 24th Congress underlined that “The Covid Pandemic that began in early 2020 strikingly confirmed the acceleration of the impact of the period of the social decomposition of capitalism”.

The pandemic crisis has shown that decomposition has gone further: 1) it has hit the central countries with particular force, especially the USA; 2) there is a combination and concomitance between the different effects of the decomposition, which is unlike previous periods when they were contained locally and did not influence each other. What this crisis announces is increasingly violent convulsions, a sharpening of the tendencies to the loss of control of society on the part of the state. The decade ahead appears full of serious uncertainties, of more frequent and interrelated catastrophes. The slide of capitalism towards barbarism will have an increasingly terrifying face.

The perspective for the class struggle

The perspectives for the proletariat must also be analysed in the framework of capitalist decomposition. The Resolution on the Balance of Class Forces adopted by our previous Congress[8] identified the difficulties and weaknesses of the working class over the last 30 years. With the collapse of the Eastern bloc, the ICC identified the opening of the phase of decomposition and its consequences for the proletariat in terms of increasing difficulties for the development of its struggles, difficulties which would be further aggravated by the campaigns about the "death of communism" and the "disappearance of the working class”. However, at its 24th Congress, the ICC argued, as it did at its previous Congresses, that the working class is not defeated: "

“Despite the enormous problems facing the proletariat, we reject the idea that the class has already been defeated on a global scale, or is on the verge of such a defeat comparable to that of the period of counter-revolution, a defeat of a kind from which the proletariat would possibly no longer be able to recover. The proletariat, as an exploited class, cannot avoid going through the school of defeats, but the central question is whether the proletariat has already been so overwhelmed by the remorseless advance of decomposition that its revolutionary potential has been effectively undermined. Measuring such a defeat in the phase of decomposition is a far more complex task than in the period before the Second World War, when the proletariat had risen openly against capitalism and been crushed by a series of frontal defeats." (Resolution on the International Situation)

Obviously, we have to sharpen our analytical skills in order to detect this "point of no return" because, “the phase of decomposition indeed contains the danger of the proletariat simply failing to respond and being ground down over a long period – a ‘death by a thousand cuts’ rather than a head-on class confrontation" (ibid).

However, the Congress affirmed that “there is still sufficient evidence to show that, despite the undoubted ‘progress’ of decomposition, despite the fact that time is no longer on the side of the working class, the potential for a profound proletarian revival– leading to a reunification between the economic and the political dimensions of the class struggle – has not vanished.

The Congress also noted "The small but significant signs of a subterranean maturation of consciousness, manifesting itself in efforts towards a global reflection on the failure of capitalism and the need for another society in some movements (particularly the Indignados in 2011), but also through the emergence of young elements looking for class positions and turning towards the heritage of the Communist Left".

We must also bear in mind that the situation facing the working class is not the same as that following the collapse of the Russian bloc and the confirmation of the phase of decomposition in 1989. At that time, the bourgeoisie was able to present these events as proof of the death of communism, the victory of capitalism and the beginning of a bright future for humanity. Thirty years of decomposition have seriously undermined this ideological fraud, and the pandemic in particular has exposed the irresponsibility and negligence of all capitalist governments, the reality of a society plagued by deep economic divisions where we are by no means "all in it together". On the contrary, the pandemic and the lockdown have revealed the conditions of the working class, both as the main victim of the health crisis and as the source of all labour and all material production and, in particular, as the force whose labour satisfies basic human needs. This can be the basis for a future recovery of class identity. And, along with the growing realisation that capitalism is a totally obsolete mode of production, this has already been an element in the emergence of politicised minorities whose motivation has been above all to understand the dramatic situation facing humanity.

Despite the social atomisation of decomposition, despite deliberate attempts to fragment the labour force through stratagems like the green economy, or ideological campaigns that aim to present the more educated sectors of the proletariat as "middle class" and encourage individualism, the workers remain a class that in recent years has increased and is globally interconnected; but with the advance of decomposition, it is also true that atomisation and social isolation intensifies. It is a factor that makes it difficult for the working class, for the time being, to experience its own class identity. Only through the struggles of the working class on its own class terrain will it be able to develop the collective strength that the proletariat will need on a world scale to overthrow capitalism.

The workers are brought together by capital in the production process; their associated work is carried out under coercion, but the revolutionary character of the proletariat means dialectically reversing these conditions in a collective struggle. The exploitation of common labour is transformed into the struggle against exploitation and for the liberation of the social character of labour, for a society that knows how to consciously use all the potential of associated activity. That society for which the world proletariat will have to fight is communist society.

Debate: a strength for the revolutionary organisation

"Contrary to the Bordigist view, the organisation of revolutionaries cannot be ‘monolithic’. The existence of divergences within it is the manifestation that it is a living organ which has no ready-made answers to provide immediately to the problems arising in the class. Marxism is neither a dogma nor a catechism (...) Like all human reflection, that which presides over the development of proletarian consciousness is not a linear and mechanical process, but a contradictory and critical one, which necessarily poses the discussion and confrontation of arguments"[9].

Since before the 23rd International Congress divergences have been expressed on different questions: will the imperialist tensions lead to a new world war? Is the proletariat already defeated? What is the task of the hour for the organisation? This leads to the question of what does it mean to be active as a kind of fraction [10]in the present phase of decomposition​

The divergences on the analysis of the international situation had a first public expression in the document “Divergences with the Resolution on the international situation at the 23rd ICC Congress”[11]. The Activities Resolution of our recent Congress underlines that “the organisation has made an effort at every level - at Congresses, meetings of central organs, section meetings along with some 45 individual contributions in the internal bulletins over the last four years - to answer the divergences of the comrades and has also begun to express the debate externally. …The organisation's effort to confront divergences during this period expresses a positive will to strengthen the polemical defence of its positions and analyses."

The divergences were made more precise at the 24th Congress:

• Isn't the polarisation of imperialist tensions, mainly between the US and China, paving the way for a Third World War?
• Wouldn't the brutal measures taken by the states of confinement etc. be a covert means of preparing the populations for imperialist war?
• Is the pandemic a "socio-natural" phenomenon that the states can take advantage of for population control purposes or does it express and accelerate, above all, the general decomposition of capitalism?
• How can the proletariat face up to this grave historical situation? Does it first need a consciousness of itself and the development of its historical perspective? Or would this require the development of a struggles on its own class terrain, the maturing of its consciousness and the strengthening of the capacity of its communist organisations to intervene?

These and other questions have been addressed at the Congress and, with the aim of reaching as much clarity as possible in their expression, will be presented publicly in discussion documents. This is a practice of the workers' movement that the ICC has taken very seriously, as the above-mentioned text from IR 33 points out:

"Insofar as the debates in progress in the organisation concern the proletariat as a whole, it is appropriate for the organisation to bring them to the outside world, respecting the following conditions:

• that the debates concern general political questions that have reached sufficient maturity to make their publication a real contribution to the consciousness of the working class;
• that the place of the debates should not compromise the overall balance of the publications;
• that it is the organisation as a whole that decides and takes charge of the publication according to the criteria that guide the publication of any article in the press: clarity and editorial form, the interest they present for the working class as a whole".

The pillars on which to build the organisation

The Congress drew a positive balance of the activity of the organisation in the last two years, in particular the solidarity with all the comrades affected by the pandemic or by the serious economic consequences of the confinement (a good number of comrades lost the means to earn a living).

This positive balance should not make us lower our guard. The communist organisation is subjected to multiple pressures, and acquisitions - which cost a lot to win - can quickly be lost. As the Activities Resolution adopted by the Congress points out "The acceleration of decomposition poses important problems at the level of militancy, theory and organisational tissue".

These problems are not new, they are an expression of the impact of decomposition on the functioning and militancy of communist organizations since

“The different elements which constitute the strength of the working class directly confront the various facets of this ideological decomposition:

• solidarity and collective action are faced with the atomisation of ‘look out for number one’;
• the need for organisation confronts social decomposition, the disintegration of the relationships which form the basis for all social life;
• the proletariat’s confidence in the future and in its own strength is constantly sapped by the all-pervasive despair and nihilism within society;
• consciousness, lucidity, coherent and unified thought, the taste for theory, have a hard time making headway in the midst of the flight into illusions, drugs, sects, mysticism, the rejection or destruction of thought which are characteristic of our epoch." (Thesis 13 of the Theses on Decomposition).

 

These dangers clearly show that our work is above all to prepare the future. The ICC's fundamental aim of building a bridge to the future world communist party of the proletariat has been set out since its founding Congress in 1975, and was reaffirmed at the 23rd Congress; but this has been brought into even shaper relief in recent years by several factors: the acceleration of decomposition, and the mounting difficulties faced by the proletariat’s struggles intensify the challenges for the organisation of revolutionaries; ageing of comrades and at the same time the emergence of new militants who are joining the organisation in the context of decomposition; the growing attacks of parasitism against the organisation; the weight of opportunism and sectarianism in the groups coming from the Communist Left. 

At its 24th ICC Congress aimed to identify the perspectives, the difficulties and dangers we have to confront if we are to carry out this role of transmission. However, faced with this situation, the preparation of the future has to be clearly understood as going against the stream.

Historically, the marxist movement has only been able to develop by successfully confronting momentous events and therefore has always based itself on a fighting spirit, a desire to overcome all the obstacles that bourgeois society puts in its way. The ICC's experience is no different in this respect. The organisations which history requires to play a role of transmission have had to prove themselves through real trials by fire: the marxist current of the mid-19th century, despite the imprisonments, exile and great poverty of its militants after the defeats of 1848, provided the springboard for the creation of the 1st International in the 1860s. Bilan and the GCF went through the trials of the Stalinist counter-revolution of the 30s, 40s and 50s, fascism and anti-fascism, of the Second World War, to keep the revolutionary flame alive for future generations. It is clear that the period of decomposition is the ICC’s own trial by fire.

The ability to analyse the world and historical situation is one of the pillars of our immediate perspectives; the marxist method of historical materialism and the constant reference to the heritage of previous acquisitions, as well as the confrontation of divergences, are part of the preparation for the future. Our activity in the spheres of intervention, of theoretical deepening, of the defence of the organisation, are founded on the transmission and development of the historic acquisitions of a century of the Communist Left and it is only on this solid basis that the future world communist party of the proletariat can be prepared.

As part of the preparation for the future, there is also the uncompromising fight against parasitism. The effort of the last years shows the necessity to continue the fight against parasitism, denouncing it as the ICC has done in front of the working class, our contacts and in front of the milieu of the Communist Left.

The struggle against opportunism within the organisations of the Communist Left, linked to the struggle against parasitism[12], is going to be important in the next period; there is a great danger that the potential of the future unity of the revolutionaries could be lost and atrophy. The experience of the last two years of the defence of the organisation against the attacks of parasitism and for breaking the cordon sanitaire it tries to erect around the ICC shows that the struggle against opportunism and sectarianism is synonymous with the knowledge and defence of our history.

In the coming period the ICC intends to improve its press. In the last decades, the concern for polemics with the proletarian political milieu our ranks has diminished. In the next period the organisation intends to reverse this situation. Our fraction-like work, also involves preparing the future by widening polemics, inspired by those of the first phase of Iskra or the first issues of Internationalisme dedicated to the polemic against Vercesi and his opportunist drift. In response to the putrefaction of bourgeois ideology, to the obscurantist mystifications, the press must act as a reference point against the intoxication that emanates from the ideological decomposition of capitalism and offer the working class a rational and concrete perspective for the overthrow of capitalism; we must therefore strengthen the diffusion of our digital and printed press.

The perspective of communism is in the preparation of the future.

The central aim of the 24th Congress was the preparation of the future through drawing the lessons of past mistakes, relentlessly combating parasitism and opportunism, understanding as rapidly as possible the constant developments of historical evolution, defending the organisation and its united, fraternal and centralised functioning. This means firmly and critically basing ourselves upon the historical continuity of the communist organisations, as the Activities Resolution of the Congress put it:

“In the stormy transition to the future of ‘wars and revolutions’ Rosa Luxemburg declared at the founding congress of the German Communist Party in 1919 that they were ‘returning under the banner of marxism’. As the working class in Russia prepared for the first time in history to overthrow the bourgeois state Lenin recalled the acquisitions on the question of the state from Marx and Engels in State and Revolution…

The ICC, as it prepares for the unprecedented instability and unpredictability of the putrefaction of world capitalism must recover the heritage, the militant example, and the organisational experience of MC, thirty years after his death. That is, return to the tradition and method of the Communist Left which the ICC inherited...

This tradition lives on and must be critically reappropriated, in fact it is the only one which can guide the ICC and the working class through the test of fire that is to come”.

ICC, December 2021

This report is written within the framework of the resolution on the international situation adopted by the 24th ICC Congress and more particularly on the following points (emphasised in bold):

“8. While the advance of capitalist decomposition, alongside the chaotic sharpening of imperialist rivalries, primarily takes the form of political fragmentation and a loss of control by the ruling class, this does not mean that the bourgeoisie can no longer resort to state totalitarianism in its efforts to hold society together. (...) The election of Biden, supported by a huge mobilisation of the media, parts of the political apparatus and even the military and the security services, express this real counter-tendency to the danger of social and political disintegration most clearly embodied by Trumpism. In the short term, such “successes” can function as a brake on mounting social chaos.

9. The evident nature of the political and ideological decomposition in the world’s leading power does not mean that the other centres of world capitalism are able to constitute alternative fortresses of stability (...)

12. Within this chaotic picture, there is no doubt that the growing confrontation between the US and China tends to take centre stage. The new administration has thus demonstrated its commitment to the “tilt to the east” (...).”

This framework aims to understand the events of the last months in order to contribute reflection around the three following questions:

1. Where are we regarding the decline of American hegemony?

2. Has China been able to draw an advantage from this period?

3. What is the dominant tendency today on the level of imperialist confrontations?

 

1. The decline of American hegemony and the polarisation of US/Chinese tensions

“Confirmed as the only remaining superpower, the USA would do everything in its power to ensure that no new superpower – in reality, no new imperialist bloc – could arise to challenge its ‘New World Order’”. (Resolution on the International Situation, point 4, 15th ICC Congress, 2003, International Review 113). The history of the last 30 years has been characterised by a systematic decline of American leadership despite its persistent policy of trying to maintain its hegemonic position in the world.

1.1 A brief look at the decline of American hegemony

Different stages have characterised the efforts of the United States to maintain its leadership faced with evolving threats. It is also marked by internal dissensions within the American bourgeoisie on which policies to undertake, and this will also accentuate these dissensions.

a) The “New World Order” under the direction of the United States (Bush Senior and Clinton: 1990-2001)

President Bush Senior utilised the invasion of Kuwait by Iraqi forces in order to mobilise a large military coalition around the United States to “punish” Saddam Hussein. The first Gulf War aimed to make an “example”: faced with a world being swamped by chaos and “each for themselves” it was a matter of imposing a minimum of order and discipline, and, in the first place, on the most important countries of the ex-Western Bloc. The sole remaining superpower tried to impose on the “international community” a “new world order” under its aegis not only because it was the only one that had the means but also because it is the country which has most to lose from a world in disorder.

However, it could only take up this role by more tightly constraining the whole of the world in the steely grip of militarism and barbaric warfare, as in the bloody civil war in ex-Yugoslavia where it had to counter the imperialist appetites of the European countries (Germany, Britain, France, etc.) by imposing a “Pax Americana” in the region (Dayton Accords, December 1995).

b) The United States as the “World Cop” (Bush Junior: 2001-2008)

The attacks by al-Qaida on September 11 2001 led President Bush Junior to unleash a “War against Terror” in Afghanistan and above all Iraq in 2003. Despite all the pressure and the use of “fake news” aiming to mobilise the “international community” behind it against the “Axis of Evil”, the United States failed to mobilise the other imperialisms against the “Gangster State” of Saddam and invaded almost alone apart from Tony Blair’s Britain, its only significant ally.

The setback of these interventions, underlined by the retreat from Iraq (2011) and Afghanistan (2021), demonstrates the incapacity of the United States to play the role of World Cop, imposing its law on the world. On the contrary, the “War against Terror” opened wide the Pandora’s Box of decomposition in these regions, exacerbating the expansion of every man for himself, which has been particularly shown by a multiplication of imperialist ambitions all over the place: countries such as China and Russia, Iran of course, but also Turkey, Saudi Arabia, even the Gulf Emirates and Qatar. The growing impasse of the policy of the United States and the aberrant flight into military barbarity has demonstrated the net weakening of its world leadership.

The Obama administration attempted to reduce the political catastrophe created by Bush (Bin Laden’s execution in 2011 underlined the absolute technological and military superiority of the United States) and to focus more and more clearly on the rise of China as the principal danger for American hegemony This “pivot” has unleashed intense debates with its bourgeoisie and its state apparatus.

c) The policy of “America First” (Trump and essentially followed by Biden: 2017-)

The policy of “America First” on the imperialist level, opened up by Trump from 2017, meant in reality the official recognition of the retreat of American imperialist policy over the last 25 years: “The American response started by Obama taken on and amplified by Trump by other means represents a turning point in American politics. The defence of its interests as a national state now means embracing the tendency towards every man for himself that dominates imperialist relations: the United States is moving from being the gendarme of the world order to being the main agent of every man for himself, of chaos, of questioning the world order established since 1945 under its auspices.” (23rd Congress of the ICC, Resolution on the International Situation, International Review 164).

While this demonstrates the limits of operations based on “boots on the ground”, given the problems of mobilising masses of workers into large-scale engagements and consequent casualties that a major military deployment implies (Bush already had this difficulty in mobilising for the war in Iraq), above all it goes in tandem with a growing polarisation and sharpened aggression towards China which tends to be identified more and more as the principal danger. If this position was discussed within the Obama administration and if still more tensions appeared on the question within the Trump administration, between those who wanted to take on the “gangster states” such as Iran (Pompeo, Kushner) and those concentrating on the “major Chinese danger” (secret services and military), the focus on this last option is incontestably the central axis of Biden’s foreign policy. Concentrating its forces on military and technological competition with China is a strategic choice for the United States with a view to maintaining or even increasing its supremacy and defending its position as the “Godfather” faced with the gangsters (China and, subordinately, Russia) which most directly threaten its hegemony. Already as a world gendarme, the United States exacerbated warfare, chaos and each for themselves; its present policy is no less destructive, quite the contrary.

1.2. Polarisation of tensions around the South China Sea

The pivot of America towards China and the consequent redeployment of forces initiated by the Trump administration have been fully taken up by Biden’s administration. The latter has not only maintained the aggressive economic measures against China set in motion up by Trump, but it has ramped up the pressure through an aggressive policy:

- on the policy level: defence of Uyghur rights and Hong Kong; diplomatic and commercial rapprochement with Taiwan; accusations of information technology piracy against China:

- at the military level in the South China Sea through explicit and spectacular military actions over the last months: a multiplication of military exercises involving the American fleet and those of its allies; alarmist reports on the imminent threat of Chinese intervention in Taiwan; the presence in Taiwan of special US forces in order to strengthen the unity of the Taiwanese elite; conclusion of the new AUKUS accord between the United States, Australia and Britain which sets up a military coordination explicitly oriented against China; Biden’s pledge to support Taiwan in the event of Chinese aggression.

Taiwan has always played an important role in the strategy of the United States towards China. During the Cold War it constituted an important element of the containment of the Soviet Bloc; in the 1990’s, and in the beginning of the 2000s, it constituted a workshop for globalised capitalism, into which China was also integrated. But with the growth in power of the latter the outlook changed and Taiwan played a new geo-strategic role in blocking access to the west Pacific for Chinese vessels. Moreover, on a strategic level, “in effect the foundries on the island produce the major part of semi-conductors of the latest generation, indispensable components of the world’s digital economy (smartphones connections, artificial intelligence, etc.)” Le Monde diplomatique, October 2021.

For its part China has reacted furiously to these political and military pressures, particularly those around Taiwan: organisation of massive and threatening naval and aerial manoeuvres around the island; the publication of alarmist studies indicating that “the risk of war has never been so high”, or the release of plans for a surprise attack against the island which would lead to a total defeat of the Taiwanese forces.

Warnings, threats and intimidation have come one after the other in the last months around the South China Sea. They underline the growing pressure exerted on China by the United States. In this context the US has done everything possible to take in tow other Asian countries concerned by the expansionist aims of Beijing, trying for example to create a type of Asian NATO, the QUAD, bringing together the United States, Japan, Australia and India, and associating South Korea to it. On the other hand, and in the same sense, Biden wanted to revive NATO with the aim of drawing European countries into its policy of pressurising China. Paradoxically, the make-up of AUKUS indicates the limits of rallying other nations behind the United States.  AUKUS first of all represents a slap in the face for France and negated Biden’s fine words about a “partnership” within NATO. Moreover, this agreement confirms the sensitivity of countries like India, which has its own imperialist ambitions, and above all of South Korea and Japan, squeezed between fear of China’s military strengthening and their industrial and commercial links with the country.

 

2. The significance of the return to power of the Taliban in Afghanistan

After the chaos and bloody barbarism of Iraq and Syria, events of September 2021 in Afghanistan fully confirm the main tendencies of the period: the decline of US leadership, the growth of chaos and each for themselves.

2.1. The US debacle in Afghanistan

The total collapse of the regime and the Afghan army, the clear advance of the Taliban despite 20 years of American military intervention and hundreds of billions of dollars devoured by “nation building”, as well as the panicked evacuation of US nationals and collaborators, strikingly confirms that the United States is no longer up to fulfilling the role of World Cop. More specifically, the dramatic and chaotic retreat of American troops from Afghanistan has led to domestic and foreign stresses on the Biden administration.

a) on the external level, the debacle has undermined the reliability of the United States in the eyes of its “allies”

 When even the Secretary General of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, has had to recognise that the United States could no longer guarantee the defence of its European allies against their enemies, the whole charm offensive of Biden towards NATO and the allies collapsed. The total absence of working in concert within NATO and the uncompromising “Lone Ranger” attitude of the United States provoked indignant reactions in London, Paris and Berlin. As for the collaborators of the Americans in Afghanistan (like the Kurds in Syria betrayed by Trump), they rightly fear for their lives: here is the strongest world power incapable of guaranteeing the lives of its collaborators and the support of its allies. It doesn’t give much confidence (as Xi Jinping sarcastically observed!).

b) on the internal level it has eroded the credibility of the Biden administration

The resolution on the international situation of the 24th congress underlined that “The election of Biden, supported by a huge mobilisation of the media, parts of the political apparatus and even the military and the security services, express this real counter-tendency to the danger of social and political disintegration most clearly embodied by Trumpism. In the short term, such ‘successes’ can function as a brake on mounting social chaos” (point 8). However, the Afghan debacle demonstrates not only the lack of United States’ reliability towards its allies but it also accentuates tensions within the American bourgeoisie and opens up an avenue to all the adverse forces (Republican and populist) who condemn this hasty and humiliating retreat that “dishonours the United States on an international level”. And this at a time when the policy of industrial recovery and public works advocated by the Biden administration, and aimed at containing the ravages caused by populism, comes up against the ferocious opposition from Republicans in the Capitol and from Trump. On top of which, faced with a stagnating anti-Covid vaccination policy, it has been obliged to take measures of constraint against the population.

2.2 An unpredictable situation for the other imperialisms

The absence of centralisation in the Taliban power, the myriad currents and groups with the most diverse aspirations which make up the movement, and the agreements made with local warlords in order to quickly define the parameters of the country mean that chaos and unpredictability characterise the situation, as the recent attacks aimed at the Hazara minority demonstrate. This can only intensify the interventions of different imperialisms, but it also increases the unpredictability of the situation and thus the ambient chaos.

- Iran is linked to the Hazara minority along its frontiers and firmly intends to maintain its influence in this region. Pakistan is concerned that the victory of the Taliban (that it finances through its ISI secret services) leads to a Pashtun independence movement within its own frontiers. India, which largely financed the collapsed regime, is now confronted with an intensification of Muslim guerrilla activity in Indian Kashmir. Russia has strengthened its troop deployment in the ex-Soviet republics of Asia in order to counter any attempts to support any local jihadist movements.

- And does China in particular draw any advantage from the American retreat? The opposite is true. Chaos in Afghanistan even renders coherent and long-term policies in the country hazardous. Moreover, the presence of the Taliban on the borders with China constitute a potentially serious danger for Islamic infiltration (via the Uyghurs); above all the Pakistani “brothers” of the Taliban, the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), cousins of the Islamic State of Khorasan (ISK), are engaged in attacks against the workplaces and dockyards of the “New Silk Road”, which have already led to the deaths of dozens of Chinese “aid workers”.

China is trying to counter the danger coming from Afghanistan by implanting itself in the old Soviet republics of Central Asia (Turkistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan). But these republics are traditionally part of the Russian zone of influence. This increases the danger of a confrontation with its “strategic ally”, with whom it has fundamentally opposing long-term interests over the “New Silk Road” (cf. Point 4.2. which deals with the Russian-Chinese alliance).

 

3. China’s position on the imperialist chessboard

In the last decades China has undergone a dazzling rise on the economic and imperialist levels which has made it the most important challenger to the United States. However, as events of September 2021 in Afghanistan have already illustrated, it hasn’t been able to profit either from the decline of the US or from the crisis of Covid-19 and its consequences in order to strengthen its position on the level of imperialist relations; again quite the contrary. We’ll examine the difficulties which faced Chinese bourgeoisie in handling the pandemic, and in the management of the economy, imperialist relations and tensions within the ruling class.

3.1. Difficulties in the management of the Covid crisis

China put herd immunity (“zero tolerance”) before opening up the country, but the strict lock-downs applied to towns and entire regions each time infections were detected heavily disrupted economic and commercial activities: thus, the closure of the port of Yantian, the third largest container port in the world, led last May to the blockage of thousands of containers and hundreds of ships, totally disorganising world maritime traffic.

Moreover, this quest for herd immunity pushed some Chinese towns and provinces to put financial sanctions on latecomers and those reluctant to get vaccinated. Faced with numerous criticisms on Chinese social networks, the central government blocked these types of measures, which were tending “to put national cohesion into danger”.

Finally, the most serious problems came without doubt over the converging information on the limited efficacy of the Chinese vaccine communicated by the various countries using them “All in all, the Chilean vaccination campaign – quite effective with 62% of the population currently vaccinated - does not seem to have any noticeable impact on the proportion of deaths” (H. Testard, "Covid-19: la vaccination décolle en Asie mais les doutes augmentent sur les vaccins chinois", Asialyst, 21.07.21). Even the Chinese authorities are looking to make agreements to import Pfizer or Moderna versions in order to alleviate the inefficiencies of their own vaccine.

Beyond the undeniable responsibility of China in the outbreak of the pandemic, the inefficient management of the Covid crisis by Beijing puts pressure on Chinese state capitalism.

3.2. The accumulation of problems for the Chinese economy

The strong growth of China for 40 years now – even if the figures have fallen back the last decade – seems to be coming to an end. Experts expect growth of Chinese GDP lower than 6% in 2021 against 7% on average over the last decade and more than 10% from the preceding decade. Various other factors are accentuating the present difficulties of the Chinese economy:

a) The danger of the bursting of the Chinese property bubble: Evergrande, China’s second biggest real estate company today finds itself burdened with some 300 billion euros of debt, around 2% of GDP, that it can’t pay back. Others similar companies are contaminated such as Fantasia Holdings or Sinic Holdings and are on the edge of default faced with their creditors. Generally, the housing sector which represents 25% of the Chinese economy has generated a colossal public and private debt of billions and billions of dollars. Evergrande’s bankruptcy is really only the first sequence in the global collapse of this sector. Today empty buildings are so numerous that they could house 90 million people! It’s true that the immediate collapse of the sector will be avoided as the Chinese authorities have no other choice than to limit the damage which otherwise risks having a very severe impact on the financial sector: “(...) ‘there will not be a snowball effect like in 2008 [in the US], because the Chinese government can stop the machine’, says Andy Xie, an independent economist and former Morgan Stanley employee in China, quoted by Le Monde. ‘I think that with Anbang [insurance group, editor's note] and HNA [Hainan Airlines], we have good examples of what can happen: there will be a committee bringing together around a table the company, the creditors and the authorities, which will decide which assets to sell, which to restructure and, in the end, how much money is left and who can lose funds’.” (P.-A. Donnet, “Chute d’Evergrande en Chine: la fin de l’argent facile”, Asialyst, 25.09.21).

However, if the Chinese housing market bases its economic model on astronomical debt, numerous other sectors are in the red: at the end of 2020, the global debt of Chinese businesses represents 160% of the GDP of the country, against about 80% for American companies; and the “toxic” investments of local governments, according to the analyses of Goldman Sachs, represents 53,000 billion yuan, a sum which amounts to 52% of Chinese GDP. Thus the bursting of the housing bubble risks not only contaminating other sectors of the economy but also endangering social stability (close to 3 million direct and indirect jobs are linked to Evergrande), a great fear of the Chinese Communist Party.

b) Energy cuts: they are the consequence of a lack of provision of coal caused, among other things, by the record floods in the Shaanxi Province which alone produces 30% of the country’s combustibles, and also the hardening of anti-pollution rules decided by Xi. The shortage is already affecting industrial activity in several regions: the steel sector and the aluminium and cement sectors are already suffering from limitations on available electricity. Aluminium production capacity has already been reduced by 7%, cement production by 29% (Morgan Stanley’s figures); paper and glass will be the next sectors hit by power shortages. From now these cuts will slow down economic growth in the whole of the country. But the situation is even more serious than appears at first sight: “The power shortage is now spilling over into the residential market in parts of the Northeast. Liaoning province has extended power cuts from the industrial sector to residential networks.” (P.-A. Donnet, «Chine: comment la grave pénurie d’électricité menace l’économie», Asialyst, 30.09.21).

c) Breaks in the production and supply chain. These are linked to the energy crisis but also to the lock-down due to Covid infections (see the preceding points). They have affected production in industries across many regions and increased the risk of breaking national and global supply chains that have already been hit hard, much more so as some manufacturers are faced with an acute shortage of semi-conductors.

3.3. The planned “New Silk Road” is running out of steam

The “New Silk Road” is becoming more and more difficult to achieve, due to financial problems linked to the Covid crisis and to the difficulties of the Chinese economy but also to the reticence of its partners:

- on one hand, the level of debt in the “partner” countries has risen because of the Covid crisis and they find themselves unable to pay the interest on Chinese loans. Some countries like Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Kirghizstan, Pakistan, Montenegro and various African countries have asked China to restructure, delay or even annul their debt payments which are due this year.

- on the other hand, there is a growing distrust among numerous countries regarding the actions of China (European Union, Cambodia, Philippines, Indonesia) connected to the anti-Chinese pressure exercised by the United States (as in Latin America), and there are also the consequences of the chaos produced by decomposition, destabilising certain key countries “along the route”, as in the example of Ethiopia.

In short, we shouldn’t be surprised that in 2020 there was a collapse in the value of investments injected into the “New Silk Road” project (-64%), while China has loaned more than $461 billion since 2013.

3.4. Accentuation of tensions with the Chinese bourgeoisie

During the regime of Deng Xiao Ping’s Stalinist-type Chinese state capitalism, under the cover of a policy of “creating wealth in order to share wealth”, a number of “free” zones were established (Hong Kong, Macao, etc.) so as to develop a type of “free market” capitalism allowing international capital to come in while also favouring the private capitalist sector. This sector, with the collapse of the Eastern bloc and the “globalisation” of the economy in the 90’s, developed in an exponential manner, even if the public sector under the direct control of the state still represented 30% of the economy. How then did the rigid and repressive “One Party” Stalinist state manage this “opening” to private capital? From the 1990’s, the Party was transformed by massively integrating entrepreneurs and private business bosses: “In the early 2000s, the then president Jiang Zemin lifted the ban on recruiting private sector entrepreneurs, who had previously been seen as class enemies (...). The businessmen and women thus selected become members of the political elite, which ensures that their companies are, at least partially, protected from predatory managers” (“Que reste-t-il du communisme en Chine?”, Le Monde Diplomatique 68, July, 2021) Today, professionals and graduate managers constitute 50% of Chinese Communist Party members.

The oppositions between the different factions will thus be expressed not only within state structures but even within the CCP itself. For several years (see the Report on Imperialist Tensions for the 20th ICC Congress, 2013), the growing tensions between different factions within the Chinese bourgeoisie, particularly between those linked to the private capitalist sectors depending on international investments and exchanges, and those linked to the state structures of financial control at the regional and national level are those that advocate opening up to world trade and those that advance a more nationalist policy. In particular, the “turn to the left” taken by the faction behind President Xi, which means less economic pragmatism and more nationalist ideology, has intensified tensions and political instability these last years: thus “the continuing tensions between Premier Li Keqiang and President Xi Jinping over economic recovery, as well as China's 'new position' on the international stage” (A. Payette, "Chine : à Beidaihe, ‘l'université d'été’ du Parti, les tensions internes à fleur de peau", Asialyst, 06.09.20). There is the “policy of war” undertaken by Chinese diplomacy regarding Taiwan and, at the same time, the spectacular declaration by Xi that China wants to reach carbon neutrality for its economy by 2060, and explicit criticisms of Xi  are regularly appearing (latterly the “viral alert” essay published by a reputable professor of constitutional right at Beijing’s Tsinghua University, predicting the end of Xi). There are tensions between Xi and the general command of the People’s Liberation Army, the interventions of the state apparatus against “too flamboyant” entrepreneurs and criticisms of state control (Jack Ma and Ant Financial, Alibaba). Some bankruptcies (HNA, Evergrande) could also be linked to fighting between cliques within the Party, for example in the cynical framework of “protecting citizens from the excesses of the capitalist class”.

In short, far from taking advantage of the present situation, the Chinese bourgeoisie, as others, is confronted with the weight of the crisis, the chaos of decomposition and internal tensions that it is trying by all means to contain within the capitalist structures of a worm-eaten state.

 

4. The extension of chaos, instability and barbaric warfare

The analysis given in the preceding points certainly shows the tensions between the United States and China tends to occupy a predominant place in the situation of imperialism, but without stimulating a tendency to the formation of imperialist blocs. In fact, beyond certain limited alliances such as AUKUS, the principal power on the planet, the United States, has not only failed to mobilise other powers behind its policies (as against Iraq or Iran before or China today) but it is incapable of defending its own allies and taking on the role of “bloc leader”. This decline of US leadership leads to an accumulation of chaos which more and more impacts on the policies of the all the dominant imperialisms including China which itself cannot durably impose its leadership over other countries.

4.1. Chaos and war

The fact that the Taliban have “beaten” the Americans will embolden all the smaller sharks, who will not hesitate to advance their agendas in the absence of anyone able to impose the “rules”. We are going into a period of an acceleration of lawlessness and the greatest chaos in history. Each for themselves becomes the central factor in imperialist relations and the most barbaric warfare threatens entire zones of the planet.

a) Central Asia, the Middle East and Africa

In addition to the barbaric civil wars in Iraq, Libya and Yemen, the descent of Afghanistan into horror, the strong tensions between Armenia and Azerbaijan, stimulated by Turkey provoking Russia, civil war has broken out in Ethiopia (supported by Eritrea) against the “rebel province” of Tigray (supported by Sudan and Egypt); and finally there are growing tensions between Algeria and Morocco.

The “Somalisation” of States, zones of instability and “no-go” areas (see the Report of the 20th Congress of the ICC) have not stopped spreading; at present chaos reigns from Kabul to Addis-Ababa, Sanna to Yerevan, Damascus to Tripoli and Baghdad to Bamako.

b) Central and South America

Covid has hit the sub-continent hard (one eighth of the world population, one third of world deaths in 2020) and it has plunged into the worst recession for 120 years: GDP contracted by 7.7% in 2020 (LMD, October 2021). Chaos is growing in Haiti which is sinking into a desperate situation under the reign of bloody gangs and the situation is equally catastrophic in Central America; hundreds of millions of desperate people fleeing misery and chaos and threatening the frontier of the United States. The region suffers more and more convulsions linked to decomposition: social revolts in Columbia and Chile, populist confusion in Brazil. Mexico is trying to play its own cards (proposing a new OAS, etc) but is too dependent on the United States to affirm its own aspirations. The United States has not been able to remove Maduro in Venezuela where China, Russia and even Iran continue with their “humanitarian” support, as well as Cuba. Above all China has infiltrated itself into the economy of the region since 2008 and has become an important financier of numerous Latin American states, but American counter-pressure is presently strong on certain states (Panama, Ecuador and Chile) to keep their distance from “the predatory economic activity” of Beijing.

c) Europe

The tensions between NATO and Russia have intensified these last months: after the incident where the Ryanair flight was diverted and intercepted by Belarus in order to arrest a dissident taking refuge in Lithuania; there were June NATO manoeuvres in the Black Sea off the coast of Ukraine where an engagement took place between a British frigate and the Russian navy; and in September there were joint manoeuvres between the Russian and Belarusian armies on the frontiers of Poland and the Baltic States faced with NATO exercises on Ukrainian territory, a real provocation in the eyes of Putin.

4.2. Growing instability

The growing chaos also increases tensions within the bourgeoisie and strengthens the unpredictability of their imperialist positioning; this is the case with Brazil where the catastrophic health situation and the irresponsible management of the Bolsonaro government has led to a more and more intense political crisis, and there are similar situations in other countries of Latin America (political instability in Ecuador, Peru, Colombia and Argentina). In the Near and Middle East tensions between the clans and tribes who run Saudi Arabia could destabilise the country, while Israel is marked by an opposition from a large part of its political factions from the right to the left against Netanyahu and against the religious parties, but also by pogroms inside the country against “Israeli” Arabs. Finally, there is Turkey looking for a solution to its political and economic difficulties in a suicidal dash into imperialist adventures (Libya, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, etc).

In Europe the Afghan debacle and the US submarine deal as well as the post-Brexit situation accentuates the destabilisation of organisations which came from the period of blocs such as NATO or the EU. Within NATO some countries increasingly doubt the reliability of the United States. Thus, Germany has not given ground to American pressure regarding the Baltic Sea pipeline with Russia, and France didn’t react well to the insult from the United States in the submarine deal with Australia; meanwhile other European countries continue to see the United States as their main protector. The question of relations with Britain over the implementation of the Brexit agreement (Northern Ireland, fish quotas, etc.) divides the countries of the EU and tensions remain strong between France and Britain. Within the EU itself the flux of refugees continues to come up against states while those like Hungary and Poland are more and more openly calling into question the “supra-national powers” defined by the European Treaty and the hydra of populism threatens France at the time of the Spring elections in 2022.

Chaos and each for themselves also tends to hinder the continuity of action of the major imperialisms: the United States is obliged to maintain pressure through regular air bombardments on the Shi’ite militias that are harassing their remaining forces in Iraq; Russia has to play the fire-fighter in the armed confrontation between Armenia and Azerbaijan, stirred up by Turkish imperialism; the extension of chaos in the Horn of Africa through the civil war in Ethiopia with Sudan and Egypt supporting the Tigray region and Eritrea the central Ethiopian government. These developments are undermining Chinese plans to make Ethiopia, vaunted as a pole of stability and the “world’s new workshop”, a pivotal point for its “Belt and Road” plan in north-east Africa – this was also the reason China set up a military base in Djibouti. The continuing impact, measures and uncertainties linked to the pandemic are equally a factor in the imperialist policies of various states: stagnation of vaccinations in the United States after opening up with a fanfare (over 800,000 thousand deaths up to December 24, New York Times), new, massive lock-downs of entire regions and a patent lack of Chinese vaccine efficiency, distrust of the population in Russia towards vaccines (just over 30% vaccination rate).

This instability also characterises alliances such as the one between China and Russia. If these countries have developed a “strategic co-operation” (reference the Sino-Russian communiqué of 28.6.21) against the United States and in relation to the Middle East, Iran or North Korea, and even organised common manoeuvres between their armies and navies, their political ambitions are radically different: above all Russian imperialism aims for the destabilisation of regions and can aim for little more than “frozen conflicts” (Syria, Libya, Ukraine, Georgia...) whereas China deploys a long-term economic and imperialist policy: the New Silk Road. Moreover, Russia is perfectly conscious that the route of the “Silk Road” by land and through the zone of the Arctic opposes its interests inasmuch as it directly threatens Russian zones of influence in Central Asia and in Siberia. It also understands that on the level of industrial strength, it does not have the weight of the second world economy - its GDP corresponds to that of Italy.

4.3. Development of the war economy

“The war economy (...) is not a political economy which can resolve the contradictions of capitalism or create the foundations of a new stage of capitalist development (...) The only function of the war economy is ... WAR! Its raison d’être is the effective and systematic destruction of the means of production and of the forces of production and the production of the means of destruction – the real logic of capitalist barbarism” (“From the crisis to the war economy”, International Review no. 11, 1977). The fact that the perspective is not towards the constitution of large stable alliances, imperialist “blocs” engaged in a global confrontation and thus a world war, takes nothing away from the present accentuation of the war economy. Submitting the economy to military necessities is a drain on the economy but this irrationality is not a choice: it is the product of the impasse of capitalism that social decomposition accelerates.

The arms race devours phenomenal sums, in the case of the United States, which still has an important advantage at this level, but also in China which has significantly increased its military expenses during the last two decades. “The increase of 2.6% of global military expenses over the year where Gross Domestic Product at the global level has shrunk by 4.4% (projection of the International Monetary Fund, October 2020), principally because of the economic aspect of Covid-19. Consequently, military expenditure in percentage of GDP – the so-called military burden – has reached a world average of 2.4% in 2020 against 2.2% in 2019. This is the strongest annual increase since the economic and financial crisis of 2009” (Sipri press communiqué, April 2021). The arms race concerns not only conventional and nuclear weapons, but the greater militarisation of space and the extension of zones that have been spared up to now, such as the Arctic region.

Given the terrifying expansion of this imperialist each for themselves, the arms race is not limited to the major imperialisms but affects all states, particularly on the Asian continent which has seen a significant rise in military expenses: thus the inversion of the respective rates between Asia and Europ between 2000 and 2018 is spectacular: in 2000, Europe and Asia respectively represented 27% and 18% of defence expenses world-wide. In 2018, these figures were overturned as Asia now represented 28% and Europe 20% (Sipri).

This militarisation is also expressed today by an awesome development of cyber-warfare by states (attacks by hackers often linked directly or indirectly to states such as the cyber-attack by Israel against Iranian nuclear sites) as well as Artificial Intelligence and military robotics (robots, drones) which are playing a more and more important role in intelligence or in military operations.

However, “the real key of the constitution of the war economy (..) (is) the physical and/or ideological submission of the proletariat to the state, (the) degree of control that the state has over the working class” (Id., International Review no.11, 1977). But this aspect is far from being achieved. That explains why the acceleration of the arms race goes along with a strong reluctance of the major imperialist powers (United States, China, Russia, Britain and France) for the massive engagement of soldiers in the field of conflicts (“boots on the ground”), for fear of the impact of large numbers of body bags coming back home on the population and particularly on the working class. Also revealing is the use of private military companies (Wagner troops for the Russians, Blackwater/Academi for the United States) or the engagement of local militias in order to undertake actions:  for example, the use of Syrian Sunni militias by Turkey in Libya and Azerbaijan, Kurdish militias by the United States in Syria and Iraq, Hezbollah or the Iraqi Shi’ite militias by Iran in Syria, Sudanese militias by Saudi Arabia in Yemen, a regional force (Chad, Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso) “coached” by France in the Liptako...

 

5. Impact on the proletariat and its struggle

The perspective is thus a multiplication of barbaric and bloody conflicts:

“11. At the same time, ‘massacres from innumerable small wars’ are also proliferating as capitalism in its final phase plunges into an increasingly irrational imperialist free for all…

 13. This does not mean that we are living in an era of greater safety than in the period of the Cold War, haunted as it was by the threat of a nuclear Armageddon. On the contrary, if the phase of decomposition is marked by a growing loss of control by the bourgeoisie, this also applies to the vast means of destruction – nuclear, conventional, biological and chemical – that has been accumulated by the ruling class, and is now more widely distributed across a far greater number of nation states than in the previous period.” (Resolution on the International Situation of the 24th Congress).

Inasmuch as we are aware that the bourgeoisie is capable of turning the worst effects of decomposition against the proletariat, we must be conscious that the context of murderous barbarity does not at all facilitate the workers’ struggle:

- The acceleration of decomposition will bring with it endless wars throughout the world, a multiplication of massacres and misery, millions of refugees aimlessly wandering around, an indescribable social chaos and destruction of the environment, and all this accentuating the feeling of fear and demoralisation in the ranks of the proletariat.

- The different armed conflicts will be used to unleash intense campaigns about the defence of democracy, human rights, the rights of women, as is the case with Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Syria and Iraq.

- Consequently, our intervention must denounce the progression of barbarism and the insidious nature of the situation, it must constantly warn the proletariat against underestimating the dangers posed by the chaotic multiplicity of conflicts, in a context where each for themselves is the dominant dynamic: “Left to its own devices, it (decomposition) will lead humanity to the same fate as world war. In the end, it is all the same whether we are wiped out in a rain of thermonuclear bombs, or by pollution, radioactivity from nuclear power stations, famine, epidemics, and the massacres of innumerable small wars (where nuclear weapons might also be used). The only difference between these two forms of annihilation lies in that one is quick, while the other would be slower, and would consequently provoke still more suffering.” (Theses on Decomposition, point 11).

 

ICC, November 2021

Preamble

This resolution is in continuity with the report on decomposition to the 22nd ICC Congress, the resolution on the international situation to the 23rd congress, and the report on pandemic and decomposition to the 24th Congress. It is based on the proposition that not only does the decadence of capitalism pass through different stages or phases, but that we have since the late 1980s reached its ultimate phase, the phase of decomposition; furthermore, that decomposition itself has a history, and a central aim of these texts is to “test” the theoretical framework of decomposition against the evolution of the world situation. They have shown that most important developments of the last three decades have indeed confirmed the validity of this framework, as witness the exacerbation of every man for himself on an international level, the “rebound” of the phenomena of decomposition to the heartlands of world capitalism through the growth of terrorism and the refugee crisis, the rise of populism and a loss of political control by the ruling class, the advancing putrefaction of ideology through the spread of scapegoating, religious fundamentalism and conspiracy theories. And just as the phase of decomposition is the concentrated expression of all the contradictions of capital, above all in its epoch of decline, so the current Covid-19 pandemic is a distillation of all the key manifestations of decomposition, and an active factor in its acceleration.

 

The final phase of capitalist decline and the acceleration of chaos

1. The Covid-19 pandemic, the first on such a scale since the Spanish flu outbreak of 1918, is the most important moment in the evolution of capitalist decomposition since the period definitively opened up in 1989. The inability of the ruling class to prevent the resulting death toll of between 7 and 12 million confirms that the capitalist world system, left to itself, is dragging humanity towards the abyss of barbarism, towards its destruction; and that only the world proletarian revolution can halt this slide and lead humanity to a different future. 

 

2. The ICC is more or less alone in defending the theory of decomposition. Other groups of the communist left reject it entirely, either, as in the case of the Bordigists, because they do not accept that capitalism is a system in decline (or at best are inconsistent and ambiguous on this point); or, for the Internationalist Communist Tendency, because talking about a “final” phase of capitalism sounds far too apocalyptic, or because defining decomposition as a descent into chaos is a deviation from materialism, which, in their view, seeks to find the roots of every phenomenon in the economy and above all in the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. All these currents seem to ignore the fact that our analysis is in continuity with the platform of the Communist International in 1919, which not only insisted that the world imperialist war of 1914-18 announced capitalism’s entry into the “epoch of the breakdown of capital, its internal disintegration, the epoch of the communist revolution of the proletariat”, but also emphasised that “The old capitalist ‘order’ has ceased to function; its further existence is out of the question. The final outcome of the capitalist mode of production is chaos. This chaos can only be overcome by the productive and most numerous class – the working class. The proletariat has to establish real order - communist order”. Thus, the drama facing humanity was indeed posed in terms of order against chaos. And the threat of chaotic breakdown was linked to “the anarchy of the capitalist mode of production”, in other words, to a fundamental element in the system itself. According to marxism, the capitalist system, on a qualitatively higher level than any previous mode of production, involves the products of human labour becoming an alien power that stands above and against their creators. This decadence of the system, with its insoluble contradictions, is marked by a new spiral in this loss of control. And as the CI’s Platform explains, the necessity to try to overcome capitalist anarchy within each nation state – through monopoly and above all through state intervention – only pushes it onto new heights on a global scale, culminating in the imperialist world war. Thus, while capitalism can at certain levels and for certain phases hold back its innate tendency towards chaos (for example, through the mobilisation for war in the 1930s or the period of economic boom that followed the war), the most profound tendency is towards the “internal disintegration” that, for the CI, characterised the new epoch.

 

3. While the Manifesto of the CI talked about the beginning of a new “epoch”, there were tendencies within the International to see the catastrophic situation of the post-war world as a final crisis in an immediate sense rather than an entire age of catastrophes that could last for many decades. And this is an error that revolutionaries have fallen into many times - not only because of errors in their analyses, but also because it is not possible to predict with certainty the precise moment when a major change will occur at the historical level. Such mistakes occurred, for example, in 1848, when the Communist Manifesto already proclaimed that the envelope of capital had become too narrow to contain the productive forces it had set in motion; in 1919-20 with theory of the of the imminent collapse of capital, developed in particular by the German communist left; or again, in 1938, with Trotsky’s notion that the productive forces had ceased to grow. The ICC itself has also underestimated the capacity of capitalism to expand and develop in its own manner, even in a general context of advancing decay, notably in the case of Stalinist China after the collapse of the Russian bloc. However, these errors are products of an immediate interpretation of the capitalist crisis, not an inherent fault in the theory of decadence itself, which sees capitalism in this period as a growing fetter on the productive forces rather than an absolute barrier.  But capitalism has been in decline for over a century, and recognising that we are reaching the limits of the system is entirely consistent with an understanding that the economic crisis, despite ups and downs, has essentially become permanent; that the means of destruction have not only reached such a level that they could destroy all life on the planet, but are in the hands of an increasingly unstable world “order”; that capitalism has conjured up a planetary ecological disaster unprecedented in human history. In sum, the recognition that that we are indeed in the ultimate stage of capitalist decadence is based on a sober appraisal of reality. Again, this should be seen on a historical, not a day-to-day time scale. But It does mean that this final phase is irreversible and there can be no exit from it other than communism or the destruction of humanity. This is the historical alternative of our time.

 

4. The Covid-19 pandemic, contrary to the views propagated by the ruling class, is not a purely “natural” event, but results from a combination of natural, social and political factors, all of them linked the functioning of the capitalist system in decay. The “economic” element is indeed crucial here, and again at more than one level. It is the economic crisis, the desperate hunt for profit, which has driven capital to invade every part of the world’s surface, to grab what Adam Smith called nature’s “free gift”, destroying the remaining sanctuaries for wild life and vastly increasing the risk of zoonotic diseases. In turn, the financial crash of 2008 led to a brutal scaling down of investment in research into new diseases, in medical equipment and treatment, which exponentially increased the deadly impact of the Corona virus, a situation that was further exacerbated by massive attacks on health systems (reductions in the number of beds and carers, etc.) that were overwhelmed at the time of the pandemic. And the intensification of “every man for himself” competition between companies and nations at the global level has severely retarded the provision of safety material and vaccinations. And contrary also to the utopian hopes of certain parts of the ruling class, the pandemic will not give rise to a more harmonious world order once it has been kept at bay. Not only because this pandemic is probably only a warning sign of worse pandemics to come, given that the fundamental conditions that generated it cannot be addressed by the bourgeoisie, but also because the pandemic has considerably worsened a world economic recession which was already looming before the pandemic struck. The result will be the opposite of harmony as national economies seek to cut each others’ throats in the fight for dwindling markets and resources. This heightened competition will certainly express itself at the military level. And the “return to normal” of capitalist competition will place new burdens on the backs of the world’s exploited, who will bear the main brunt of capitalism’s efforts to claw back some part of the gigantic debts it has incurred through its attempts to manage the crisis.

 

5. No state can pretend to be a model of managing the pandemic. If, in an initial phase,  certain states in Asia have managed to face up to it more effectively (even though countries like China have engaged in falsifying the figures and the reality of the epidemic) this is because of their experience in confronting pandemics at the social and cultural level, since this continent has historically provided the soil for the emergence of new diseases, and above all because these states have maintained the means, institutions, and procedures of coordination set up during the SARS epidemic in 2003. The spread of the virus at the planetary level, the international generation of new variants, straight away pose the problem at the level where the impotence of the bourgeoisie is exposed most clearly, especially its inability to adopt a unified and coordinated approach (as shown by the recent failure of the proposal to sign a treaty of struggle against pandemics) and to ensure that the whole of humanity obtains the protection of vaccines.

 

6. The pandemic, a product of the decomposition of the system, thus reveals itself as a formidable force in the further acceleration of this decomposition. Moreover, its impact on the most powerful nation on Earth, the USA, confirms what was already noted in the report to the 22nd Congress: the tendency for the effects of decomposition to return with added force to the very heart of the world capitalist system. In fact, the USA is now at the “centre” of the global process of decomposition. The catastrophic mishandling of the Covid crisis by the populist Trump administration has certainly been a significant factor in the US experiencing the highest death rates in the world from the disease. At the same time, the extent of divisions within the ruling class in the US were laid bare by the contested elections in November 2020, and above all by the storming of the Capitol by Trump supporters on 6 January 2021, egged on by Trump and his entourage. The latter event demonstrates that the internal divisions rocking the USA traverse the whole of society. Although Trump has been ousted from government, Trumpism remains a potent, heavily armed force, expressing itself on the streets as well as through the ballot box. And with the whole of the left wing of capital rallying behind the banner of anti-fascism, there is a real danger that the working class in the US will be caught up in violent conflicts between rival factions of the bourgeoisie.

 

7. The events in the USA also highlight the advancing decay of capitalism’s ideological structures, where again the US “leads the way”. The accession of the populist Trump administration, the powerful influence of religious fundamentalism, the growing distrust of science, have their roots in particular factors in the history of American capitalism, but the development of decomposition and in particular the outbreak of the pandemic has moved all kinds of irrational ideas to the mainstream of political life, accurately reflecting the complete lack of perspective for the future offered by the existing society. In particular, the US has become the nodal point for the radiation of “conspiracy theory” throughout the advanced capitalist world, notably via the internet and social media, which have provided the technological means for further undermining the foundations of any idea of objective truth to a degree that Stalinism and Nazism could only have dreamed about. Appearing in different forms, conspiracy theory has certain common features: the personalised vision of secret elites who run society from behind the scenes, a rejection of scientific method and a deep distrust for all official discourse. Contrary to the mainstream ideology of the bourgeoisie, which presents democracy and the existing state power as true representatives of society, conspiracy theory has its centre of gravity in the hatred of the established elites, a hatred it directs against finance capital and the classical democratic facade of state capitalist totalitarianism. This misled representatives of the workers’ movement in the past to call this approach the “socialism of fools” (August Bebel, with reference to anti-Semitism) – a mistake still understandable before World War One, but which would be dangerous today. Conspiracy theory populism is not a warped attempt to approach socialism or anything resembling proletarian class consciousness. One of its main sources is the bourgeoisie itself: that part of the bourgeoisie which resents being excluded precisely from the elitist inner circles of its own class, backed up by other parts of the bourgeoisie which have lost or are losing their prior central position. The masses this kind of populism attracts behind it, far from being animated by any willingness to challenge the ruling class, by identifying with the struggle for power of those they support, hope to in some way share in that power, or at least to be favoured by it at the expense of others.

 

8. While the advance of capitalist decomposition, alongside the chaotic sharpening of imperialist rivalries, primarily takes the form of political fragmentation and a loss of control by the ruling class, this does not mean that the bourgeoisie can no longer resort to state totalitarianism in its efforts to hold society together. On the contrary, the more society tends to break apart, the more desperate becomes the bourgeoisie’s reliance on the centralising state power, which is the principal instrument for this most Machiavellian of all ruling classes. The reaction to the rise of populism, those factions of the ruling class who are more aware of the general interests of national capital and its state, is a case in point. The election of Biden, supported by a huge mobilisation of the media, parts of the political apparatus and even the military and the security services, express this real counter-tendency to the danger of social and political disintegration most clearly embodied by Trumpism. In the short term, such “successes” can function as a brake on mounting social chaos. Faced with the Covid-19 crisis, the unprecedented lock-downs, a last resort to hold back the unrestrained spread of the disease, the massive recourse to state debt to preserve a minimum of living standards in the advanced countries, the mobilisation of scientific resources to find a vaccine, demonstrate the bourgeoisie’s need to preserve the image of the state as the protector of the population, its unwillingness to lose credibility and authority in the face of the pandemic. But in the longer term, this recourse to state totalitarianism tends to further exacerbate the contradictions of the system.  The semi-paralysis of the economy and the piling up of debt can have no other result than to accelerate the global economic crisis, while at the social level, the massive increase in police powers and state surveillance introduced to enforce the lock-down laws- and inevitably used to justify all forms of protest and dissent – are visibly aggravating distrust of the political establishment, expressed mainly on the anti-proletarian terrain of the “rights of the citizen”.

 

9. The evident nature of the political and ideological decomposition in the world’s leading power does not mean that the other centres of world capitalism are able to constitute alternative fortresses of stability. Again, this is most clear-cut in the case of Britain, which has been pummelled simultaneously by the highest Covid death rates in Europe and the first symptoms of the self-inflicted wound of Brexit, and which faces a real possibility of breaking up into its constituent “nations”. The current unseemly rows between Britain and the EU over the viability and distribution of vaccines offer further proof that the main trend in global bourgeois politics today is towards increasing fragmentation, not towards unity in the face of a “common enemy”. Europe itself has not been spared from these centrifugal trends, not only around the management of the pandemic, but also around the issue of “human rights” and democracy in countries like Poland and Hungary.  It is remarkable that even central countries like Germany, which was previously considered a relative “safe haven” of political stability and was able to build on its economic strength, is now being affected by growing political chaos. The acceleration of decomposition in the historical centre of capitalism is characterised both by a loss of control and by increasing difficulties in generating political homogeneity. After the loss of its second largest economy, even if the EU is not in immediate danger of major splits, these threats continue to hang over the dream of a united Europe. And while Chinese state propaganda highlights the growing disunity and incoherence of the “democracies”, presenting itself as a bulwark of global stability, Beijing’s increasing recourse to internal repression, as against the “democracy movement” in Hong Kong and the Uighur Muslims, is actually evidence that China is a ticking time bomb. China's extraordinary growth is itself a product of decomposition. The economic opening up during the Deng period in the 1980s mobilised huge investments, especially from the US, Europe and Japan.  The Tiananmen Massacre in 1989 made it clear that this economic opening was being implemented by an inflexible political apparatus which has only been able to avoid the fate of Stalinism in the Russian bloc through a combination of state terror, a ruthless exploitation of labour power which subjugates hundreds of millions of workers to a permanent migrant worker status, and a frenzied economic growth whose foundations are now looking increasingly shaky. The totalitarian control over the whole social body, the repressive hardening of the Stalinist faction of Xi Jinping, is not an expression of strength but a manifestation of the weakness of the state, whose cohesion is endangered by the existence of centrifugal forces within society and important struggles between cliques within the ruling class.

 

Capitalism’s march towards the destruction of humanity

10. In contrast to a situation in which the bourgeoisie is able to mobilise society for war, as in the 1930s, the exact rhythm and forms of decomposing capitalism’s drive towards the destruction of humanity are harder to predict because it is the product of a convergence of different factors, some of which may be partially hidden from view. The final result, as the Theses on Decomposition insist, is the same: “Left to its own devices, (capitalism) will lead humanity to the same fate as world war. In the end, it is all the same whether we are wiped out in a rain of thermonuclear bombs, or by pollution, radioactivity from nuclear power stations, famine, epidemics, and the massacres of innumerable small wars (where nuclear weapons might also be used). The only difference between these two forms of annihilation lies in that one is quick, while the other would be slower, and would consequently provoke still more suffering”. Today, however, the contours of this drive towards annihilation are becoming sharper. The consequences of capitalism’s destruction of nature are becoming increasingly impossible to deny, as is the failure of the world bourgeoisie, with all its global conferences and pledges to move towards a “green economy”, to halt a process which is inextricably linked to capitalism’s need to penetrate every last corner of the planet in its competitive pursuit of the accumulation process. The Covid pandemic is probably the most significant expression so far of this profound imbalance between humanity and nature, but other warning signs are also multiplying, from the melting of polar ice to the devastating fires in Australia and California and the pollution of the oceans by the detritus of capitalist production.

 

11. At the same time, “massacres from innumerable small wars” are also proliferating as capitalism in its final phase plunges into an increasingly irrational imperialist free for all. The ten year agony in Syria, a country now utterly ruined by a conflict involving at least five rival camps, is perhaps the most eloquent expression of this terrifying “basket of crabs”, but we are seeing similar manifestations in Libya, the Horn of Africa and Yemen, wars that have been accompanied and aggravated by the emergence of regional powers such as Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, none of whom can be relied upon to accept the discipline of the main global powers: these second or third level powers may forge contingent alliances with the most powerful states only to find themselves on opposite sides in other situations (as in the case of Turkey and Russia in the war in Libya). The recurring military confrontations in Israel/Palestine are also testimony to the intractable nature of many of these conflicts, and in this case the slaughter of civilians has been exacerbated by the development of a pogrom atmosphere within Israel itself, showing the impact of decomposition at both the military and social levels. At the same time, we are seeing a sharpening of conflict between the global powers. The exacerbation of rivalries between the USA and China was already evident under Trump but the Biden administration will continue in the same direction, even if under different ideological pretexts, such as China’s human rights abuses; at the same time the new administration has announced that it will no longer “roll over” in the face of Russia, who have now lost their point of support in the White House. And even if Biden has promised to reinsert the US into a number of international institutions and accords (on climate change, Iran’s nuclear programme, NATO…), this does not mean that the US will forgo its capacity to act alone in defence of its interests. The military strike against pro-Iranian militias in Syria by the Biden administration only weeks after the election was a clear statement to this effect. The pursuit of every man for himself will make it increasingly difficult, if not impossible, for the United States to impose its leadership, an illustration of each against all in the acceleration of decomposition.

 

12. Within this chaotic picture, there is no doubt that the growing confrontation between the US and China tends to take centre stage. The new administration has thus demonstrated its commitment to the “tilt to the east” (now supported by the Tory government in Britain) which was already a central axis of Obama’s foreign policy. This has been concretised in the development of the “Quad”, an explicitly anti-China alliance between the US, Japan, India and Australia. However, this does not mean that we are heading towards the formation of stable blocs and a generalised world war. the march towards world war is still obstructed by the powerful tendency towards indiscipline, every man for himself and chaos at the imperialist level, while in the central capitalist countries capitalism does not yet dispose of the political and ideological elements - including in particular a political defeat of the proletariat - that could unify society and smooth the way towards world war. The fact that we are still living in an essentially multipolar world is highlighted in particular by the relationship between Russia and China. While Russia has shown itself very willing to ally with China on specific issues, generally in opposition to the US, it is no less aware of the danger of subordinating itself to its eastern neighbour, and is one of the main opponents of China’s “New Silk Road” towards imperialist hegemony.

 

13. This does not mean that we are living in an era of greater safety than in the period of the Cold War, haunted as it was by the threat of a nuclear Armageddon. On the contrary, if the phase of decomposition is marked by a growing loss of control by the bourgeoisie, this also applies to the vast means of destruction – nuclear, conventional, biological and chemical – that has been accumulated by the ruling class, and is now more widely distributed across a far greater number of nation states than in the previous period.  While we are not seeing a controlled march towards war led by disciplined military blocs, we cannot rule out the danger of unilateral military outbreaks or even grotesque accidents that would mark a further acceleration of the slide towards barbarism.

 

An unprecedented economic crisis

 

14. For the first time in the history of capitalism outside of a world war situation, the economy has been directly and profoundly affected by a phenomenon - the Covid 19 pandemic - which is not directly related to the contradictions of the capitalist economy. The magnitude and importance of the impact of the pandemic, as the product of a completely obsolete system in full decomposition, illustrates the unprecedented fact that the phenomenon of capitalist decomposition is now also affecting, massively and on a global scale, the entire capitalist economy.

This irruption of the effects of decomposition into the economic sphere is directly affecting the evolution of the new phase of open crisis, ushering in a completely unprecedented situation in the history of capitalism. The effects of decomposition, by profoundly altering the mechanisms of state capitalism which up till now have been set up to “accompany” and limit the impact of the crisis, are introducing a factor of instability and fragility, of growing uncertainty.

The chaos which is seizing hold of the capitalist economy confirm Rosa Luxemburg’s view that capitalism will not undergo a purely economic collapse. “The more ruthlessly capital sets about the destruction of non-capitalist strata, at home and in the outside world, the more it lowers the standard of living for the workers as a whole, the greater also is the change in the day-to-day history of capital. It becomes a string of political and social disasters and convulsions, and under these conditions, punctuated by periodical economic catastrophes or crises, accumulation can go on no longer. But even before this natural economic impasse of capital’s own creating is properly reached it becomes a necessity for the international working class to revolt against the rule of capital”. (Accumulation of Capital, chapter 32)

 

15. Hitting a capitalist system which since the beginning of 2018 had already been entering a clear slowdown, the pandemic quickly concretised the prediction of the ICC’s 23rd Congress that we were heading for a new dive into the crisis.

The violent acceleration of the economic crisis – and the fears of the bourgeoisie – can be measured by the height of the enormous wall of debt, hastily erected to preserve the apparatus of production from bankruptcy and to maintain a minimum of social cohesion.

One of the most important manifestations of the gravity of the current crisis, unlike past situations of open economic crisis, and unlike the crisis of 2008, resides in the fact that the central countries (Germany, China and the US) have been hit simultaneously and are among the most affected by the recession. In in China this has meant sharp drop in the rate of growth in 2020. The weakest states are seeing their economies strangled by inflation, the fall in the value of their currency and impoverishment.

After four decades of resorting to credit and debt to counter-act the growing tendency towards overproduction, punctuated by increasingly profound recessions and increasingly limited recoveries, the crisis of 2007-9 already marked a further step in capitalism’s descent into irreversible crisis. While massive state intervention was able to save the banking system from utter ruin, pushing debt up to even more staggering levels, the causes of the crisis of 2007-09 were not overcome. The contradictions underneath the crisis moved onto a higher level with a crushing weight of debt on states themselves. Attempts to relaunch economies didn’t lead to a real recovery: an element which was without precedent since the Second World War was that, apart from the US, China, and to a lesser extent Germany, production levels in all the other main countries stagnated or even fell between 2013 and 2018. The extreme fragility of this “recovery”, by piling up all the conditions for a further significant deterioration of the world economy, already presaged the current situation.

Despite the historic scale of recovery plans, and because the relaunch of the economy is taking place in such a chaotic manner, it is not yet predictable how – and to what degree – the bourgeoisie will manage to stabilise the situation, since it is characterised by all kinds of uncertainties, above all about the evolution of the pandemic itself.

Unlike what the bourgeoisie was able to do in 2008, when it brought together the G7 and the G20, made up of the main states, and was able to agree on a coordinated response to the credit crisis, today each national capital is reacting in dispersed order, without any other concern than reviving its own economic machinery and its survival on the world market, without concertation between the principal components of the capitalist system. Every man for himself has become decisively predominant.

The apparent exception to this, the European recovery plan, which includes the mutualisation of debts between EU countries, is a product of the awareness of the two main EU states of the need for a minimum of cooperation between them as a precondition for avoiding a major destabilisation of the EU in order to face up to their main rivals China and the United States, on pain of risking an accelerated downgrading of their position in the global arena.

The contradiction between the necessity to contain the pandemic and to avoid the paralysis of production led to the “war of masks” and the “war of vaccines” The present war of vaccines, the way they are being fabricated and distributed, is a mirror to the disorder afflicted the world economy.

After the collapse of the eastern bloc, the bourgeoisie did everything it could to maintain a certain collaboration between states, in particular by relying on the organs of international regulation inherited from the period of the imperialist blocs. This framework of “globalisation” made it possible to limit the impact of the phase of decomposition at the level of the economy, by pushing to its extreme the possibility of “associating” nations at different levels of the economy – financial, productive, etc.

With the aggravation of the crisis and imperialist rivalries, these multilateral institutions and mechanisms were already being put to the test by the fact that the main powers were increasingly developing their own policies, in particular China, by constructing its vast parallel network, the New Silk Road, and the US, which was tending to turn its back on these institutions because of the growing inability of these organisms to maintain their dominant position. Populism was already coming forward as a factor worsening the deteriorating economic situation by introducing an element of uncertainty faced with the torments of the crisis. Its accession to power in different countries accelerated the deterioration of the means imposed by capitalism since 1945 to avoid any drift towards a withdrawal behind national borders, which can only lead to an uncontrolled contagion of the economic crisis.

The unleashing of every man for himself derives from the contradiction in capitalism between the more and more global scale of production and the national structure of capital, a contradiction exacerbated by the crisis. By provoking growing chaos within the world economy (with the tendency towards the fragmentation of chains of production and breakdown of the world market into regional zones, towards the strengthening of protectionism and the multiplication of unilateral measures), this totally irrational move of each nation towards saving itself at the expense of everyone else is counter-productive for each national capital and a disaster at the world level, a decisive factor in worsening the entire global economy.

This rush by the most “responsible” bourgeois factions towards an increasingly irrational and chaotic management of the system, and, above all, the unprecedented advance of this tendency towards every man for himself, reveals a growing loss of control of its own system by the ruling class.

 

16. The only nation to have a positive growth rate in 2020 (2%), China has not emerged triumphant or strengthened from the pandemic crisis, even though it has momentarily gained ground at the expense of its rivals. On the contrary. The continuing deterioration in the growth of its economy, which is the most heavily indebted in the world, and which also has a low rate of utilisation of capacities and a proportion of “zombie enterprises” of more than 30%, is testimony to the incapacity of China from now on to play the role it did in 2008-11 in the relaunch of the world economy.

China is confronted with a reduction of markets across the world, with the desire of numerous states to free themselves from dependence on Chinese production, and with the risk of insolvency facing a number of those countries who are involved in the Silk Road project and which are most affected by the economic consequences of the pandemic. The Chinese government is therefore pursuing an orientation towards the internal economic development of the “Made in China 2025” plan, and of the “dual circulation” model, which is also aimed at compensating for the loss of external demand by stimulating domestic demand. This policy shift does not, however, represent an “inward turn”; Chinese imperialism will not and cannot turn its back on the world. On the contrary, the goal of this shift is to gain national autarky at the level of key technologies in order to be all the more able to gain ground beyond its own borders. It represents a new stage in the development of its war economy.  All this is provoking powerful conflicts within the ruling class, between partisans of the direction of the economy by the Chinese Communist Party and those linked to the market economy and the private sector, between the “planners” of the central authority and local authorities who want to guide investment themselves. Both in the United States (in relation to the “GAFA” technology giants from Silicon Valley) and - even more resolutely - in China (in relation to Ant International, Alibaba etc.) there is a strong move of the central state apparatus towards cutting down to size companies become too big (and to powerful) to control.

 

17. The consequences of the frenzied destruction of the environment by decomposing capitalism, the phenomena resulting from climate disturbance and the destruction of biodiversity, are in the first place leading to further pauperisation of the most deprived parts of the world population (sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Asia) or of those prey to military conflicts. But they are more and more affecting all economies, the developed countries at their head.

We are currently seeing the multiplication of extreme meteorological phenomena, extremely violent rainfall and flooding, vast fires leading to huge financial losses in city and countryside through the destruction of vital infrastructure (towns, roads, river installations). These phenomena disrupt the functioning of the industrial production apparatus and also weaken the productive capacity of agriculture. The global climate crisis and the resulting increased disorganisation of the world market in agricultural products are threatening the food security of many states.

Capitalism in decomposition does not possess the means to really fight against global warming and ecological devastation. These are already having an increasingly negative impact on the reproduction of capital and can only act as an obstacle to the return to economic growth.

Motivated by the necessity to replace obsolete heavy industries and fossil fuels, the “green economy” does not represent a way out for capital, whether on the ecological or the economic level. Its production networks are no more green and no less polluting. The capitalist system does not have the capacity to engage in a “green revolution”. The actions of the ruling class in this area also inevitably sharpen destructive economic competition and imperialist rivalries. The emergence of new and potentially profitable sectors, such as the production of electric vehicles, could at best benefit certain parts of the stronger economies, but given the limits of solvent markets and the increasing problems encountered by the ever more massive use of money creation and debt, they will not be able to act as a locomotive for the economy as a whole. The “green economy” is also a privileged vehicle for powerful ideological mystifications about the possibility of reforming capitalism, and a choice weapon against the working class, justifying plant closures and lay-offs.

 

18.  In response to mounting imperialist tensions, all states are increasing their military effort, in terms of both volume and duration. The military sphere is extending to more and more “zones of conflict”, such as cyber-security and the growing militarisation of space. All the nuclear powers are discreetly relaunching their atomic programmes. All states are modernising and adapting their armed forces.

This insane arms race, to which every state is irredeemably condemned by the demands of inter-imperialist competition, is all the more irrational given that the increasing weight of the war economy and arms production is absorbing a considerable proportion of national wealth: this gigantic mass of military expenditure on a world scale, even if it constitutes a source of profit for the arms merchants, represents a sterilisation and destruction of global capital. The investments realised in the production and sales of weapons and military equipment in no way form a point of departure or the source of the accumulation of new profits: once they have been produced or acquired weapons serve only to sow death and destruction or stand idle in silos until they become obsolete and have to be replaced. The economic impact of these completely unproductive expenses “will be disastrous for capital. In the face of already unmanageable budget deficits, the massive increase in military spending, which the growth of inter-imperialist antagon­isms makes necessary, is an economic burden which will only accelerate capitalism's descent into the abyss” (“Report on the International Situation”, IR 35).

 

19. After decades of gigantic debts, the massive injection of liquidity contained in the most recent economic support plans go well beyond the volume of previous interventions. The billions of dollars released by the American, European and Chinese plans have brought world debt to a record 365% of world GDP.

Debt, which has again and again been used by capitalism throughout its epoch of decadence as a palliative to the crisis of overproduction, is a way of putting things off to the future at the cost of even more serious convulsions. It has now soared to unprecedented levels. Since the Great Depression, the bourgeoisie has shown its determination to keep alive a system increasingly threatened by overproduction, by the diminishing availability of markets, through more and more sophisticated means of state intervention, aimed at exerting an overall control over its economy. But it has no way of dealing with the real causes of the crisis. Even if there is not a fixed, predetermined limit to the headlong flight into debt, a point at which this would become impossible, this policy cannot go on indefinitely without grave repercussions on the stability of the system, as shown by the increasingly frequent and widespread nature of the crises of the last decade. Furthermore, such a policy has proven to be, at least for the last four decades, less and less effective in reviving the world economy. 

Not only does the weight of debt condemn the capitalist system to ever more devastating convulsions (bankruptcy of enterprises and even of states, financial and monetary crises, etc) but also, by more and more restraining the capacity of states to cheat the laws of capitalism, it can only hinder their ability to relaunch their respective national economies.

The crisis that has already been unfolding over decades is going to become the most serious of the whole period of decadence, and its historic import will go beyond even the first crisis of this epoch, the crisis which began in 1929. Ripening after more than 100 years of capitalist decadence, with an economy ravaged by the military sector, weakened by the impact of the destruction of the environment, profoundly altered in its mechanisms of reproduction by debt and state manipulation, prey to the pandemic, increasingly suffering from all the other effects of decomposition, it is an illusion to think that in these conditions there will be any easy or durable recovery of the world economy.

 

20. At the same time, revolutionaries should not be tempted to fall into a “catastrophist” vision of a world economy on the verge of a final collapse. The bourgeoisie will continue to fight to death for the survival of its system, whether by directly economic means (such as the exploitation of untapped resources and potential new markets, typified by China’s New Silk Road project) or political, above all through the manipulation of credit and cheating the law of value. This means that there can still be phases of stabilisation in between economic convulsions with increasingly profound consequences.

 

21. The return of a kind of “neo-Keynesianism” initiated by the huge spending commitments of the Biden administration, and initiatives for corporate tax increases - though also motivated by the need to hold bourgeois society together, and by the equally pressing need to face up to sharpening imperialist tensions – shows the willingness of the ruling class to experiment with different forms of economic management, not least because the deficiencies of the neo-liberal policies launched in the Thatcher-Reagan years have been severely exposed under the glare of the pandemic crisis. However, such policy changes cannot rescue the world economy from oscillating between the twin dangers of inflation and deflation, new credit crunches and currency crises, all leading to brutal recessions.

 

 22. The working class is paying a heavy tribute to the crisis. First because it is most directly exposed to the pandemic and is the principal victim of the spread of infection, and secondly because the downward dive in the economy is unleashing the most serious attacks since the Great Depression, at all levels of working and living conditions, although not all sectors of the class will be affected in the same way.

The destruction of jobs was four times greater in 2020 than in 2009, but it has not yet revealed the full extent of the huge increase in mass unemployment that lies ahead. Although the public subsidies handed out in some countries to those who are partially unemployed are aimed at mitigating the social shock (in the United States, for example, during the first year of the pandemic, the average income of wage earners, according to official statistics, actually increased – for the first time ever, during a recession, in the history of capitalism) millions of jobs are going to disappear very soon

The exponential increase in precarious working and the general lowering of wages will lead to a gigantic increase in impoverishment, which is already hitting many workers. The number of victims of famine in the world has increased two-fold and hunger is reappearing in the western countries. For those who keep a job the workload and the rhythm of exploitation will worsen.

The working class can expect nothing from the efforts by the bourgeoisie to “normalise” the economic situation except lay-offs and wage cuts, added stress and fear, drastic increases in austerity measures at all levels, in education as well as health pensions and social benefits. In short, we will see a degradation of living and working conditions at a level which none of the post-Second World War generations have hitherto experienced. 

 

23. Since the capitalist mode of production entered its period of decadence, the pressure to fight against this decline with state capitalist measures has grown constantly. However, the tendency to strengthen state capitalist organs and forms is anything but a strengthening of capitalism; on the contrary, they express the increasing contradictions on the economic and political terrain. With the acceleration of decomposition in the wake of the pandemic, we are also witnessing a sharp increase in state capitalist measures. These are not an expression of greater state control over society but rather an expression of the growing difficulties in organising society as a whole and preventing its increasing tendency to fragmentation.

 

The perspectives for the class struggle

24. The ICC recognised at the beginning of the 90s that the collapse of the eastern bloc and the definitive opening of the phase of decomposition would create growing difficulties for the proletariat: the lack of political perspective, the inability to come to grips with its political and historical perspective which had already been a central element in the difficulties of the  class movement in the 1980s, would be seriously aggravated by the deafening campaigns about the death of communism; linked to this, the proletariat’s sense of class identity would be severely weakened  in the new period, both by the atomising and divisive effects of social decomposition, and by the conscious efforts of the ruling class to exacerbate these effects through ideological campaigns (the “end of the working class”) and the “material” changes brought about by the policy of globalisation (break up of traditional centres of class struggle, relocation of industries to regions of the world where the working class did not have the same degree of historical experience, etc).

 

25. The ICC has tended to underestimate the depth and duration of this retreat in the class struggle, often seeing signs that the reflux was about to be overcome and that we would see in a relatively short period of time new international waves of struggle as in the period after 1968. In 2003, on the basis of new struggles in France, Austria and elsewhere, the ICC predicted a revival of struggles by a new generation of proletarians who had been less influenced by the anti-Communist campaigns and would be faced by an increasingly uncertain future. To an important degree these predictions were confirmed by the events of 2006-2007, notably the struggle against the CPE in France, and of 2010-2011, in particular the Indignados movement in Spain. These movements displayed important advances at the level of solidarity between generations, self-organisation through assemblies, culture of debate, real concerns about the future facing the working class and humanity as a whole. In this sense, they showed the potential for a unification of the economic and political dimensions of the class struggle. However, it took us a long time to understand the immense difficulties that confronted this new generation, “raised” in the conditions of decomposition, difficulties which would prevent the proletariat from reversing the post-89 retreat during this period.

 

26. A key element in these difficulties was the continued erosion of class identity. This had already been apparent in the struggles of 2010-11, particularly the movement in Spain: despite the important advances made at the level of consciousness and organisation, the majority of the Indignados saw themselves as “citizens” rather than as part of a class, leaving them vulnerable to the democratic illusions peddled like the likes of Democratia Real Ya! (the future Podemos), and later to the poison of Catalan and Spanish nationalism. Over the next few years, the reflux that followed in the wake of these movements was deepened by the rapid rise of populism, which created new divisions in the international working class – divisions that exploited national and ethnic differences, and fuelled by the pogromist attitudes of the populist right, but also political divisions between populism and anti-populism.  Throughout the world, anger and discontent were growing, based on serious material deprivation and real anxieties about the future; but in the absence of a proletarian response much of this was channelled into inter-classist revolts such as the Yellow Vests in France,  into single issue campaigns on a bourgeois terrain such as the climate marches, into movements for democracy against dictatorship (Hong Kong, Belarus, Myanmar etc) or into the inextricable tangle of  racial and sexual identity politics which serve to further conceal the crucial issue of proletarian class identity as the only basis for an authentic response to the crisis of capitalist mode of production.  The proliferation of these movements – whether they appear as inter-classist revolts or openly bourgeois mobilisations – has increased the already considerable difficulties not only for the working  class as a whole but for the communist left itself, for the organisations which have the responsibility to define and defend the class terrain. A clear example of this was the inability of the Bordigists and the ICT to recognise that the anger provoked by the police murder of George Floyd in May 2020 had immediately been diverted into bourgeois channels. But the ICC has also encountered important problems in the face of this often bewildering array of movements, and, as part of its critical review of the past 20 years, will have to seriously examine the nature and extent of the errors it made in the period from the Arab spring of 2011, via the so-called candlelight protests in South Korea, to these more recent revolts and mobilisations.

 

27. The pandemic in particular has created considerable difficulties for the working class:

• The majority of workers recognise the reality of this disease and the real dangers posed by gathering together in large numbers, inhibiting the possibility of general assemblies and workers’ demonstrations; the proletariat is confronted, not only by the bourgeoisie, but also, and in a more immediate sense, by the virus. In general, situations in which natural catastrophes play a paramount role, are not conducive to the development of the class struggle. The indignation of Voltaire against nature because of the Lisbon earthquake did not generalise. Unlike the “social earthquake” of the mass strike of 1905 in Russia, the earthquake of 1906 in San Francisco did not advance the cause of the proletariat, any more than that of 1923 in Tokyo;
• As always, the bourgeoisie does not hesitate to use the effects of decomposition against the working class. While the lockdowns have been motivated primarily by the bourgeoisie’s understanding that it had no other recourse to prevent the spread of the disease, it will certainly take advantage of the situation to enforce the atomisation and exploitation of the working class, in particular through the new model of “working from home”. This new step in the atomisation of the working population has been a source of growing psychological suffering, especially among the young, even to the point of increasing cases of suicide;
• By the same token, the ruling class has used the conditions of the pandemic to step up its systems of mass surveillance and to introduce new repressive laws restricting protests and demonstrations, alongside increasingly overt police violence against all expressions of social discontent;
• The massive increase in unemployment resulting from the lockdown will not, in this situation and in the short term, be a factor in the unification of workers’ struggles but rather will tend to further reinforce atomisation;
• Although the lockdown has provoked a great deal of social discontent, when this has expressed itself openly, as in Spain in February and Germany in April 2021, it has overwhelmingly taken the form of protests “for individual freedom” which are a total dead end for the working class;
• More generally, the period of the pandemic has seen a further upsurge of “identity politics”, in which dissatisfaction with life under the present system is fragmented into a maelstrom of clashing identities based on race, gender, culture, etc, and which constitute a major threat to the recovery of the only identity capable of unifying and liberating the whole of humanity behind it: proletarian class identity. Moreover, behind this chaos of competing identities penetrating the whole population, lies the competition between different bourgeois factions of right and left, carrying with it the danger of dragging the working class into new forms of reactionary “culture wars” and even violent civil war.

 

28. Despite the enormous problems facing the proletariat, we reject the idea that the class has already been defeated on a global scale, or is on the verge of such a defeat comparable to that of the period of counter-revolution, a defeat of a kind from which the proletariat would possibly no longer be able to recover. The proletariat, as an exploited class, cannot avoid going through the school of defeats, but the central question is whether the proletariat has already been so overwhelmed by the remorseless advance of decomposition that its revolutionary potential has been effectively undermined. Measuring such a defeat in the phase of decomposition is a far more complex task than in the period before the Second World War, when the proletariat had risen openly against capitalism and been crushed by a series of frontal defeats, or the period after 1968 when the main obstacle to the bourgeoisie’s drive towards a new world war was the revival of struggles by a new and undefeated generation of proletarians. As we have already recalled, the phase of decomposition indeed contains the danger of the proletariat simply failing to respond and being ground down over a long period – a “death by a thousand cuts” rather than a head-on class confrontation. Nevertheless, we affirm that there is still sufficient evidence to show that, despite the undoubted “progress” of decomposition, despite the fact that time is no longer on the side of the working class, the potential for a profound proletarian revival– leading to a reunification between the economic and the political dimensions of the class struggle – has not vanished, as witness:

• the persistence of important proletarian movements that have appeared in the phase of decomposition (2006-7, 2010-11, etc);
   
• the fact that, just prior to the pandemic, we saw several embryonic and very fragile signs of a reappearance of the class struggle, especially in France 2019.  And even if this dynamic was then largely blocked by the pandemic and the lockdowns, there were workers’ protests in several countries even during the pandemic, particularly around issues of health and safety at work;
   
• The small but significant signs of a subterranean maturation of consciousness, manifesting itself in efforts towards a global reflection on the failure of capitalism and the need for another society in some movements (particularly the Indignados in 2011), but also through the emergence of young elements looking for class positions and turning towards the heritage of the communist left;
   
• More importantly, the situation facing the working class is not the same as it was following the collapse of the eastern bloc and the opening of the phase of decomposition in 1989. At that time, it was possible to present these events as proof of the death of communism and of the victory of capitalism and the beginning of a bright future for humanity. Thirty years of decomposition have severely undermined this ideological fraud of a brighter future, and the pandemic in particular has uncovered the irresponsibility and negligence of all capitalist governments and the reality of a society riven by deep economic divisions where we are by no means “all in it together”. On the contrary, the pandemic and the lockdown have tended to reveal the condition of the working class both as the main victim of the health crisis but also as the source of all “essential” labour and all material production, and in particular of basic necessities. This can be one of the bases for a future recovery of class identity. And, together with the growing understanding that capitalism is a totally obsolete mode of production, this has already been an element in the appearance of the politicised minorities whose motivation has above all been to understand the dramatic situation facing humanity;
   
• Finally, on a broader historical level, the process of decomposition has not eliminated the associated character of labour under capitalism. This remains the case despite the social atomisation engendered by decomposition, despite deliberate attempts to fragment the workforce through stratagems such as the “gig economy”, despite ideological campaigns aiming to present the more educated sectors of the proletariat as “middle class”. Capital mobilises more and more workers worldwide, the process of proletarianisation and thus the exploitation of living labour continues unabated. The working class today is larger and more interconnected than ever, but with the progress of decomposition social atomisation and isolation intensify. This is also expressed in the difficulties of the working class to experience its own class identity. Only through the struggles of the working class on its own class terrain it is able to create its “associative” power which express an anticipation of the associated labour of communism. The workers are brought together by capital in the production process, where the combination of labour is realised under compulsion, but the revolutionary character of the proletariat means dialectically reversing these conditions in a collective struggle. The exploitation of common labour is turned around in the struggle against exploitation and for the liberation of the social character of labour, for a society that knows how to consciously use the full potential of associated labour.

 

Thus, the defensive struggle of the working class contains the seeds of the qualitatively higher social relations which are the final goal of the class struggle – what Marx called the “freely associated producers”.  Through association, through the bringing together of all its components, capacities and experiences, the proletariat can become powerful, can become the ever more conscious and united combatant for and harbinger of a liberated humankind.

 

29. Despite the tendency for the process of decomposition to react on the economic crisis, the latter remains the “ally of the proletariat” in this phase. As the Theses on Decomposition put it: 

 “The inexorable aggravation of the capitalist crisis constitutes the essential stimulant for the class struggle and development of consciousness, the precondition for its ability to resist the poison distilled by the social rot. For while there is no basis for the unification of the class in the partial struggles against the effects of decomposition, nonetheless its struggle against the direct effects of the crisis constitutes the basis for the development of its class strength and unity. This is the case because:

• while the effects of decomposition (eg pollution, drugs, insecurity) hit the different strata of society in much the same way and form a fertile ground for aclassist campaigns and mystifications (ecology, anti-nuclear movements, anti-racist mobilisations, etc), the economic attacks (falling real wages, layoffs, increasing productivity, etc) resulting directly from the crisis hit the proletariat (ie the class that produces surplus value and confronts capitalism on this terrain) directly and specifically;
• unlike social decomposition which essentially effects the superstructure, the economic crisis directly attacks the foundations on which this superstructure rests; in this sense, it lays bare all the barbarity that is battening on society, thus allowing the proletariat to become aware of the need to change the system radically, rather than trying to improve certain aspects of it”. (Thesis 17)

 

30. Consequently, we must reject any tendency to downplay the importance of the “defensive”, economic struggles of the class, which is a typical expression of the modernist outlook which only sees the class as an exploited category and not equally as a historic, revolutionary force. It is of course true that the economic struggle alone cannot hold back the tides of decomposition: as the Theses on Decomposition put it, “The workers’ resistance to the effects of the crisis is no longer enough: only the communist revolution can put an end to the threat of decomposition”. But it is a profound mistake to lose sight of the constant, dialectical interaction between the economic and political aspects of the struggle, as Rosa Luxemburg emphasised in her work on the 1905 mass strike; and again, in the heat of the German revolution of 1918-19, when the “political” dimension was out in the open, she insisted that the proletariat still needed to develop its economic struggles as the only basis for organising and unifying itself as a class. It will be the combination of a renewed defensive struggle on a class terrain, coming up against the objective limits of decomposing bourgeois society, and fertilised by the intervention of the revolutionary minority, that will enable the working class to recover its revolutionary perspective, to move towards the fully proletarian politicisation that will arm it to lead humanity out of the nightmare of decomposing capitalism.

 

31. In an initial period, the rediscovery of class identity and class combativity will constitute a form of resistance against the corrosive effects of capitalist decomposition – a bulwark against the working class being further fragmented and divided against itself. Without the development of the class struggle, such phenomena as the destruction of the environment and the proliferation of military chaos tend to reinforce feelings of powerlessness and the resort to false solutions such as ecologism and pacifism. But at a more developed stage of the struggle, in the context of a revolutionary situation, the reality of these threats to the survival of the species can become a factor in understanding that capitalism has indeed reached the terminal phase of its decline and that revolution is the only way out. In particular, capitalism’s war-drive – above all when it involves the great powers directly or indirectly – can be an important factor in the politicisation of the class struggle since it brings with it both a very concrete increase in exploitation and physical danger, but also further confirmation that society is faced with the momentous choice between socialism and barbarism. From factors of demobilisation and despair, these threats can strengthen the proletariat’s determination to do away with this dying system.

“Similarly, in the period to come, the proletariat cannot hope to profit from the weakening that decomposition provokes within the bourgeoisie itself. During this period, it must aim to resist the noxious effects of decomposition in its own ranks, counting only on its own strength and on its ability to struggle collectively and in solidarity to defend its interests as an exploited class (although revolutionary propaganda must constantly emphasize the dangers of social decomposition). Only in the revolutionary period, when the proletariat is on the offensive, when it has directly and openly taken up arms for its own historic perspective, will it be able to use certain effects of decomposition, in particular of bourgeois ideology and of the forces of capitalist power, for leverage, and turn them against capital” (Theses on Decomposition).

 

In a way, "the communist left finds itself in a similar situation today to that of Bilan in the 1930s, in the sense that it is obliged to understand a new and unprecedented historical situation" (Resolution on the international situation of the 13th ICC Congress, 1999).[1] This observation, now more appropriate than ever, required intense debates between organisations of the proletarian political milieu (PPM) in order to analyse the meaning of the Covid-19 crisis in the history of capitalism and the consequences which flow from it. Now, in the face of the rapid extension of events, the groups of the PPM appear totally helpless and disarmed: instead of seizing the marxist method as a living theory, they reduce it to an invariant dogma where class struggle is seen as an immutable repetition of eternally valid schemas, without being able to show not only what persists but also what has changed. Thus, the Bordigist or councilist groups stubbornly ignore the entry of the system into its phase of decadence. On the other hand, the International Communist Tendency (ICT) rejects decomposition as a cataclysmic vision and limits its explanations to the truism that profit is responsible for the pandemic and to the illusory idea that the latter is only a trivial event, a parenthesis, in the bourgeoisie's attacks to maximise its profits. These PPM groups merely recite the patterns of the past without analysing the specific circumstances, timing and impact of the health crisis. As a result, their contribution to the assessment of the balance of forces between the two antagonistic classes in society, of the dangers or opportunities facing the class and its minorities, is today derisory.

A firm marxist approach is all the more necessary since mistrust of official discourse is currently giving rise to the emergence of many false and fanciful "alternative explanations" of events. Conspiracy theories, each more fanciful than the other, are emerging and are shared by millions of followers: The pandemic and today's mass vaccination are a Chinese plot to ensure their supremacy, a conspiracy of the world bourgeoisie to prepare for war or restructure the world economy, a seizure of power by a secret international of virologists or a nebulous world conspiracy of the elites (under the leadership of Soros or Gates)... This general atmosphere even provokes a disorientation of the political milieu, a veritable "Corona blues".

For the ICC, marxism is a “living thought enriched by each important historical event. (…) Revolutionary organisations and militants have the specific and fundamental responsibility of carrying out this effort of reflection, always moving forward, as did our predecessors such as Lenin, Rosa, Bilan, the French Communist Left, etc, with both caution and boldness:

- basing ourselves always and firmly on the basic acquisitions of marxism,

- examining reality without blinkers, and developing our thought "without ostracism of any kind" (Bilan).

In particular, faced with such historic events, it is important that revolutionaries should be capable of distinguishing between those analyses which have been overtaken by events and those which still remain valid, in order to avoid a double trap: either succumbing to sclerosis, or ‘throwing the baby out with the bath water’". (Orientation text on militarism and decomposition, 1991). [2]

Consequently, the Covid-19 crisis requires the ICC to confront the salient elements of this major event with the framework of decomposition that the organisation has been putting forward for more than 30 years, in order to understand the evolution of capitalism. This framework is clearly recalled in the resolution on the international situation of the 23rd International Congress of the ICC (2019):

“Thirty years ago, the ICC highlighted the fact that the capitalist system had entered the final phase of its period of decadence, that of decomposition. This analysis was based on a number of empirical facts, but at the same time it provided a framework for understanding these facts: "In this situation, where society's two decisive - and antagonistic - classes confront each other without either being able to impose its own definitive response, history nonetheless does not just come to a stop. Still less for capitalism than for preceding social forms, is a ‘freeze’" or a ‘stagnation’ of social life possible. As crisis-ridden capitalism's contradictions can only get deeper, the bourgeoisie's inability to offer the slightest perspective for society as a whole, and the proletariat's inability, for the moment, openly to set forward its own historic perspective, can only lead to a situation of generalised decomposition. Capitalism is rotting on its feet" ("Decomposition, the final phase of the decadence of capitalism", Point 4, International Review No. 62).

Our analysis took care to clarify the two meanings of the term ‘decomposition’: on the one hand, it applies to a phenomenon that affects society, particularly in the period of decadence of capitalism and, on the other hand, it designates a particular historical phase of the latter, its ultimate phase:

‘.. it is vital to highlight the fundamental distinction between the elements of decomposition which have infected capitalism since the beginning of the century [the 20th century] and the generalised decomposition which is infecting the system today, and which can only get worse. Here again, quite apart from the strictly quantitative aspect, the phenomenon of social decomposition has today reached such a breadth and depth that it has taken on a new and unique quality, revealing decadent capitalism's entry into a new and final phase of its history: the phase where decomposition becomes a decisive, if not the decisive factor in social evolution.’ (Ibid., Point 2)

It is mainly this last point, the fact that decomposition tends to become the decisive factor in the evolution of society, and therefore of all the components of the world situation - an idea that is by no means shared by the other groups of the communist left - that constitutes the major thrust of this resolution.”[3]

In this context, the aim of this report is to assess the impact of the Covid-19 crisis on the deepening of the contradictions within the capitalist system and its implications for the deepening of the phase of decomposition.

 

1. The Covid-19 crisis reveals the depth of capitalism's putrefaction

 

The pandemic is at the heart of capitalism: a first, then a second, and even a third wave of infections are sweeping across the world and in particular the industrialised countries; their hospital systems are on the verge of implosion and they are forced to repeatedly impose more or less radical lockdowns. After one year of the pandemic, the official figures, which are largely underestimated in many countries, count more than 500,000 deaths in the USA and more than 650,000 in the European Union and Latin America.

During the last twelve months, in this mode of production with unlimited scientific and technological capacities, the bourgeoisie, not only in peripheral countries but especially in the main industrialised countries, have shown itself to be unable

• to prevent the spread of the pandemic and then its resumption through a second, third, etc., wave;
• to avoid saturation of hospital systems, as in Italy, Spain, but also in Great Britain or the USA;
• to put in place techniques and instruments to control and stem the different waves;
• to coordinate and centralise vaccine research and to set up a planned and well-thought-out production, distribution and vaccination policy for the entire planet.

On the contrary, they have competed in taking inconsistent and chaotic measures and have resorted, in desperation, to measures dating from the distant past, such as lockdown, quarantine or curfews. They have condemned hundreds of thousands of people to death by selecting Covid patients admitted to overcrowded hospitals or by postponing the treatment of other serious illnesses to a distant date.

The catastrophic unfolding of the pandemic crisis is fundamentally linked to the relentless pressure of the historic crisis of the capitalist mode of production. The impact of austerity measures, which have been further accentuated since the recession of 2007-11, the ruthless economic competition between states, and the priority given, particularly in industrialised countries, to maintaining production capacities at the expense of the health of populations in the name of the primacy of the economy, have favoured the extension of the health crisis and constitute a permanent obstacle to its containment. This immense catastrophe represented by the pandemic is not the product of destiny or the inadequacy of scientific knowledge or health techniques (as may have been the case in previous modes of production); nor does it come like a thunderbolt in a serene sky, nor is it a passing digression. It expresses the fundamental impotence of the declining capitalist mode of production, which goes beyond the carelessness of this or that government, but which is on the contrary indicative of the blockage and putrefaction of bourgeois society. And above all it reveals the extent of this phase of decomposition which has been deepening for 30 years.

1.1 Its emergence highlights 30 years of sinking into decomposition.

The Covid-19 crisis did not arise out of nowhere; it is both the expression and the result of 30 years of decomposition which marked a tendency towards the multiplication, deepening and increasingly clear convergence of the various manifestations of capitalism's putrefaction.

(a) The importance and the significance of the dynamics of decomposition were understood by the ICC from the end of the 1980s:

"As long as the bourgeoisie doesn't have a free hand to impose its 'solution' - generalised imperialist war - and as long as the class struggle isn't sufficiently developed to allow its revolutionary perspective to come forward, capitalism is caught up in a dynamic of decomposition, a process of rotting on its feet which is experienced at all levels:

- degradation of international relations be­tween states as manifested in the development of terrorism

- repeated technological and so-called natural catastrophes

- destruction of the ecosphere

- famines, epidemics, expressions of the generalization of absolute pauperization

- explosion of ‘nationalities’, or ethnic conflicts

- social life marked by the development of criminality, delinquency, suicide, madness, individual atomisation

- ideological decomposition marked among other things by the development of mysticism, nihilism, the ideology of 'everyone for himself', etc ...” (Resolution on the international situation of the 8th ICC Congress, 1989).[4]

(b) The implosion of the Soviet bloc marked a spectacular acceleration of the process despite the campaigns to conceal it. The collapse from within of one of the two imperialist blocs facing each other, without this being the product either of a world war between the blocs or of the offensive of the proletariat, can only be understood as a major expression of capitalism’s entry into the phase of decomposition. However, the tendencies towards the loss of control and the exacerbation of ‘every man for himself’ expressed by this implosion was largely concealed and countered in the first instance by the revival of the prestige of ‘democracy’ because of its ‘victory over communism’ (campaigns on the ‘death of communism’ and the superiority of the democratic mode of government), then by the First Gulf War (1991), fought in the name of the United Nations against Saddam Hussein, which allowed Bush senior to impose an ‘international coalition of states under the leadership of the United States and thus to curb the tendency towards every man for himself; finally, by the fact that the economic collapse resulting from the implosion of the Eastern bloc only affected the former Russian bloc countries, a particularly backward part of capitalism, and largely spared the industrialised countries.

(c) At the beginning of the 21st century, the spread of decomposition manifested itself above all in the explosion of every man for himself and chaos on the imperialist level. The attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon by Al Qaeda on 11 September 2001, and the unilateral military response of the Bush administration, further opened the Pandora's box of decomposition: with the attack and invasion of Iraq in 2003 in defiance of international conventions and organisations and without taking into account the opinion of its main ‘allies’, the world's leading power went from being the gendarme of world order to the principal agent of every man for himself and chaos. The occupation of Iraq and then the civil war in Syria (2011) would powerfully stir up the imperialist every man for himself, not only in the Middle East but all over the world. They also accentuated the declining trend of US leadership, while Russia began coming back to the forefront, especially through a ‘disruptive’ imperialist role in Syria, and China was rapidly rising as a challenger to the US superpower.

(d) In the first two decades of the 21st century, the quantitative and qualitative growth of terrorism, fostered by the spread of chaos and warlike barbarity in the world, is taking a central place in the life of society as an instrument of war between states. This led to the establishment of a new state, the "Islamic state" (Daesh), with its army, police, administration and schools, for which terrorism is the weapon of choice and which has triggered a wave of suicide attacks in the Middle East as well as in the metropolises of the industrialised countries. "The establishment of Daesh in 2013-14 and the attacks in France in 2015-16, Belgium and Germany in 2016 represent another step in this process” (Report on decomposition from the 22nd ICC Congress, 2017).[5] This expansion of 'kamikaze' terrorism goes hand in hand with the spread of irrational and fanatical religious radicalism throughout the world, from the Middle East to Brazil, from the USA to India.

(e) In 2016-17, the Brexit referendum in Britain and the advent of Trump in the USA revealed the populist tsunami as a particularly salient new manifestation of deepening decomposition.

"The rise of populism is an expression, in the current circumstances, of the bourgeoisie's increasing loss of control over the workings of society, resulting fundamentally from what lies at the heart of its decomposition, the inability of the two fundamental classes of society to provide a response to the insoluble crisis into which the capitalist economy is sinking. In other words, decomposition is fundamentally the result of impotence on the part of the ruling class, an impotence that is rooted in its inability to overcome this crisis in its mode of production and that increasingly tends to affect its political apparatus.

Among the current causes of the populist wave are the main manifestations of social decomposition: the rise of despair, nihilism, violence, xenophobia, associated with a growing rejection of the ‘elites’ (the ‘rich’, politicians, technocrats) and in a situation where the working class is unable to present, even in an embryonic way, an alternative.” (Resolution on the international situation of the 23rd ICC Congress, 2019)[6]

If this populist wave affects in particular the bourgeoisies of the industrialised countries, it is also found in other regions of the world in the form of the coming to power of strong and ‘charismatic’ leaders (Orban, Bolsonaro, Erdogan, Modi, Duterte...), often with the support of sects or extremist movements of religious inspiration (evangelist churches in Latin America or Africa, the Muslim Brotherhood in Turkey, racist Hindu identity movements in the case of Modi).

The decomposition phase already has 30 years of history and the brief overview of the latter shows how the decomposition of capitalism has spread and deepened through phenomena that have gradually affected more and more aspects of society, and which constitute the ingredients that caused the explosive nature of the Covid-19 global crisis. Admittedly, during these 30 years, the progression of the phenomena has been uneven, but it has taken place at different levels (ecological crisis, imperialist every man for himself, fragmentation of states, terrorism, social riots, loss of control of the political apparatus, ideological decomposition), increasingly undermining the attempts of state capitalism to counter its advance and maintain a certain shared framework. However, if the different phenomena reached an appreciable level of intensity, they appeared until then as "a proliferation of symptoms with no apparent interconnection, unlike previous periods of capitalist decadence which were defined and dominated by such obvious landmarks as world war or proletarian revolution” (Report on the Covid-19 pandemic and the period of capitalist decomposition, July 2020).[7] It is precisely the significance of the Covid-19 crisis to be, like the implosion of the Eastern bloc, highly emblematic of the phase of decomposition by accumulating all the factors of putrefaction of the system.

1.2 The pandemic results from the interaction of the manifestations of decomposition  

Like the various manifestations of decadence (world wars, general economic crises, militarism, fascism and Stalinism...), there is therefore also an accumulation of manifestations of the phase of decomposition. The scale of the impact of the Covid-19 crisis is explained not only by this accumulation but also by the interaction of ecological, health, social, political, economic and ideological expressions of decomposition in a kind of spiral never before observed, which has led to a tendency to lose control over more and more aspects of society and to an outbreak of irrational ideologies, extremely dangerous for the future of humanity.

a) Covid-19 and the destruction of nature

The pandemic is clearly an expression of the breakdown in the relationship between humanity and nature, which has reached an intensity and a planetary dimension unequalled with the decadence of the system and, in particular, with the last phase of this decadence, that of decomposition, more specifically here through uncontrolled urban growth and concentration (proliferation of overcrowded shantytowns) in the peripheral regions of capitalism, deforestation and climate change. Thus, in the case of Covid-19, a recent study by researchers from the Universities of Cambridge and Hawaii and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (in the journal Science of the Total Environment) would indicate that climate change in southern China over the past century has favoured the concentration in the region of bat species, which carry thousands of coronaviruses, and allowed the transmission of SARS-CoV-2, probably via pangolins, to humans.[7a]

For decades, the irretrievable destruction of the natural world has been generating a growing danger of environmental as well as health disasters, as already illustrated by the SARS, H1N1 or Ebola epidemics, which fortunately did not become pandemics. However, although capitalism has such technological strengths that it is capable of sending men to the moon, of producing monstrous weapons capable of destroying the planet dozens of times over, it has not been able to equip itself with the necessary means to remedy the ecological and health problems that led to the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. Man is increasingly separated from his "organic body" (Marx) and social decomposition is accentuating this trend.

b) Covid-19 and economic recession

At the same time, austerity and restructuring measures in research and health systems, which have been further intensified since the recession of 2007-11, have reduced hospital availability and slowed, if not stopped, research into viruses of the Covid family, even though various previous epidemics had warned of their dangerousness. On the other hand, during the pandemic, the primary objective of the industrialised countries has always been to keep production capacities intact as long as possible (and, by extension, crèches, day-care and primary education to enable parents to go to work), while being aware that companies and schools constitute a not insignificant source of contagion despite the measures taken (wearing a mask, keeping one's distance, etc.). In particular, during the pause in lockdown in the summer of 2020, the bourgeoisie cynically played with the health of the population in the name of the primacy of the economy, which has always prevailed, even if this risked contributing to the emergence of a new wave of the pandemic and to the return of lockdowns, to the increase in the number of hospitalisations and deaths.

c) Covid-19 and the imperialist every man for himself

The emphasis on ‘every man for himself’ between states has from the outset been a powerful incentive for the spread of the pandemic and has even encouraged its exploitation for hegemonic purposes. First, China's initial attempts to cover up the emergence of the virus and its refusal to pass on information to the WHO greatly favoured the initial expansion of the pandemic. Secondly, the persistence of the pandemic and its various waves, as well as the number of victims, were favoured by the refusal of many countries to ‘share’ their stocks of sanitary equipment with their neighbours, by the growing chaos in cooperation between the various countries, including and especially within the EU, to harmonise contamination control policies or vaccine design and purchasing policies, and again by the "vaccine race" between competing pharmaceutical giants (with juicy profits for the winners) instead of bringing together all the available expertise in medicine and pharmacology. Finally, the "vaccine war" is raging between countries: for example, the European Commission had initially refused to reserve 5 million additional doses of vaccine proposed by Pfizer-BioNTech under pressure from France, which demanded an equivalent additional order for the French company Sanofi ; the AstraZeneca/Oxford University vaccine is reserved in priority for Britain to the detriment of EU orders; moreover, Chinese (Sinovac), Russian (Sputnik V), Indian (BBV152) or American (Moderna) vaccines are widely exploited by these states as instruments of imperialist policy. The competition between states and the explosion of every man for himself have accentuated the frightening chaos in the management of the pandemic crisis.

d) Covid-19 and the loss of control of the bourgeoisie over its political apparatus

The loss of control over the political apparatus was already one of the characteristics marking the implosion of the Eastern bloc, but it appeared then as a specificity linked to the particular character of the Stalinist regimes. The refugee crisis (2015-16), the emergence of social riots against the corruption of the elites and above all the populist tidal wave (2016), all manifestations that were certainly already present but less prominent in past decades, would from the second half of the decade 2010-2020 highlight the importance of this phenomenon as an expression of the progression of decomposition. This dimension would play a determining role in the spread of the Covid-19 crisis. Populism and in particular populist leaders such as Bolsonaro, Johnson or Trump have favoured the expansion and lethal impact of the pandemic through their ‘vandalist’ policies: they have trivialised Covid-19 as a simple flu, have favoured the inconsistent implementation of a policy of limiting contamination, openly expressing their scepticism towards it, and have sabotaged any international collaboration. Thus, Trump openly transgressed the recommended health measures, openly accused China (the "Chinese virus") and refused to cooperate with the WHO.

This ‘vandalism’ is an emblematic expression of the bourgeoisie's loss of control over its political apparatus: after initially proving incapable of limiting the spread of the pandemic, the various national bourgeoisies failed to coordinate their actions and set up a broad system of ‘testing’ and ‘track and tracing’ in order to control and limit new waves of Covid-19 contagion. Finally, the slow and chaotic deployment of the vaccination campaign once again underscores the states’ difficulties in adequately managing the pandemic. The succession of contradictory and ineffective measures has fuelled growing scepticism and mistrust among the population towards government directives: "It is clear that, compared to the first wave, it is more difficult for citizens to adhere to the recommendations."[8] This concern is very present among governments in industrialised countries (from Macron to Biden), urging the population to follow the recommendations and directives of the authorities.

e) Covid-19 and the rejection of elites, irrational ideologies and rising despair

Populist movements are not only opposed to the elites but also favour the progression of nihilist ideologies and the most retrograde religious sectarianisms, already reinforced by the deepening of the decomposition phase. The Covid-19 crisis has provoked an unprecedented explosion of conspiratorial and anti-scientific visions, which are fuelling the contestation of state health policies. Conspiracy theories abound and spread totally fanciful conceptions of the virus and the pandemic. On the other hand, populist leaders such as Bolsonaro or Trump have openly expressed their contempt for science. The exponential spread of irrational thinking and the questioning of scientific rationality during the pandemic is a striking illustration of the acceleration of decomposition.

Populist rejection of elites and irrational ideologies have exacerbated an increasingly violent, purely bourgeois challenge to government measures such as curfews and lockdowns. This anti-elite and anti-state rage has stimulated the rise of rallies (Denmark, Italy, Germany) or ‘vandalist’, nihilist and anti-state riots against restrictions (to the cries of "Freedom!", "for our rights and life"), against "lockdown tyranny" or the "fraud of a virus that doesn't exist", such as those that broke out in January in Israel, Lebanon, Spain and especially in many cities in the Netherlands.

1.3 The pandemic marks the concentration of manifestations of decomposition in the central countries of capitalism.

The effects of the decomposition phase first hit the peripheral areas of the system hard: Eastern countries with the implosion of the Soviet bloc and former Yugoslavia, wars in the Middle East, war tensions in the Far East (Afghanistan, Korea, Sino-Indian border conflict), famines, civil wars, chaos in Africa. This changed with the refugee crisis, which has led to a massive flow of asylum seekers to Europe, or with the exodus of desperate populations from Mexico and Central America to the USA, then with the jihadist attacks in the USA and in the heart of Europe, and finally with the populist tsunami of 2016. In the second decade of the 21st century, the centre of the industrialised countries is increasingly affected and this trend is dramatically confirmed with the Covid-19 crisis.

The pandemic is hitting the heart of capitalism, especially the US. Compared to the crisis of 1989, the implosion of the Eastern bloc, which opened the phase of decomposition, a crucial difference is precisely that the crisis of Covid-19 does not affect a particularly backward part of the capitalist mode of production, that it cannot therefore be presented as a victory of ‘democratic capitalism’ since it impacts the centre of the capitalist system, the democracies of Europe and the US. Like a boomerang, the worst effects of decomposition, which capitalism had pushed for years to the periphery of the system, are coming back to the industrialised countries, which are now at the centre of the turmoil and far from being rid of all its effects. This impact on the central industrialised countries had certainly already been underlined by the ICC in terms of the control of the political game, in particular from 2017 onwards, but today, the American, British and German bourgeoisies (and following them those of the other industrialised countries) are at the heart of the pandemic hurricane and its consequences at the health, economic, political, social and ideological levels.

Among the central countries, it is the most powerful of them, the US superpower, which is suffering most from the impact of the Covid-19 crisis: the highest absolute number of infections and deaths in the world, a deplorable health situation, a ‘vandal’ presidential administration that has catastrophically mismanaged the pandemic and internationally isolated the country from its alliances, an economy in great difficulty, a president who has undermined the credibility of elections, called for a march on parliament, deepened divisions within the country and fuelled mistrust of science and rational data, described as "fake news". Today, the US is the epicentre of decomposition.

How can it be explained that the pandemic does indeed seem to affect the "periphery" of the system less this time (number of infections, number of deaths), and in particular Asia and Africa? There are of course a series of circumstantial reasons: climate, population density or geographical isolation (as shown by the cases of New Zealand, Australia or Finland in Europe) but also the relative reliability of the data: for example, the figure for deaths by Covid-19 in 2020 in Russia turns out to be three times higher than the official figure (185,000 instead of 55,000) according to one of the deputy prime ministers, Tatjana Golikova, on the basis of excess mortality.[9]

More fundamentally, the fact that Asia and Africa have previous experience in managing pandemics (N1N1, Ebola) certainly played in their favour. Then, there are various explanations of an economic nature (the more or less high density of international exchanges and contacts, the choice of limited lockdown allowing economic activity to continue), social (an elderly population parked by the hundreds in ‘retirement homes’), medical (a more or less high average lifespan: cf. France: 82.4 / Vietnam: 76 / China: 76.1 / Egypt: 70.9 / Philippines: 68.5 / Congo: 64.7 and a more or less high resilience to disease). In addition, African, Asian and Latin American countries are and will be heavily impacted indirectly by the pandemic e.g. through delays in vaccination in the periphery, the economic effects of the Covid-19 crisis and the slowdown in world trade, as indicated by the current danger of famine in Central America due to the economic downturn. Finally, the fact that European countries and the US avoid as much as possible imposing drastic and brutal lockdowns and controls, such as those decreed in China, is no doubt also linked to the prudence of the bourgeoisie towards a working class, disoriented but not beaten, which is not ready to let itself be ‘locked up’ by the state. The loss of control of its political apparatus and the anger among a population confronted with the collapse of health services and the failure of health policies make it all the more necessary for it to act with circumspection.

 

2. The Covid-19 crisis heralds a powerful acceleration of the process of decomposition

 

Faced with a proletarian political milieu which, after having denied past expressions of decomposition, considers the pandemic crisis as a transitional episode, the ICC must stress on the contrary that the scale of the Covid-19 crisis and its consequences implies that there will be no ‘return to normal’. Even if the deepening of decomposition, as was the case with decadence, is not linear, even if the departure of the populist Trump and the coming to power of Biden in the world's leading power may initially present the image of an illusory stabilisation, one must be aware that various trends that manifested themselves during the Covid-19 crisis mark an acceleration of the process of capitalism rotting on its feet, of the self-destruction of the system.

2.1. The decomposition of superstructures is now infecting the economic base

In 2007, our analysis still concluded that:

“Paradoxically, the economic situation of capitalism is the aspect of this society which is the least affected by decomposition. This is the case mainly because it is precisely the economic situation which, in the last instance, determines the other aspects of the life of this system, including those that relate to decomposition. (…) Today, despite all the speeches about the triumph of liberalism and the free play of the market, the states have not renounced intervening in the economies of their respective countries, or the use of structures whose task is to regulate as far as possible the relations between them, even creating new ones such as the World Trade Organisation.” (Resolution on the international situation to the 17th ICC Congress, 2007)[10]

Until then, economic crisis and decomposition had been separated by state action, the former not seeming to be affected by the latter.

In fact, the international mechanisms of state capitalism, deployed within the framework of the imperialist blocs (1945-89), had been maintained from the 1990s on the initiative of the industrialised countries as a palliative to the crisis and as a protective shield against the effects of decomposition. The ICC understood the multilateral mechanisms of economic cooperation and a certain coordination of economic policies not as a unification of capital at the world level, nor as a tendency to super-imperialism, but as a collaboration between bourgeoisies at the international level in order to regulate and organise the market and world production, to slow down and reduce the pace of the plunge crisis, to avoid the impact of the effects of decomposition on the nerve centre of the economy, and finally to protect the heart of capitalism (USA, Germany...). However, this mechanism of resistance against the crisis and decomposition was tending to erode more and more. Since 2015, several phenomena have begun to express such an erosion: a trend towards a considerable weakening of coordination between countries, particularly with regard to economic recovery (and which is in clear contrast to the coordinated response to the 2008-2011 crisis), a fragmentation of relations between and within states. Since 2016, the vote in favour of Brexit and the Trump presidency have increased the paralysis and risk of fragmentation of the European Union and intensified the trade war between the US and China, as well as the economic tensions between the US and Germany.

A major consequence of the Covid-19 crisis is the fact that the effects of decomposition, the accentuation of every man for himself and the loss of control, which until then had essentially affected the superstructure of the capitalist system, now tend to have a direct impact on the economic basis of the system, its capacity to manage economic jolts as it sinks into its historic crisis.

"When we developed our analysis of decomposition, we considered that this phenomenon affected the form of imperialist conflicts (see "Militarism and decomposition", International Review 64) and also the consciousness of the proletariat. On the other hand, we considered that it had no real impact on the evolution of the crisis of capitalism. If the current rise of populism were to lead to the coming to power of this current in some of the main European countries, such an impact of decomposition will develop.” (Report on decomposition from the 22nd ICC Congress, 2017).[11]

Indeed, the perspective put forward in 2017 has quickly materialised, and now we have to consider that the economic crisis and decomposition increasingly interfere with and influence each other.

Thus, budgetary restrictions in health policies and hospital care have favoured the expansion of the pandemic, which in turn has led to a collapse of world trade and economies, particularly in the industrialised countries (the GDPs of the main industrialised countries in 2020 will be negative at levels not seen since the Second World War). The economic recession will in turn provide a stimulus to deepen the decomposition of the superstructure. On the other hand, the growing ‘every man for himself’ mentality and loss of control that marked the Covid-19 crisis as a whole is now also infecting the economy. The lack of international consultation between central economic countries is striking (no G7, G8 or G20 meeting in 2020) and the failure of economic and health policy coordination between EU countries is also evident. Faced with the pressure of economic contradictions within the core countries of capitalism; faced with China's hesitations about its policy (whether to continue opening up to the world or to initiate a strategic nationalist withdrawal to Asia), the shocks at the level of the economic base will tend to become increasingly strong and chaotic.

2.2. Central countries at the heart of the growing instability of relations within and between bourgeoisies

In previous years, we have seen an exacerbation of tensions within and between bourgeoisies. In particular, with the coming to power of Trump and the implementation of Brexit, this has manifested itself intensely at the level of the bourgeoisies. The American and British bourgeoisies were hitherto regarded as the most stable and experienced in the world, but the consequences of the Covid-19 crisis can only sharpen these tensions even more:

- The British bourgeoisie enters the post-Brexit fog having lost the support of the US big brother because of Trump's defeat, while at the same time suffering the full consequences of the pandemic. As far as Brexit is concerned, dissatisfaction with the fuzzy agreement with the EU appears as much among those who did not want it (the Scots, the Northern Irish) as among those who wanted a hard Brexit (the fishermen), while there is no agreement (or not yet?) with the EU on services (80% of trade), and tensions between the EU and the UK are growing (over vaccines, for example). As for the Covid-19 crisis, Britain has had to lockdown again in a hurry, has passed the 120,000 deaths mark and is under terrible pressure on its health services. Meanwhile, the situation is having a deleterious impact on its main political parties, the Tories and Labour, both of which are in the throes of a serious internal crisis.

- The exacerbation of tensions between the US and other states was evident under the Trump administration: "The vandalising behaviour of a Trump, who can denounce American international commitments overnight in defiance of established rules, represents a new and powerful factor of uncertainty, providing further impetus towards ‘each against all’. It is a further indication of the new stage in which capitalism is sinking further into barbarism and the abyss of untrammelled militarism” (Point 13, Resolution on the international situation of the 23rd ICC Congress, 2019).[12] But within the US bourgeoisie itself, tensions are also high. This had already manifested itself over the strategy for maintaining its supremacy during the catastrophic Iraqi adventure of Bush junior:

"The accession of the ‘Neo-Cons’ to the head of the American state represents a real catastrophe for the American bourgeoisie. (…) In fact, the arrival of the team of Cheney, Rumsfeld and Co. to the reins of the state was not the simple result of a monumental mistake in casting by the ruling class. While it has considerably worsened the situation of the US on the imperialist level, it was already the expression of the impasse facing the US, given the growing weakening of its leadership and more generally given the development of ‘every man for himself’ in international relations which characterises the phase of decomposition.” (Resolution on the international situation of the 17th ICC Congress, 2007).[13]

But with Trump's ‘vandalist’ policy and the Covid-19 crisis, the oppositions within the US bourgeoisie appeared to be much broader (immigration, economy); and above all, the capacity of the political apparatus to maintain the cohesion of a fragmented society seems to have been undermined. Indeed, national ‘unity’ and ‘identity’ have congenital weaknesses that make them vulnerable to decomposition. For example: the existence of large ethnic and migrant communities, who have suffered racial discrimination from the very beginning of the USA and some of whom are excluded from 'official' life; the weight of churches and sects spreading irrational and anti-scientific thinking; the considerable autonomy of the states of the 'American Union' from the federal government (there is, for example, an independence movement in Texas); the increasingly sharp opposition between the states on the East and West coasts (California, Oregon, Washington, New York, Massachusetts, etc.) taking full advantage of ‘globalisation’, and the southern (Tennessee, Louisiana, etc.), rust belt (Indiana, Ohio, etc.) and deep-central (Oklahoma, Kansas, etc.) states, who are much more favourable to a more protectionist approach – all tend to favour a fragmentation of American society, even if the federal state is still far from having lost control of the situation. However, the vaudeville of contesting the process and results of the last presidential elections, as well as the ‘storming’ of the Capitol by Trump supporters in front of the whole world, as in any banana republic, confirms the accentuation of this trend towards fragmentation.

Concerning the future exacerbation of tensions within and between bourgeoisies, two points need to be clarified.

a) Biden's appointment does not change the basis of US problems

The advent of the Biden administration in no way signifies the reduction of intra- and inter-bourgeois tensions and in particular the end of the imprint on domestic and foreign policy of Trump's populism: on the one hand, four years of unpredictability and vandalism by Trump, most recently with regard to the catastrophic management of the pandemic, profoundly affect the domestic situation in the USA and the fragmentation of American society, as well as its international positioning. Moreover, Trump will have done everything during the last period of his presidency to make the situation even more chaotic for his successor (cf. the letter from the last 10 defence ministers enjoining Trump not to involve the army in the contestation of the election results in December 2020; the occupation of Congress by its supporters). Secondly, Trump's election result shows that about half of the population shares his ideas and in particular his aversion to political elites. Finally, the hold of Trump and his ideas on a large part of the Republican Party heralds a difficult management for the unpopular (apart from among the political elites) Biden administration. Its victory is due more to an anti-Trump polarisation than to enthusiasm for the new president's programme.

Thus, while in form and in certain areas, such as climate policy or immigration, the Biden administration will tend to break with Trump's policy, its internal policy of ‘revenge’ by the elites on both coasts against ‘Deep America’ (the issues of fossil fuels and the ‘Wall’ are precisely linked to this) and an external policy marked by the maintenance of Trump's attitudes in the Middle East and a strengthening of the confrontation with China (cf. Biden's harsh attitude towards Xi in their first telephone conversation and the US demand that the EU review its trade treaty with China) can only lead in the long run to increased instability within the US bourgeoisie and between bourgeoisies.

b) China is not the great victor in this situation

Officially, China presents itself as the ‘country that defeated the pandemic’. What is its situation in reality? To answer this question, it is necessary to assess the short-term (effective control of the pandemic) and medium-term impact of the Covid-19 crisis.

China has an overwhelming responsibility for the emergence and expansion of the pandemic. After the SARS outbreak in 2003, protocols were established for local authorities to warn the central authorities; already with the swine fever epidemic in 2019 it became clear that this was not working because, in Stalinist state capitalism, local officials fear for their career/promotion if they announce bad news. The same was true at the beginning of Covid-19 in Wuhan. It was the ‘democratic citizen oppositions’ who after much delay finally got the news through to the central level. The central level was in turn initially conspicuous by its absence: it did not notify the WHO and, for three weeks, Xi was absent from the scene: three precious weeks of lost time. Since then, moreover, China has still refused to provide the WHO with verifiable data on the development of the pandemic on its territory.

The short-term impact is above all indirect. At the direct level, the official figures for contamination and deaths are unreliable (these range from 30,000 to several million) and, according to the New York Times, the Chinese government itself may be unaware of the extent of the epidemic as local authorities lie about the number of infections, tests and deaths for fear of reprisals from the central government. However, the imposition of ruthless and barbaric lockdowns on entire regions, literally locking millions of people in their homes for weeks (imposed again regularly in recent months), has totally paralysed the Chinese economy for several weeks, leading to massive unemployment (205 million in May 2020) and disastrous crop failure (in combination with droughts, floods and locust invasions). For 2020, China’s GDP is down by more than 4% compared to 2019 (+6.1% to +1.9%); domestic consumption has been maintained by a massive release of credits from the State.

In the longer term, the Chinese economy is faced with the relocation of strategic industries by the United States and European countries and the difficulties of the "New Silk Road" because of the financial problems linked to the economic crisis and accentuated by the Covid-19 crisis (with its impact on Chinese financing but above all because of the level of indebtedness of ‘partner’ countries such as Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal, etc.) but also by growing mistrust on the part of many countries and anti-Chinese pressure from the United States. So, it should come as no surprise that in 2020 there has been a collapse in the financial value of the investments injected into the "New Silk Road" project (-64%).

The Covid-19 crisis and the obstacles encountered by the "New Silk Road" have also accentuated the increasingly evident tensions at the head of the Chinese state, between the ‘economist’ faction, which relies above all on economic globalisation and ‘multilateralism’ to pursue China's capitalist expansion, and the ‘nationalist’ faction, which calls for a more muscular policy and puts forward force ("China defeated Covid") in the face of internal threats (the Uighurs, Hong Kong, Taiwan) and external threats (tensions with the USA, India and Japan). In the perspective of the next People's Congress in 2022, which should appoint the new (former?) president, the situation in China is therefore also particularly unstable.

2.3. State capitalism as a factor exacerbating contradictions

"As the GCF pointed out in 1952 state capitalism is not a solution to the contradictions of capitalism, even if it can delay their effects, but is an expression of them. The capacity of the state to hold a decaying society together, however invasive it becomes, is therefore destined to weaken over time and in the end become an aggravating factor of the very contradictions it is trying to contain. The decomposition of capitalism is the period in which a growing loss of control by the ruling class and its state becomes the dominant trend of social evolution, which Covid reveals so dramatically.” (Report on the Covid-19 pandemic and the period of capitalist decomposition, July 2020)[14]

The pandemic crisis expresses in a particularly acute way the contradiction between the need for massive intervention by state capitalism in an attempt to limit the effects of the crisis and an opposite tendency to loss of control, to fragmentation, itself exacerbated by these attempts by the state to maintain its control.

The Covid-19 crisis in particular marked an acceleration in the loss of credibility of the state apparatus. While state capitalism intervened on a massive scale to deal with the effects of the pandemic crisis (health measures, lockdown, mass vaccination, generalised financial compensation to cushion the economic impact, etc.), the measures taken at the various levels have often proved ineffective or have led to new contradictions (vaccination exacerbates the anti-state opposition of the 'anti-vaxxers', economic compensation for one sector causes discontent in others). Consequently, if the state is supposed to represent society as a whole and maintain its cohesion, society sees it less and less in this way: in the face of the growing carelessness and irresponsibility of the bourgeoisie, increasingly evident in central countries too, the tendency is to see the state as a structure at the service of corrupt elites, as well as a force of repression. As a result, it is having more and more difficulty in imposing rules: in many European countries, for example in Italy, France or Poland, and also in the USA, demonstrations have taken place against government measures to close down businesses or to impose lockdowns. Everywhere, especially among young people, social media campaigns are appearing to oppose these rules, such as the hashtag "I don't want to play the game anymore" in Holland.

The inability of states to deal with the situation is both symbolised and affected by the impact of populist 'vandalism'. The disruption of the political game of the bourgeoisie in the industrialised countries manifested itself in an explicit way from the beginning of the 21st century with populist movements and parties, often close to the extreme right. Thus, let us note the surprise rise of Le Pen in the final round of the 2002 presidential election in France, the dazzling and spectacular breakthrough of the "Pim Fortuyn list" in the Netherlands in 2001-2002, the Berlusconi governments with the support of the extreme right in Italy, the rise of Jorg Haider and the FPÖ in Austria, or the rise of the Tea Party in the USA. Even then, the ICC tended to link the phenomenon to the weakness of the bourgeoisies:

"They depend on the strength or weakness of the national bourgeoisie. In Italy, the bourgeoisie’s weaknesses and internal divisions, even from the imperialist viewpoint, have led to the upsurge of a substantial populist right. In Britain on the contrary, the virtual non-existence of a specific far right party is due to the British bourgeoisie’s greater experience and superior grip over its own political game."[15]

While the trend of loss of control is global and has marked the periphery (countries like Brazil, Venezuela, Peru in Latin America, the Philippines or India in Asia), it is now hitting the industrialised countries, the historically strongest bourgeoisies (Britain) and today especially the US. While the populist wave is focused on contesting the establishment, the coming to power of populists is further undermining and destabilising state structures through their ‘vandalist’ policies (cf. Trump, Bolsonaro, but also the Five Star and Lega ‘populist government’ in Italy), as they are neither willing nor able to responsibly take over the affairs of state.

These observations go against the thesis that the bourgeoisie, through these measures, is mobilising and subduing the population in order to march towards a generalised war. On the contrary, the chaotic health policies and the inability of the states to face the situation express the difficulty of the bourgeoisies of the central countries to impose their control on society. The development of this tendency can alter the credibility of democratic institutions (without this implying in the present context the slightest strengthening of the class terrain) or, on the contrary, stimulate the development of campaigns to defend them, or even to restore ‘real democracy’: thus, regarding the assault on the Capitol, we see a clash between those who want to reconquer democracy ‘taken hostage by the elites’ ("the Capitol is our home") and those who defend democracy against a populist putsch.

The fact that the bourgeoisie is less and less able to present a perspective for society as a whole also generates a frightening expansion of irrational alternative ideologies and a growing disregard for a scientific and reasoned approach. Certainly, the decomposition of the values of the ruling class is not new. It appeared at the end of the 1960s, but the deepening of the decomposition, chaos and barbarism favours the advent of hatred and violence of nihilist ideologies and the most retrograde religious sectarianism. The Covid-19 crisis stimulates the large-scale spread of these. Movements such as QAnon, Wolverine Watchmen, Proud Boys or the Boogaloo movement in the USA, evangelical sects in Brazil, Latin America or Africa, Sunni or Shiite Muslim sects but also Hindu or Buddhist ones spread conspiracy theories and spread totally fanciful conceptions about the virus, the pandemic, about the origin (creationism) or future of society. The exponential spread of irrational thinking and the rejection of the contributions of science will tend to accelerate.

2.4. The proliferation of anti-state riots and inter-classist movements

Explosions of popular revolts against misery and warlike barbarity were present from the beginning of the phase of decomposition and are becoming more pronounced in the 21st century: Argentina (2001-02), the French suburbs in 2005, Iran in 2009, London and other British cities in 2011, the outbreak of riots in the Maghreb and the Middle East in 2011-12 (the "Arab Spring"). A new wave of social riots broke out in Chile, Ecuador or Colombia (2019), Iran (in 2017-18 and again in 2019-20), Iraq, Lebanon (2019-20), but also in Romania (2017) in Bulgaria (2013 and 2019-20) or in France with the ‘yellow vests’ movement (2018-19) and, with specific characteristics, in Ferguson (2014) and Baltimore (2016) in the USA. These revolts manifest the growing despair of populations suffering from the breakdown of social relations, subjected to the traumatic and dramatic consequences of impoverishment linked to economic collapse or endless wars. They are also increasingly targeting the corruption of ruling cliques and more generally political elites.

In the aftermath of the Covid-19 crisis, such outbursts of anger multiplied, taking the form of demonstrations and even riots. They tend to crystallise around three poles:

(a) inter-classist movements, expressing revolt at the economic and social consequences of the Covid-19 crisis (example of the 'Yellow Vests');

(b) identity movements, whether of populist (MAGA) origin or as expressions of partial struggles, tending to exacerbate tensions between components of the population (such as revolts about race, eg Black Lives Matter), but also religiously inspired movements (in India, for example);

(c) anti-establishment and anti-state movements in the name of ‘individual freedom’, of a nihilistic type, without any real ‘alternatives’, such as ‘anti-vax’ or conspiracy movements ("get my institutions back from the hands of the elites").

These types of movements often lead to riots and looting, serving as an outlet for gangs of young people from neighbourhoods undermined by decomposition. While these movements highlight the significant loss of credibility of the political structures of the bourgeoisie, none of them offer in any way a perspective for the working class. Any revolt against the state is not always a favourable terrain for the proletariat: on the contrary, they divert it from its class terrain to a terrain that is not its own.

2.5. The exploitation of the ecological threat by the bourgeoisie's campaigns

The pandemic illustrates the dramatic worsening of environmental degradation, which is reaching alarming levels, according to the findings and forecasts that are now unanimously accepted in scientific circles and which the majority of the bourgeois sectors of all countries have taken up (Paris Agreement, 2015): urban air pollution and ocean water pollution, climate change with increasingly violent meteorological phenomena, the advance of desertification, and the accelerated disappearance of plant and animal species that increasingly threaten the biological balance of our planet.

“The scale and the proliferation of all these economic and social calamities, which spring generally speaking from the decadence of the system itself, reveals the fact that this system is trapped in a complete dead-end, and has no future to propose to the greater part of the world population other than a growing and unimaginable barbarity. This is a system where economic policy, research, investment are all conducted to the detriment of humanity’s future, and even to the detriment of the system itself.” (Point 7, Theses on Decomposition, 1990)[16]

The ruling class is unable to implement the necessary measures because of the very laws of capitalism and more specifically because of the exacerbation of contradictions caused by the sinking into decomposition; consequently, the ecological crisis can only worsen and lead to new catastrophes in the future. However, in recent decades, the bourgeoisie has tried to recuperate the ecological dimension in an attempt to put forward a perspective of ‘reforms within the system’. In particular, the bourgeoisies in the industrialised countries are placing the ‘ecological transition’ and the ‘green economy’ at the centre of their current campaigns to gain acceptance for a perspective of drastic austerity as part of their post-Covid economic policies aimed at restructuring and strengthening the competitive position of the industrialised countries. Thus, they are at the centre of the European Commission's ‘recovery plans’ for EU countries and the Biden administration's stimulus package in the US. In the coming years, therefore, the question of ecology will be more than ever be the source of major mystifications to be fought by revolutionaries.

 

3. Conclusions

 

This report has shown that the pandemic does not open a new period, but that it is first of all a revelation of the level of putrefaction reached during the 30 years of the phase of decomposition, a level that has often been underestimated until now. At the same time, the pandemic crisis also heralds a significant acceleration of various effects of decomposition in the period ahead, which is illustrated in particular by the impact of the Covid-19 crisis on the management of the economy by states and by its devastating effects on the central industrial countries, and in particular on the US superpower. There are possibilities for occasional countertrends, which may impose a pause or even a certain resumption of control by state capitalism, but these specific events will by no means mean that the historical dynamics of sinking into the phase of decomposition, highlighted in this report, will be called into question.

If the perspective is not for a generalised world war (between imperialist blocs), the current plunge into every man for himself and fragmentation nevertheless brings the sinister promise of a multiplication of murderous warlike conflicts, revolts without perspectives or catastrophes for humanity.

"The course of history cannot be turned back: as its name suggests, decomposition leads to social dislocation and putrefaction, to the void. Left to its own devices, it will lead humanity to the same fate as world war. In the end, it is all the same whether we are wiped out in a rain of thermonuclear bombs, or by pollution, radioactivity from nuclear power stations, famine, epidemics, and the massacres of innumerable small wars (where nuclear weapons might also be used). The only difference between these two forms of annihilation lies in that one is quick, while the other would be slower, and would consequently provoke still more suffering”. (Point 11, Theses on Decomposition)

The progression of the phase of decomposition can also lead to a decline in the capacity of the proletariat to carry out its revolutionary action. The proletariat is thus engaged in a race against time against the sinking of society into the barbarity of a historically obsolete system. Of course, workers' struggles cannot prevent the development of decomposition, but they can stop the effects of it, of every man for himself. As a reminder, "capitalism’s decadence was necessary for the proletariat to be able to overthrow the system; by contrast, the appearance of this specific phase of decomposition as a result of the continuation of the decadent period without its leading to a proletarian revolution, is in no way a necessary stage for the proletariat on the road towards its emancipation." (Point 12, Theses on Decomposition)

The Covid-19 crisis is therefore creating an even more unpredictable and confusing situation. Tensions on different levels (health, socio-economic, military, political, ideological) will generate major social upheavals, massive popular revolts, destructive riots, intense ideological campaigns, such as the one around ecology. Without a solid framework for understanding events, revolutionaries will not be able to play their role as the political vanguard of the class, but will on the contrary contribute to its confusion, to the decline of its ability to carry out its revolutionary action.

This report follows on from the report adopted by the 24th Congress of RI.[1] Several aspects are adequately dealt with in that report, including the measures taken in the economic field in the face of the pandemic; the violent incursion of decomposition onto the economic terrain, and the attack on workers' living conditions becoming a real nightmare. We will not develop these elements but will concentrate on the perspective: where is the world economy heading after the great cataclysm that erupted with the Covid pandemic?

1. A widely predicted crisis

The Report on the economic crisis adopted by the 23rd ICC Congress announced that: “we must consider the possibility of significant shocks in the global economy in 2019-2020. Negative factors are accumulating increasingly uncontrollable debt; the trade war that is raging; sharp devaluations of overvalued financial assets; a -0.1% contraction of the German economy in the third quarter of 2018, with the Chinese economy falling to its lowest rate in the last decade.”

For 2020, the World Bank recorded a global fall in output of 5.2%, which is 7% for the world's top 23 economies and 2.5% in the 'developing economies'. According to the World Bank, the fall in output is the worst since 1945 and "the first time since 1870 that so many economies have experienced a simultaneous fall in output".[2] A very important phenomenon is the fall in world trade. One indicator is the drop in world seaborne trade, which fell by 10% in 2020. But, paradoxically, "container prices have on average quadrupled in the last two months. From around $1,500 to almost $5,000. And in some cases, it has been as high as $12,000. This is because countries like China use their ships and containers for their own use, taking them away from global traffic.”[3]

For 2021 a rebound of the world economy is forecast; however, this would be on condition that the pandemic has been overcome by June 2021, otherwise the forecasts are much more pessimistic. There will be feverish increases in growth, but beyond that, we should consider that the most serious forecasts point to a stabilisation of the world economy from 2023 onwards. The experience of the post-2008 recovery is that it took a long time to take hold (from 2013 onwards), was rather anaemic and in 2018 showed signs of exhaustion. As we will see throughout this report, the current conditions of the global economy are much worse than in 2008, and, rather than making predictions, the important thing is to understand this significant deterioration.

On one hand, the 'experts' give a misleading picture of the effects of the pandemic crisis on the economy. They start from the axiom that such a crisis will not have irreversible effects on the economic apparatus and that the economy will recover at a higher level than in the previous period. Such an assumption underestimates the significant deterioration of the long-standing productive, financial and commercial tissue, which the pandemic crisis is likely to profoundly weaken. It is estimated that 30% of companies may disappear permanently in OECD countries. Behind us we have more than 100 years of capitalist decadence, with the economy deformed by the war economy and the effects of environmental destruction, profoundly altered in its reproductive mechanisms by indebtedness and state manipulations, eroded by pandemics, and increasingly affected by the effects of decomposition. In such conditions it is illusory to think that the economy will recover without the slightest scratch.

On the other hand, the profound weakness of the proclaimed 'recovery' of 2013-2018 already heralded the current situation. Outside the United States, China, and to a lesser extent Germany, production in all the major countries of the world has stagnated or fallen (according to World Bank estimates) - something that has not happened since the Second World War.

2. The irruption of decomposition on the economic terrain

Already at the 22nd Congress we noticed the growing impact of the effects of decomposition on the economic terrain and particularly on the state capitalist management of the crisis. We were aware of this tendency in the economic crisis report adopted by the 23rd Congress that noted this irruption of decomposition as one of the main factors in the evolution of the economic situation and, finally, the report on the crisis adopted by the 24th Congress of RI deepened this analysis and focused on the pandemic in a double sense: as a result of decomposition and of the aggravation of the economic crisis, but at the same time a powerful factor in the acceleration of the latter.

It’s important to underline our approach to the question: one of the features of decadence is that the capitalist system tries to stretch all the possibilities contained in its relations of production to their extreme limits, even at the risk of violating its own economic laws. So,

“one of the major contradictions of capitalism is that arising from the conflict between the increasingly global nature of production and the necessarily national structure of capital. By pushing to its limits, the economic, financial and productive possibilities of the 'associations' of nations, capitalism has obtained a significant 'breath of fresh air' in its fight against the crisis, but at the same time it has put itself in a risky situation” (23rd Congress Report).

This 'risky situation' has been demonstrating its serious consequences linked to the impact of decomposition on the economic terrain, especially in the last five years of the 2010s.

The pandemic is the expression of the acceleration of decomposition and, at the same time, aggravates it further. The report on the economic crisis is focussed on this fundamental reality. The Resolution on the Situation in France of the 24th RI Congress shows this central axis quite clearly:

"In 2008, during the 'subprime crisis', the bourgeoisie was able to react in a coordinated manner on an international scale. The famous G7, G8, ... G20 (which were in the headlines) symbolised this capacity of states to agree at the very least to try to respond to the 'debt crisis'. 12 years later, division, the 'war of masks' and then the 'war of vaccines', the cacophony of decisions to close borders against the spread of the COVID 19, the lack of consultation at the international level (except for Europe, which is struggling to protect itself against its competitors) to limit the economic collapse, are signs of the advance of 'every man for himself' and the plunge of the highest political circles of capitalism into an increasingly irrational management of the system.”

This tendency is becoming even stronger, particularly in the US where a long trend of economic decline is combined with an unprecedent aggravation of decomposition in its political apparatus and its social tissue.

However, it would be a mistake to think that this tendency is limited to the United States. In Europe, Germany seems to have reacted, but tensions within the EU are increasingly evident, and the shock of Brexit will have consequences that have not yet surfaced. China's 'stability' is more apparent than real.

Consequently, we can say that the effects of the breakdown in the economic sphere and in state management of the economy are here to stay and will have an increasingly strong influence on economic developments. It is true that the bourgeoisie is going to set in motion countertendencies (for example, the EU agreements on partial mutualisation of the debt or Biden's annulment of certain measures adopted by Trump). However, beyond the brakes or the reversal measures, the weight of decomposition on the economy and on the state management of the latter is going to become stronger, with consequences that are for the moment difficult to predict. Rather than making predictions, we need to monitor developments closely and draw conclusions within the overall framework we set up.

3. Bailing out the economy cannot be done under the same conditions as in 2008.

With the response that capital in most countries has been forced to give to the pandemic (the lockdown that has not yet ended), one of the worst recessions in history has occurred.

To prevent a generalised collapse, the bourgeoisie has been forced to inject billions. This has allowed it to 'muddle through', to 'weather the storm'.[4] It will be necessary to 'rescue the world economy'. And how will this complicated operation be carried out?

We can say that it will be done in much worse conditions than in 2008, that it will entail a violent dose of austerity and that the world economy will be left in a much more deteriorated condition, with less capacity for recovery, and will experience greater chaos and significant convulsions.

Five factors explain these worse conditions:

1. The growing weight of decomposition on the economy and state capitalism

2. China will no longer be able to play the role of a locomotive providing a lifeline as it did in response to 2008

3. Environmental disaster

4. The weight of the war economy

5. The crushing weight of debt.

4. The gradual dislocation of the economic edifice of globalisation

With the pandemic we have witnessed a chaotic and irrational response by states, starting with the largest and most powerful ones. The WHO has been ignored by all states, thus preventing the required international strategy based as much as possible on scientific criteria. Each state has tried to close its economy as late as possible in order not to lose competitive and imperialist advantages over its rivals. By the same token, economies have been reopened with the aim of gaining advantages over rivals, and the closures provoked by the worsening of the pandemic have been trapped in the contradiction between the need to maintain and increase production in the face of rivals and the need to prevent the productive apparatus and social cohesion from being undermined by new waves of contagion.

The mask war has been a degrading spectacle: states considered 'serious' such as France or Germany were blatantly stealing shipments of masks destined for other national capitals. The same has happened with equipment such as breathing apparatus, oxygen, personal protective equipment, etc.

In the current war over vaccines: their manufacture, their distribution, and the vaccinations themselves, are all revealing the growing disorder which the world economy is sliding into.

In vaccine research and manufacture, we have seen a chaotic race between states in fierce competition. Britain, China, Russia, the United States ... have been in a race against the clock to be the first to have the vaccine. International coordination has been absent. Vaccines have been tested in record time with no real guarantee of efficacy.

Distribution is equally chaotic. The EU's conflict with the British company AstraZeneca is testimony to this. The richer countries have left the poorer ones unprotected. Israel has vaccinated its nationals while side-lining the Palestinians. Russia uses misleading propaganda to present its vaccine as the best. It is evidence that the vaccine is used as an instrument of imperialist influence. Russia and China make no secret of this and openly proclaim that they will offer lower prices to those countries that bow to their economic, political and military demands.

Finally, the way in which the population is being vaccinated is mind-bogglingly disorganised and undisciplined. In France, Germany, Spain, Italy, to give just a few examples, there is a constant lack of supply, causing delays in vaccination even in the groups identified as priority (health workers, the over-65s). Vaccination plans have been delayed several times. Often the first dose is administered and the second is delayed sine die, thus nullifying the effectiveness of the vaccine. Rulers, politicians, businessmen, the military etc. have bypassed the list of priority groups and have been vaccinated first.

What this degrading spectacle around vaccines shows us is a growing tendency for capitalism to undermine the capacity for 'international cooperation' that had managed to mitigate the economic crisis in the period 1990-2008. Capitalism is founded on competition to the death - and this constituent feature of capitalism did not disappear in the heyday of 'globalisation' - but what we see now is an exacerbated competition, taking as its field something as sensitive as health and epidemics. If in the ascendant period of capitalism competition between capitals and nations was a factor of expansion and development of the system, in decadence it is, on the contrary, a factor of destruction and chaos: destruction with the barbarism of imperialist war; chaos (that also includes destruction and wars) especially with the irruption of the effects of decomposition on the economic terrain and its state management. This chaos will increasingly affect global production and supply chains, the planning of production, the ability to combat 'unexpected' phenomena such as pandemics or other catastrophes.

The repatriation of production to the home country by multinationals was already underway since 2017 but seems to have accelerated with the pandemic:

"A study released this week by Bank of America, on 3,000 companies with a total market capitalisation of $22 trillion and located in 12 major global sectors, states that 80% of these companies have relocation plans to repatriate part of their production from abroad. 'This is the first turning point in a decades-long trend,' the authors proclaim. In the last three years, some 153 companies have returned to the US while 208 have done so in the EU."[5]

Are these measures irreversible? Are we witnessing the end of the phase of 'globalisation', i.e. global production, strongly interconnected with an international division of labour, with production, transport and logistics chains organised on a global scale?

The first consideration is that the pandemic is taking longer than expected. On 28 September 2020, the figure of one million deaths was reached; on 15 January, less than three months later, this reached two million. Although vaccines are being applied, the WHO's scientific director, Soumya Swaminathan, predicts that we will have to wait until 2022 to reach reasonable immunisation of the population in Europe. It is likely that the disruption and interruptions in production will continue throughout 2021.

Secondly, if we look at historical experience, we can see that the measures of state capitalism that were taken in response to the First World War did not disappear completely after the end of the war; and 10 years later, with the crisis of 1929, they made a gigantic leap, confirming the correct prediction of the First Congress of the Communist International:

“All the fundamental questions of the world's economic life are no longer regulated by free competition, not even by combinations of national and international trusts or consortiums. They have fallen under the yoke of military tyranny to serve as its safeguard from now on. If the absolute subjection of political power to finance capital has led mankind to imperialist butchery, this butchery has allowed finance capital not only to militarise the state to the end, but to militarise itself, so that it can only fulfil its essential economic functions with iron and blood.”[6]

By the same token, it’s likely that the measures taken in response to the pandemic on the economic terrain will remain in place, even if there will be partial setbacks.

This is confirmed by the fact that, since 2015, as we made clear in the report of the 23rd Congress, China, Germany and the United States have been moving in this direction. The measures taken during the pandemic only deepen an orientation that was already present in the 2010s.

That the big powers have not, for the moment, coordinated their financial and economical responses to the danger of bankruptcy is evidence of this. While, in the 2008 crisis, meetings of the G8, G20 etc proliferated, this kind of meeting is now obviously absent.[7]

However, the globalised structure of world production offers major advantages to the most powerful economies, and they will take actions to correct the major disruptions outlined above. A really clear example: the plan to mutualise debts in the EU particularly benefits Germany which will consolidate its exports to Spain, Italy, etc. These countries, presented as 'the great beneficiaries', will in the end be the big losers, as their industrial tissue will be weakened by the overwhelming competition from German exports. In fact, debt mutualisation will help Germany to counter the Chinese presence in southern European countries, which has strengthened since 2013. We are not witnessing a dismantling of globalisation, but rather its increasing dislocation (for example, through the tendency towards fragmentation into regional areas), the much greater weight of protectionist tendencies, the relocation of production areas, the multiplication of measures that each country takes on its own, in breach of international agreements. In short, a growing chaos in the functioning of the world economy.

5. Chinese policy

In the period 2009-2015, China played an essential role with its purchases and investments in the weak revival of the world economy after the severe upheaval of 2008. In the face of the present situation, can China play the same role as the locomotive of the world economy?

We think that this is very unlikely for at least 4 reasons:

1) China's current situation is much weaker than it was then: growth in output continues to decline slowly but surely; according to the IMF, China will have the worst growth in 35 years: only 1.2%. This how the International Communist Party (Bordigist) expressed it:
"in China, the official unemployment rate was 6% at the end of April; but a study by a Chinese organisation estimated real unemployment at the same date at 20.5% (or 70 million unemployed); the study was withdrawn and the organisation's management punished by the authorities, but Western economists put forward figures of the same order.” (cited in our internal bulletin, 2020)

China's level of indebtedness is gigantic (300% of GDP in 2019); the situation of many of its companies is very fragile. For example, in China 30% of companies are ‘zombies’,[8] which is the highest percentage in the world (in Germany and France it is estimated at 10%). Also state-owned companies still hold a large share in the economy and these companies have the highest debt burden.

2. The Silk Road project - a 60-country plan of commercial, economic and imperialist expansion - seeks to define a global economic area exclusive to China, with the result that the role it can play in stimulating world trade will diminish. China's rivals and especially the USA have responded with a trade war and in the Asia-Oceania area with the Trans-Pacific Economic Cooperation Agreement that links 12 countries in the area. And, among those countries that had to become indebted to China in their participation in the Silk Road project, some have been hardest hit by the economic consequences of the Corona pandemic, threatening their solvency.

3. These 'agreements' show that the dynamic that will dominate the coming years - barring a change in trend, which is highly unlikely - is not one of 'cooperation' but rather a large fragmentation of world production into reserved areas under Chinese, American, German tutelage.

4. The pile of debts, which after 2008 served to 'fuel' the Chinese engine, managed to allow double digit growth in China and also to create bigger markets in China itself for many exporters from the US, East Asia and Europe. But the conditions for this to be repeated do not exist. All countries have become more protectionist. Moreover, the workforce in China, which had been receiving some of the lowest wages, have been receiving higher wages, which has led to considerable job transfers from China to other, still cheaper countries (South-East Asia, Africa).

6. Environmental disaster

The process of ecological destruction (devastation and pollution of environmental and natural resources) goes back a long way. Imperialist war and the war economy have contributed to this process to an important extent. However, the question that arises is to what extent has this process negatively influenced the capitalist economy by hindering accumulation?

In the framework of this report, we cannot give an elaborate answer. However, it’s likely that in the context of the increasing difficulties in collaboration between countries, with the nationalist manoeuvring of each state, ecological destruction will have an increasingly negative impact on the reproduction of capital and will contribute to making the moments of economic recovery in the coming period much weaker and more unstable than in the past.

Air pollution is estimated to kill 7 million people every year. Consumption of contaminated water causes approximately 485,000 deaths every year.[9]

During the 20th century, 260 million people died from indoor air pollution in the Third World – about twice the toll in all the century’s wars. This is more than 4 times more than died from outdoor air pollution.[10]

Extreme weather, mass extinctions, falling agricultural yields, and toxic air and water are already damaging the global economy, with pollution alone costing 4.6 trillion USD every year.[11]

The mere protection of cities along the coasts will swallow large sums – equal to if not superior to all the rescue packages which have had to be adopted under the Corona pandemic. The economic implications of this chaos are very real and the impact of this process of self-destruction is staggering. It is calculated that if climate change increases the temperature by 4ºC, global GDP will fall from 2010 levels by 30% (the fall during the depression of the 30s was 26.7%). The present fall will be permanent: 1,2 billion jobs could be lost. These figures do not consider the deepening economic crisis or the impact of Covid.

All these damages are considerably aggravated by the Covid crisis, even if will take a while to assess its impact. In fact, the Covid crisis itself is a clear expression of the consequences for the economy of ecological destruction:

"The colonisation of natural areas and human contact with animals that are reservoirs of viruses and pathogens is the first link in the chain that explains the pandemics. The destruction of forest habitats in tropical areas means that many pathogens that were previously confined to inaccessible places can be transmitted to humans. People meet species with which they were not previously associated, thus increasing the chances of becoming infected with animal-borne diseases. Animal markets, transport and globalisation then spread them.”[12]

Institutions such as the World Bank clearly warn of the consequences of ecological destruction, for example in terms of the expansion of poverty:

“New research estimates that climate change will push between 68 million and 135 million people into poverty by 2030. Climate change is a serious and specific threat to countries in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, the regions where most poor people are concentrated. In several countries, a large proportion of the poor live in conflict-affected areas with a high degree of exposure to flooding, such as Nepal, Cameroon, Liberia and the Central African Republic.”[13]

The breakdown of international cooperation around the Covid pandemic is a foretaste of the dog-eat-dog attitude that will predominate faced with climate change. The increased economic competition resulting from Covid can only accelerate this dynamic. Capitalism's ability to limit the increase in global temperature is growing weaker.

“Taken together, rapid action against rising temperatures and a renewed commitment to globalisation would put the world economy on track for 2050 output of $185 trillion. Delaying moves to cut carbon emissions, and allowing cross-border ties to fray, could cap it at $149 trillion - the equivalent of kissing goodbye to the entire GDP of the U.S. and China last year.”

The contradiction between the interests of the capitalist nation and the whole capitalist system with the future of humanity could not be clearer. If determined action is taken against climate change, imperialist and economic tensions will be ramped up qualitatively, with the rise of China to becoming the world’s main economy. If no action is taken, the world economy will shrink by 30% with all the consequences that this will bring.

This can only exponentially develop capitalism's destruction of the environment and lay the ground for further pandemics as the conditions for them are expanded, as several internal contributions have shown.[14]

7. The barrier of the war economy

The war economy, as Internationalisme reminded us, is a dead weight on the world economy. In spite of the clear position of the orientation text on militarism and decomposition,[15] parts of the organisation have tended to think that under decomposition, war spending would tend to be reduced and would not have the enormous impact it had in the period of the blocs and the Cold War. This view is false, as the report adopted by the 23rd Congress underlined: "Global military spending experienced - in 2019 - the largest increase in ten years. Over the course of 2019, military spending reached $1.9 trillion (€1.8 trillion) worldwide, an increase of 3.6 percent in one year, the largest since 2010. ‘Military spending reached its highest level since the end of the Cold War,’ said Nan Tian, a researcher at SIPRI.”[16]

The need to address COVID has not diminished the rearmament. The Bundeswehr's budget is up by 2.85% by 2021, Spain is increasing military spending by 4.7, France by 4.5, while the UK is rising by an additional 18.5 billion euros.[17]

In the United States, stirring up anti-China hysteria, the Senate has approved an astronomical increase in military spending, which by 2021 will reach 740 billion dollars. In Japan, "Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga on Monday approved the ninth consecutive increase in the military budget, setting the new all-time record at 5.34 trillion yen (about $51.7 billion), an increase of 1.1% over the previous year's budget".[18]

“The U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Pakistan have cost American taxpayers $6.4 trillion since they began in 2001. That total is $2 trillion more than all federal government spending during the recently completed fiscal year”[19].

There is no available data for China for 2021 but military spending apparently grew less in 2020 than in 2019. However, "the People's Liberation Army reached two major milestones, unveiling its first 100% indigenous aircraft carrier and its first intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching the United States. China also built its first overseas military base in Djibouti in 2017. Beijing is also designing a new generation of destroyers and missiles to strengthen its deterrence against its Asian neighbours and the US Navy.”[20]

Russia dramatically increased military spending in the three-year period 2018-21, Australia "has launched in the last two years an ambitious naval programme to create an ocean-going fleet with twelve new submarines to be built by the French shipyard DCNS, nine frigates (a programme for which Navantia is bidding), two logistics ships and twelve patrol vessels; it will also receive 72 US F-35 fighter planes from Lockheed Martin by 2020. The Australian authorities even plan to double its budget within a decade to 21 billion dollars a year". Scandinavian countries "see Russian threats to their airspace and in the Arctic as less and less a work of fiction, and in the case of Sweden, the revival of compulsory military service and significant increases in the defence budget have been announced."[21]

This tour through the bloody jungle of military spending shows that the war economy and armaments, beyond the initial boost they can give, end up being an increasingly heavy burden for it, and we can foresee that they will participate in the tendency to make the economic recovery that capitalism is seeking for the post-COVID period more fragile and convulsive.[22]

8. The crushing weight of debt

In 1948 the Marshall Plan involved a total amount of loans of 8 billion dollars; the Brady Plan to save South American economies in 1985 involved 50 billion dollars; expenditure to get out of the quagmire of 2008 reached the astronomical figure of 750 billion dollars.

The current figures turn these injections into the economy into small change. The EU has deployed a 750-billion-euro package. In Germany “The government is deploying the largest assistance package in the history of the Federal Republic. To finance this package, the Federation will take out new loans totalling roughly €156 billion.”[23] Biden has proposed a $1.9 trillion economic stimulus and support programme to Congress. The total stimulus poured into the US economy in 2020 is estimated at $4 trillion.

World debt in the third quarter of 2020 was €229 trillion, 365% of world GDP (a new historical record). This debt is 382% in industrialised countries. According to the International Institute of Finance this escalation has been accelerating since 2016 with an increase in the last 4 years of 44 trillion euros. It is within this framework that we must address the consequences of the current escalation of global indebtedness.[24]

The accumulation of capital (the expanded reproduction defined by Marx) has as its basis of development the extra-capitalist markets and the areas insufficiently integrated into capitalism. If both become smaller, the only way out for capital, organised by the state, is indebtedness, which consists of throwing ever larger sums of money into the economy on account of the expected production of the coming years.

If there are no inflationary shocks in the major economies, it is for three reasons:

1) The deflationary tendency that has affected the world economy since 2008.

2) The overvaluation of the assets of companies and even states has become chronic and degraded the economic figures that have ceased to be reliable for decades.

3) Zero-interest rates or even negative interest rates.

One of the factors that allowed global capital to cushion the effects of debt was the international coordination of monetary policies, a certain degree of coordination and organisation of financial transactions on a global scale. If this factor is beginning to fail and 'everyone for themselves' has prevailed, what consequences are to be expected?

Capitalism has deployed the equivalent of three and a half years of world production. Is this an unimportant figure that could be stretched to infinity? Absolutely not. This gigantic gangrene is the breeding ground not only for crazy speculative rallies that have ended up being institutionalised in the indecipherable labyrinth of financial transactions, but also for monetary crises, gigantic bankruptcies of companies and banks and even of significant states. Logically, this process implies that the internal market for capital cannot grow infinitely, even if there is no fixed limit in the matter. It is in this context that the crisis of overproduction at the current stage of its development poses a problem of profitability for capitalism. The bourgeoisie estimates that around 20% of the world’s productive forces are unused. The overproduction of means of production is particularly visible and affects Europe, the United States, India, Japan, etc.[25]

Since 1985, when the USA abandoned its position as creditor to become one of the biggest debtors, the world economy has been suffering from the aberrant situation that practically all countries are in debt; the biggest creditors are in turn the biggest debtors, and everyone knows that. Today after decades of gigantic debts these recent rescue packages have surpassed all previous interventions. However now the big players are all so much in debt, the risk of 'detonations'/avalanches of debts is increasing. Now the 'zero-interest' situation is still facilitating the policy of increasing debt burdens, but - leaving all other factors aside - should interest rates go up, something will tumble...

9. A weakened and unstable world economy

The brutal closure of production has consequences. First, China and Germany, as well as other major producing countries, will find themselves with a huge production overcapacity that cannot be immediately compensated. In general, the machinery sector, electronics, IT, raw material supply, transport etc. will find themselves with huge stocks and a slow revival of demand.

Although there will undoubtedly be moments of recovery in production (which will be enthusiastically cheered in capitalist propaganda), and although there will be countertendencies that the most intelligent sectors of capital will set in motion,[26] what is indisputable is that the world economy will be shaken and weakened in the coming decade.

Over the last half century capitalism has shown a capacity to 'carry on' in the face of the many upheavals it has undergone (1975, 1987, 1998, 2008). However, the global conditions we have just analysed allow us to suggest that this capacity has been considerably weakened. There will not be - as councilists and Bordigists hope - a Great Final Collapse, but because it is the heart of the world economy that is being destabilised - particularly the USA and in an increasing manner also parts of Europe - it will make it more difficult to coordinate a response to the crisis on an international level. Along with the crushing weight of debt, this provides a clear confirmation of the perspective outlined by the 23rd Congress report on the crisis:

“The destabilising weight of unbridled indebtedness; the growing saturation of markets; the growing difficulties of 'globalising management' of the world economy caused by the irruption of populism, but also the sharpening of competition and the weight of the enormous investments demanded by the arms race; lastly, a factor that should not be neglected, the increasingly negative effects of the galloping destruction of the environment and the uncontrolled upheaval of the 'natural' balances of the planet.”

One of the policies that states are going to launch to give a boost to the economy are the so-called 'green economy' plans. These are driven by the need to replace old heavy industry and fossil fuels with electronics, computerisation, AI, lightweight materials and new energy sources that allow for higher productivity, cost reduction and labour savings. For a while, the large investments that such a revival of the economy will require - which will also include arms production - may give a boost to the economies of the countries that are best positioned in the process, but the spectre of overproduction will once again return to haunt the world economy.

10. Workers’ resistance - a key factor in the evolution of the situation

The deterioration of workers' living conditions was very gradual in the period 1967-80.

It first began to accelerate in the 1980s when welfare benefits began to be limited, mass lay-offs took place, and the precariousness of work began to be established.

In the period 1990-2008 the deterioration continued: the systematic reduction in the number of workers employed became ‘normal’. A housing crisis also began. Mass migration put downward pressure on wages and working conditions in the central countries. However, the fall in living conditions in the central countries was still gradual and limited. There was something perverse that masked the fall: the development of massive credit in proletarian households.

In the Report adopted by the 23rd Congress we showed the huge worsening of the living standards of the proletariat in the central countries, significant cuts in pensions, health, education, social services, social benefits etc., the rise in unemployment and especially the spectacular development of job insecurity. The 2010s have seen a major escalation of the degradation of working class living conditions in the central countries. The gradual attacks that we saw between 1970-2008 began to accelerate in the decade 2010-2020.

The pandemic crisis has intensified the attacks on workers' living conditions. First, in all countries, workers have been sent to the slaughterhouse because they have been forced to go to work in overcrowded public transport and have found themselves without protective equipment in the workplace (in fact there were a lot of protests in factories, warehouses etc. at the beginning of lockdown because of this). However, it should be noted that health care workers and workers in old people's homes have suffered a high number of infections and deaths. Workers in the food industry have also been hard hit,[27] as have agricultural workers, most of whom are migrants.[28]

Attacks against the working class in all countries, but particularly in the central countries, are clearly on the agenda. The ILO's report COVID-19 and the World of Work is blunt: “the COVID-19 pandemic has caused the world of labour the most serious crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s.”

Unemployment. The over-capacities in industry, and the slow and weak recovery of demand, will act as a strong stimulus for massive lay-offs. During the period of strict lockdown, the huge state subsidies to the part-time unemployed masked the gravity of the situation of many workers suffering from a drastic reduction in their incomes. However, a gradual ‘normalisation’ of economic functioning will bring about a further worsening of workers' living conditions, making it in many cases irreversible. According to the ILO, a global loss of 36 million jobs is the best-case scenario and 130 million is the worst-case scenario estimated for 2021.[29]

We can illustrate this in an analysis of the dismal perspective for the car industry:

“An expert of the German car industry gave the following overview/forecast: According to the forecast, all major auto-mobile markets will shrink by double-digit percentages. France and Italy will be hardest hit, with a decline of 25 percent each, Spain with 22 percent, and Germany, the USA and Mexico with 20 percent each. For the world's largest auto mobile market, China, Dudenhöffer expects a decline in sales of around 15 percent. In the German plants, there is suddenly surplus capacity of 1.3 to 1.7 million vehicles. Short-time work only can bridge short periods. No company could keep unused production capacity for years. That is why 100,000 of the 830,000 jobs at car manufacturers and suppliers in Germany today are at risk – ‘under optimistic assumptions’, Dudenhöffer wrote.”[30]

Precariousness. The ILO calls precariousness "underutilised employment" and estimates that there are 473 million workers in the world in this condition (2020). Equally important is informal work: "more than 2 billion workers are engaged in economic activities which are not sufficiently covered, or not covered at all, by formal systems in law or in practice." According to the ILO, “630 million workers worldwide do not earn enough from their work to lift themselves and their families out of poverty.”[31]

Wages. On wages, the ILO has assessed the global decline in wages worldwide at 8.3% up to 2020. Despite government support measures, wages fell in 2020 by 56.2% in Peru, 21.3% in Brazil, 6.9% in Vietnam, 4.0% in Italy, 2.9% in the UK and 9.3% in the USA (ILO data).

The above-mentioned ILO report warns that

"the crisis has had a particularly devastating impact on many population groups and devastating effects on many population groups and vulnerable sectors around the world. Young people, women and low-skilled workers and low-wage earners will find it more difficult to benefit from an early recovery and are at a very high risk of suffering long-term consequences and exclusion from the labour market.”

The incredible level of national indebtedness cannot be sustained indefinitely; from a certain point onwards, it will necessarily lead to the adoption of drastic austerity measures affecting education, health, pensions, subsidies, social benefits, etc.

Nothing can be expected from the ‘intelligent management’ of state capitalism: only austerity, misery, chaos and no future. The future of humanity is in the hands of the proletariat, its resistance against brutal austerity, and the politicisation of this resistance will be key in the coming period.

Part 1: building on the work of our 23rd Congress

At its 23rd International Congress, the ICC made it clear that we have to draw a distinction between the concept of the balance of forces between the classes, and the concept of the historic course. The first applies to all phases of the class struggle, in ascendance as well as decadence, whereas the second only to decadence and then only in the period between the lead-up to the First World War and the collapse of the eastern bloc in 1989. The idea of a historic course only makes sense in phases where it becomes possible to predict the general movement of capitalist society towards either world war or decisive class confrontations. Thus, in the 1930s, the Italian Left was able to recognise that the prior defeat of the world proletariat in the 1920s had opened a course towards World War Two, while after 1968 the ICC was correct to argue that, without a frontal defeat of a resurgent working class, capitalism would not be able to enlist the proletariat for a Third World War. By contrast, in the phase of decomposition, product of a historic stalemate between the classes, even if world war has been taken off the agenda for the foreseeable future by the disintegration of the bloc system, the system can slide into other forms of irreversible barbarism without a head-on confrontation with the working class. In such a situation, it becomes much more difficult to recognise when a “point of no return” has been reached and the possibility of a proletarian revolution has been buried once and for all.

But the “unpredictability” of decomposition by no means signifies that revolutionaries are no longer concerned with assessing the global balance of forces between the classes. This point is obviously affirmed by the title of the 23rd Congress resolution on the class struggle: “Resolution on the balance of forces between the classes”. There are two key elements of this resolution which we need to stress here:

1. “in the balance of forces between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, it is always the ruling class that is on the offensive, except in a revolutionary situation” (point 9). At certain moments the defensive struggles of the working class may be able to push back the attacks of the bourgeoisie, but in decadence the tendency is for such victories to become increasingly limited and short-lived: this is a central factor in ensuring that the proletarian revolution becomes a necessity as well as a possibility in this epoch;

2. The primary means to “measure” the balance of forces is the observation of the tendency for the working class to develop its class autonomy and pose its own solution to the historic crisis of the system. In short, the tendency towards politicisation – the development of class consciousness to the point where the working class understands the necessity to confront and overthrow the political machinery of the ruling class and replace it with its own class dictatorship.

These themes are the “red thread” running through the resolution, as announced in the opening section:

“By the late 1960s, with the exhaustion of the post-war economic boom and in the face of deteriorating living conditions, the working class had re-emerged on the social scene. The workers' struggles that exploded on an international scale put an end to the longest period of counter-revolution in history, opening a new historical course towards class confrontations, thus preventing the ruling class from putting in place its own response to the acute crisis of capitalism: a Third World War. This new historical course had been marked by the emergence of massive struggles, particularly in the central countries of Western Europe with the May 1968 movement in France, followed by the ‘hot autumn’ in Italy in 1969 and many others such as Argentina in spring 1969 and Poland in winter 1970-71. In these massive movements, large sectors of the new generation who had not experienced war once again raised the perspective of communism as a real possibility.

In connection with this general movement of the working class in the late 1960s and early 1970s, we must also highlight the international revival, on a very small but no less significant scale, of the organized communist left, the tradition that remained faithful to the flag of world proletarian revolution during the long night of counter-revolution. In this process, the constitution of the ICC represented an important impetus for the communist left as a whole.

Faced with a dynamic towards the politicisation of workers' struggles, the bourgeoisie (which had been surprised by the May 1968 movement) immediately developed a large-scale and long-term counter-offensive in order to prevent the working class from providing its own response to the historical crisis of the capitalist economy: the proletarian revolution”[1].

The resolution then traces in broad lines how the bourgeoisie, the Machiavellian class par excellence, used all the means at its disposal to block this dynamic:

• “In an initial period, by offering the working class a purely bourgeois political alternative. In the late 60s and early 70s, by derailing its aspirations towards the false dawn of left wing governments capable of humanising capitalism and even bringing in a socialist society, and from the late 70s onwards, through the division of labour between a hard right in power carrying out the brutal reductions in working class living standards demanded by the economic crisis, and a ‘left in opposition’ better placed to soak up the threat posed by the waves of struggle that characterised this period;
• The extensive use of the extreme left of capital (Maoists, Trotskyists etc) to recuperate the growing search for political answers by a significant minority of the new generation;
• The use of radical trade unionism and even ‘extra union’ forms of organisation manipulated by the extreme left to derail the workers’ growing disenchantment with the trade unions and the danger of workers arriving at a political understanding of the role of trade unions in the decadent epoch;
• The use of corporatist and nationalist ideology to isolate important workers’ struggles and, where necessary, to crush them through direct state repression (cf the miners’ strike in Britain and, on a much bigger scale, the mass strike in Poland in 1980);
• The conscious re-organisation of global production and exchange which took flight from the 1980s onwards: the policy of ‘globalisation’, though fundamentally determined by the need to respond to the economic crisis, also contained a directly anti-working class element in that it sought to break up traditional centres of proletarian combativity and undermine class identity;
• Turning the very decomposition of capitalist society against the working class. Thus, the tendency towards ‘every man for himself’ magnified in this new phase was used to reinforce social atomisation and corporatist divisions. Above all, the collapse of ‘really existing socialism’ in the Eastern bloc was the launch-pad for a gigantic campaign around the death of communism, which deepened and extended the difficulties of the working class to develop its own revolutionary perspective”.

While these difficulties were already growing in the 1980s – and were at the root of the stalemate between the classes – the events of 1989 not only definitively opened up the phase of decomposition but brought about a profound retreat in the class at all levels: in its combativity, in its consciousness, in its very capacity to recognise itself as a specific class in bourgeois society. Furthermore, it accelerated all the negative tendencies of social decomposition which had already begun to play a role in the previous period: the cancerous growth of egoism, nihilism and irrationality which are the natural products of a social order which can no longer offer humanity any perspective for its future[2].

The resolution from the 23rd conference, it should be noted, also reaffirms that, despite all the negative factors of the phase of decomposition weighing on the scales, there were still signs of a proletarian counter-tendency. In particular, the students’ movement against the CPE in France in 2006, and the Indignados movement in Spain in 2011, together with the re-emergence of new elements looking for genuinely communist positions, provide concrete evidence that the phenomenon of the subterranean maturation of consciousness, the digging of the “Old Mole”, still operates in the new phase. The quest of a new generation of proletarians to understand the impasse of capitalist society, the renewed interest in previous movements which had raised the possibility of a revolutionary alternative (1917-23, May 68 etc) confirmed that the perspective of a future politicisation had not been drowned under the sludge of decomposition. But before advancing any further towards a better understanding of the balance of class forces in the last decade or so, and above all in the wake of the Covid pandemic, it is necessary to go deeper into what exactly is meant by the term politicisation.

 

Part 2. The meaning of politicisation

Throughout its history, the marxist vanguard of the workers’ movement has fought to clarify the inter-relationship between different aspects of the class struggle: economic and political, practical and theoretical, defensive and offensive. The profound connection between the economic and the political dimensions were emphasised by Marx in his first polemic with Proudhon:

“Do not say that social movement excludes political movement. There is never a political movement which is not at the same time social.

It is only in an order of things in which there are no more classes and class antagonisms that social evolutions will cease to be political revolutions”[3]

This polemic continued in the days of the First International in the struggle against the doctrines of Bakunin. In this period, the need to affirm the political dimension of the class struggle was mainly linked to the struggle for reforms, and thus to intervention in the bourgeoisie’s parliamentary arena. But the conflict with the anarchists, as well as the practical experience of the working class, also raised questions relating to the offensive stage of the struggle, above all the events of the Paris Commune, the first example of working class political power.

During the period of the Second International, above all its phase of degeneration, a new battle was launched: the struggle of the left currents against the growing tendency to rigidly separate the economic dimension, seen as the speciality of the trade unions, and the political dimension, increasingly reduced to the party’s efforts to win seats in bourgeois parliaments and local municipalities.

With the dawn of capitalism’s decadent epoch, the dramatic appearance of the mass strike in 1905 in Russia, and the emergence of the soviets, reaffirmed the essential unity of the economic and political dimensions, and the necessity for independent class organs which combined both aspects. As Luxemburg put it in her pamphlet on the mass strike, which was essentially a polemic against the outmoded conceptions of the social democratic right and centre:

“There are not two different class struggles of the working class, an economic and a political one, but only one class struggle, which aims at one and the same time at the limitation of capitalist exploitation within bourgeois society, and at the abolition of exploitation together with bourgeois society itself”[4].

However, it is necessary to recall that these two dimensions, while forming part of a unity, are not identical, and their unity is often not grasped by the workers engaged in actual struggles. Thus, even when a strike around economic demands may rapidly be confronted with the active opposition of organs of the bourgeois state (government, police, trade unions, etc) the “objectively” political context of the struggle may well be apparent only to a militant minority of the workers involved.

Furthermore, this emphasises that within the movement towards consciousness of the political implications of the struggle, two different dynamics are at play: on the one hand, what could be called the politicisation of struggles, and on the other hand, the emergence of politicised minorities who may or may not be linked to the immediate upsurge of the open struggle.

And again, in the first case, we are looking at a process which moves through different phases. In decadence, while there can no longer be a proletarian intervention in the bourgeois political sphere, there can still be defensive political demands and debates which do not yet pose the question of political power or of a new society, for example when proletarians discuss how to respond to police violence, as during mass strikes in Poland in 1980 or the anti-CPE movement in 2006. It is only at a very advanced stage in the struggle that the workers can envisage the seizure of political power as a real goal of their movement. Nevertheless, what generally characterises the politicisation of struggles is the outburst of a massive culture of debate, where the workplace, the street corner, the public square, universities and schools are the scene of passionate discussions about how to take the struggle forward, about who are the enemies of the struggle, about its methods of organisation and overall objectives, such as Trotsky and John Reed described in their books on the Russian revolution of 1917, and which were perhaps the main “warning sign” to the bourgeoisie about the dangers posed by the events of May-June 1968 in France.

For marxism, the communist minority is an emanation of the working class, but of the working class seen as a historic force in bourgeois society; it is not a mechanical product of its immediate struggles. Certainly, the experience of bitter class conflict may drive individual workers towards revolutionary conclusions, but communists can also be “made” by reflecting on the general conditions of the proletariat and of capitalism generally, and they may also have their sociological origins in strata outside the proletariat. This is how Marx expresses it in The German Ideology: 

“In the development of productive forces there comes a stage when productive forces and means of intercourse are brought into being, which, under the existing relationships only cause mischief, and are no longer productive but destructive forces...and connected with this a class is called forth, which has to bear all the burdens of society without enjoying its advantages, which, ousted from society, is forced into the most decided antagonism to all other classes; a class which forms the majority of all members of society, and from which emanates the consciousness of the necessity of a fundamental revolution, the communist consciousness, which may, of course, arise among the other classes too through the contemplation of the situation of this class."

Obviously, the convergence of the two dynamics – the politicisation of struggles and the development of the revolutionary minority - is essential for a revolutionary situation to emerge; and we can even say that such a convergence, as noted by the opening section of the resolution with regard to May 68 in France, can be the expression of a shift in the course of history towards major class confrontations. Similarly, the advances in the general struggle of the working class, and the appearance of politicised minorities are both, at root, products of the subterranean maturation of consciousness, which can continue even when the open struggle has vanished from sight. But to mix up the two dynamics can also lead to false conclusions, particularly an overestimation of the immediate potential of the class struggle. As the English expression has it: a single swallow does not a summer make.

The resolution (point 6) also warns us about the very considerable difficulties that stand in the way of the working class becoming aware that it is “revolutionary or nothing”. It talks about the nature of the working class as an exploited class subject to all the pressures of the dominant ideology, so that “class consciousness cannot advance from victory to victory but can only develop unevenly through a series of defeats”; it also notes that the class faces added difficulties in decadence, for example: the non-permanence of mass organisations in which workers can maintain and develop a political culture; the non-existence of a minimum programme, which means that the class struggle has to scale the dizzy heights of the maximum programme; the use of former instruments of the working class organisations against the class struggle which – in the case of Stalinism in particular – has helped to create a gulf between genuine communist organisations and the mass of the working class. Elsewhere, the resolution, echoing our Theses on Decomposition, stresses the new difficulties imposed by the particular conditions of the final phase of capitalist decline.

One of these difficulties is considered at some length in the resolution: the danger posed by inter-classist struggles like the Yellow Vests in France or the popular revolts provoked by the increasing immiseration of the masses in the less “developed” countries. In all these movements, in a situation where the working class has a very low level of class identity and is still far from gathering its forces to the point where it can give a perspective to the anger and discontent building up throughout society, the proletarians participate not as an independent social and political force but as a mass of individuals. In some cases, these movements are not merely inter-classist, mixing up proletarian demands with the aspirations of other social strata (as in the case of the Yellow Vests) but espouse openly bourgeois goals, such the democracy protests in Hong Kong, or the illusion of sustainable development or racial equality inside capitalism, as in the case of the Youth for Climate marches and the Black Lives Matter protests. The resolution is not altogether precise about the distinction to be made here, a reflection of wider problems in the ICC’s analyses of such events: hence the need for a specific section of this report clarifying these issues.

 

Part 3: The central danger of interclassism

“Because of the current great difficulty of the working class in developing its struggles, its inability for the moment to regain its class identity and to open up a perspective for the whole of society, the social terrain tends to be occupied by inter-classist struggles particularly marked by the petty bourgeoisie…These inter-classist movements are the product of the absence of any perspective which affects society as a whole, including an important part of the ruling class itself… The struggle for the class autonomy of the proletariat is crucial in this situation imposed by the aggravation of the decomposition of capitalism:

- against inter-classist struggles;

- against partial struggles put forward by all kinds of social categories giving a false illusion of a ‘protective community’;

- against the mobilisations on the rotten ground of nationalism, pacifism, ‘ecological’ reform, etc”(Resolution on the balance of class forces, 23rd ICC Congress).

Recurrent difficulties in analysing the nature of social movements which have appeared in recent years

Interclassist struggles and partial struggles are obstacles to the development of the workers’ struggle. We have seen recently how hard the ICC has found it to master these two questions:

• With regard to the Yellow Vests, the movement was seen at the beginning as having positive elements for the class struggle (through the issue of the rejection of the unions)
• In the youth movement around the climate question, which is a partial struggle, the mobilisation of the young people was seen as something positive, forgetting point 12 of the platform
• On the murder of George Floyd, there were tendencies to see it as an interclassist movement when the indignation it provoked led to a mobilisation on a directly bourgeois terrain, calling for a more democratic police and judiciary

Long-standing difficulties

The balance sheet of the movements in the Middle East: a question to be clarified

The presentation on the class struggle to the 23rd Congress recalled that the analysis of the movements of the Arab Spring had not been included in the critical balance sheet we have been undertaking since the 21st Congress despite the existence of unresolved differences, in particular “questions of opportunist slidings we have made in the past towards for example the inter-classist movements of the Arab Spring and others”[5]

Going back to our analysis of the movements of 2011

If the organisation, in its intervention, didn’t use the term “interclassism” to qualify these movements, it described them in a way which developed all the characteristics of an interclassist movement, showing that it was not totally in the dark about their nature: “The working class has not yet presented itself in these events as an autonomous force capable of assuming the leadership of the movements, which have often taken the form of revolts by the whole non-exploiting population, from ruined peasants to middle strata on the road to proletarianisation”.[6]

The position developed at the time – “The working class has, in general, not been in the leadership of these rebellions but it has certainly had a significant presence and influence which can be discerned both in the methods and forms of organisation thrown up by the movement and, in certain cases, by the specific development of workers’ struggles, such as the strikes in Algeria and above all the major wave of strikes in Egypt”[7] – did not succeed in precisely situating the class terrain on which they were developing or in drawing out the dynamic of the working class component which could be found in these movements;

• Our analysis was based on an approach marked by empiricism: the comparison with Iran in 1979, certainly inspiring, was used without placing them in the new situation, without recontextualising them with the aid of our framework: “In trying to understand the class nature of these rebellions, we therefore have to avoid two symmetrical errors: on the one hand, a blanket identification of all the masses in movement with the proletariat (a position most characteristic of the Groupe Communiste Internationaliste), and on the other hand a rejection of anything positive in revolts which are not explicitly working class”[8] . The second part of the quote makes concessions to an approach that looks at “positive points” and “negative points” without basing it on their class nature
• An overestimation of these movements: “All these experiences are important stepping stones towards the development of a genuinely revolutionary consciousness. But the road in that direction is still a long one, and is obstructed by many and obvious illusions and ideological weaknesses”[9] ; “All of these revolts constitute a formidable bank of experience on the road that leads to revolutionary consciousness”. [10]

Weaknesses in the application of our political framework

Forgetting the framework of the critique of the weak link

Although the organisation was right to point out that the Indignados movement and the uprisings of the exploited classes and particularly of the working class in the Middle East had a common origin in the effects of the world economic crisis, it did so by putting all the movements, whether they came from the central countries or the peripheral countries, on the same level, or by amalgamating them. That’s to say without placing them in the framework of the critique of the theory of the weak link (see the resolution on the international situation from the 20th congress)[11].

The ICC defined the Indignados[12] movement as a movement of the working class marked:

• by a loss of class identity: “This partly explains why the participation of the proletariat as a class has not been dominant even though it was present through the participation of individual workers (employed, unemployed, students, retired...) who attempted to clarify, to get involved according to their instincts, but who lacked the strength, cohesion and clarity there would be if the class participated collectively as a class”.
• by a “strong presence of non-proletarian social strata, especially a middle layer that is in the throes of proletarianisation”. “If the movement appears vague and poorly defined, this cannot put into question its class character, especially if we view things in their dynamic, in the perspective of the future…The presence of the proletariat is visible neither as a force leading the movement, nor through a mobilisation in the workplace. It lies in the dynamic of searching, clarification, preparation of the social terrain, of recognition of the battle that is being prepared. That is where its importance is found, despite the fact that this is only an extremely fragile small step forward.

Our texts from this period do not make a distinction between the Indignados movement in Spain and the revolts in the Arab countries. However, there are very important differences: in Spain, even if the proletarian wing didn’t dominate the Indignados movement, it did fight for its own autonomy faced with the efforts of “Democracy Now” to destroy it. In the Arab countries, the proletariat, at best, was not able to maintain itself on its own terrain, or to use its own methods of combat to develop its consciousness, allowing itself to be mobilised behind nationalist and democratic factions[13].

Absence of the framework of decomposition

Without ever denying its existence or the weight of the profound difficulties in these movements, by stressing the “positive aspects” of the social revolts[14], the analysis of these movements in the Arab countries was not placed in the context of decomposition[15]. This led to lessening the firm denunciation of the democratic and nationalist poison which was so powerful in these countries, and the danger that this represented above all in these parts of the world, but also and above all faced with the propaganda of the western bourgeoisies towards the European proletariat, underlining the necessity for democracy in the Arab countries.

More general weaknesses of the organisation determining its analyses and statements of position

Impatience to see everywhere and rapidly an exit from the retreat after 1989 following the revival of struggles in 2003 was a heavy burden: “The present international wave of revolts against capitalist austerity is opening the door to another solution altogether: the solidarity of all the exploited across religious or national divisions; class struggle in all countries with the ultimate goal of a world-wide revolution which will be the negation of national borders and states. A year or two ago such a perspective would have seemed completely utopian to most. Today, increasing numbers are seeing global revolution as a realistic alternative to the collapsing order of global capital.” [16]

The position of the ICC was marked not only by a general overestimation of the situation, but within that an overestimation of the significance of the movements in the Arab countries for the development of a proletarian perspective. Similarly, the tendency to neglect the importance of debate in the proletarian political milieu also had a negative influence: whereas the contribution of the Nucleo Comunista Internacional to the analysis of the Piqueteros movement in Argentina in 2002-4 had been very important, later on, in 2011, the ICC was not able to take into account the criticisms made of it by the Internationalist Voice group.

Did we make opportunist errors in the analysis of the Arab movements?

We can conclude from the preceding elements that although ICC analysed the movements in the Arab countries in 2011, with their massive character, their simultaneity with other movements in the western countries, the forms taken by these movements (assemblies etc), the presence of the working class (different from the chaotic nature of a number of the interclassist riots or mobilisations dominated by leftist groups like the Piqueteros for example), we did not take a step back and come to a lucid view of what they really represented, in a context where the most experienced parts of the world proletariat was not able to provide a perspective and a direction. This approach was caught up in immediatism.

In the overall context that favoured the impatience and precipitation which existed in the organisation, imagining that the world proletariat was already overcoming the post-89 retreat on a massive scale, this immediatism was certainly the antechamber to opportunism, the point of departure for a slide towards opportunism and the abandoning of class positions, as can be attested by the different ways this immediatism manifested itself:

• The rather contradictory nature of our statements of position on the revolts in the Middle East;
• The absence of coherence and articulation based on the cardinal positions of the organisation underlying our political analyses, or even forgetting or abandoning them (for example, replacing the concept of interclassist struggles by the term “social revolts”, and without really explaining what we meant by “social revolts”.

• The rather empirical and superficial approach which tended to stay at the surface of things and which tended to substitute itself for our political framework;
• The major role played by our view of indignation as a unilaterally positive factor for the development of proletarian consciousness (or even as an indication of a movement’s positive nature, applied to all kinds of movements);
• The tendency to see positive elements where the situation was dominated by the greatest dangers for the class, leading to a weakening of the denunciation of bourgeois ideology by the organisation.

While all these elements combined bring together the conditions for openly opportunist positions - if there is no barrier to these deleterious tendencies posed by proletarian clarity and the defence of class positions by the ICC - it should be underlined that the ICC didn’t take up positions that directly contradicted its platform and class positions. We have to situate these difficulties at the level of what they really represented (which doesn’t mean relativising their importance and dangers). The analysis and intervention of the ICC was weakened by immediatism (with all that this implies at the level of ambiguity, superficiality, lack of rigour, forgetting the defence of our framework and political positions, and a dynamic opening the door to opportunism), but we can’t conclude that it took up directly opportunist positions (which was the case regarding the youth movement around ecology).

Relationship between partial struggles and interclassism

The deviation on the youth movement against ecological destruction showed a forgetting of point 12 of our platform: “The ecological question, like all social questions (whether education, family and sexual relations or whatever) are destined to play an enormous role in any future coming to consciousness and any communist struggle. The proletariat, and it alone, has the capacity to integrate these questions into its own revolutionary consciousness. In so doing it will broaden and deepen this consciousness. It will thus be able to lead all ‘partial struggles’ and give them a perspective. The proletarian revolution will have to confront all of these problems very concretely in the struggle for communism. But they cannot be the point of departure of the development of a revolutionary class perspective. In the absence of the proletariat, they are at worst the point of departure for new rounds of barbarism. The leaflet and the article of the ICC in Belgium are glaring examples of opportunism. This time, it is not opportunism on organisational matters, but opportunism in relation to the class positions as expounded in our platform” (comrade S, contribution to an internal bulletin in 2019)

We can say that the report on the class struggle to the 23rd Congress was not without ambiguities at this level. It took an ambiguous position on the nature of these movements and left the door open to the idea that they could play a positive role in the development of consciousness[17].

We have found it hard to see what distinguishes these two types of movement, with a tendency to amalgamate them, to put them at the same level. So what is it that distinguishes interclassist struggles and partial struggles? In interclassist movements, workers’ demands are diluted and mixed up with petty bourgeois demands (cf the Yellow Vests). This is not the case with partial or “single issue” struggles which manifest themselves essentially at the level of the superstructures, their demands focusing on themes which leave out the foundations of capitalist society, even if they can point to capitalism as being responsible, as with the climate question, or with the oppression of women which is blamed on the capitalist patriarchy. They are also factors of division within the working class, divisions with workers employed in the energy sector in the first case, or by reinforcing divisions between the sexes. Workers may be drawn into partial struggles but this doesn’t make them interclassist. It’s a question of clarifying the difference between partial struggles and interclassist struggles, and what they may have in common.

On indignation

In the 2010s, the ICC recognised indignation as an important component of the class struggle of the proletariat and a factor in its coming to consciousness, However, the ICC has had a tendency to define its importance “in itself”, in a somewhat metaphysical way. One of the roots of our difficulties lies in the inappropriate and unilateral use of the concept of indignation as something necessarily positive, an indication of reflection and even of the development of class consciousness, without taking into account the class nature of its origin, or the class terrain on which it is being expressed. With the further plunge into decomposition there will be many movements driven by indignation, disgust, anger among large layers of society against the phenomena of this period.

The report on the class struggle to the 23rd ICC Congress develops on the spread of social indignation against the destructive nature of capitalist society (eg in reaction against the murder of black people, the climate question or the harassment of women). But by affirming that that the anger expressed by these movements can be recuperated by the proletariat when the latter has regained its class identity and is struggling on its terrain, an ambiguity is introduced about whether the proletariat can “take over” the leadership of such movements in their present form. In reality, such movements would have to “dissolve” before the elements participating in them could join the proletarian struggle. This is in contradiction to what is said in point 12 of the platform: “The struggle against the economic foundations of the system contains within it the struggle against all the super-structural aspects of capitalist society, but this is not true the other way around”. Furthermore, such partial struggles tend to hinder the combat of the working class, its autonomy, and this is why the bourgeoisie knows very well how to recuperate them to preserve the capitalist order. In this sense indignation in itself is not a factor in the development of class consciousness: everything depends on the terrain on which it is expressed. This emotional reaction which may come from different classes does not automatically lead to a reflection that can contribute to the development of class consciousness.

The organisation needs to clarify what would be the conditions, on the historical scale, for an autonomous proletarian movement to give an entirely new focus and direction to all the different grievances and oppressions imposed by capitalist society, and which today, in the absence of proletarian leadership, find their only outlet on the terrain of interclassist or bourgeois mobilisations.

The impact of the capitalist crisis on the whole of society poses another question to be clarified: what is the relationship of the struggle of the proletariat to other classes, intermediate or non-exploiting layers, still existing in capitalism and capable of developing their own mobilisations against the policy of the state (such as peasant movements).

 

Part 4. What has changed since the 23rd Congress?

Almost a decade has passed since the Indignados movement. Important though it was, it by no means marked a reversal of the retreat that began in 1989. We also know that the bourgeoisie – above all in France where the danger of contagion was most evident - took counter-measures to prevent a similar, or more advanced, movement erupting in the traditional “home” of revolutions.

In many ways, the retreat of the class deepened after the subsidence of the movements around 2011. The illusions that predominated in the Arab Spring, given the inability of the working class to provide leadership to the various revolts, have been drowned in barbarism, war, terrorism, and ferocious repression. In Europe and the US, the populist tide, in part fed by the barbaric developments in Africa and the Middle East which precipitated the refugee crisis and the blow-back of Islamic terrorism, has undoubtedly had an impact on a part of the working class. In the “Third World”, mounting economic misery tended to provoke popular revolts in which the working class was again unable to manifest itself on its own terrain; even more significantly, the tendency of social discontent to take on an interclassist nature was clearly expressed in a central country like France, with the Yellow Vest demonstrations that persisted for a whole year. From 2016, with the accession to power of Trump and the vote for Brexit in the UK, the rise of populism reached spectacular levels, dragging a part of the working class into its campaigns against the “elites”. And in 2020, this whole process of decomposition accelerated even more dramatically with the pandemic. The climate of fear generated by the pandemic, and the resulting lock-down, have further increased the atomisation of the working class and created profound difficulties for a class response to the devastating economic consequences of the Covid-19 crisis.

And yet, not long before the pandemic hit, we were seeing a new development of class movements: the teachers’ and GM autoworkers strikes in the US; the widespread strikes in Iran in 2018, which posed the question of self-organisation even if, contrary to the exaggerations of parts of the milieu, they were still a long way from the formation of soviets. In particular, the latter strikes raised the question of class solidarity in the face of state repression.

Above all, we saw the struggles in France at the end of 2019, where key battalions of the working class were in the streets around class demands, pushing aside the Yellow Vest movement which was reduced to a symbolic presence at the back of the marches

There were parallels in other countries, for example Finland. But then the pandemic struck the heart of Europe, to a large extent paralysing the possibility that the struggles in France could take on an international dimension, despite the fact that in the first phase of the lock-down there were many strikes by workers in defence of their working conditions faced with the totally inadequate health measures taken by the state and the employers[18]. These movements were unable to develop further given the restrictive conditions of the lock-down, although the central role of the working class in keeping life in this society going was highlighted by those sectors who had no choice but to carry on working during the lock-down: health, transport, food supply, etc. The ruling class made strong efforts to present these workers as heroes serving the nation, but the hypocrisy of governments – and thus the class basis of the “sacrifices” of these workers – was evident to many. In Britain, for example, there were angry protests by health workers when it became clear that their “heroism” wasn’t worth a wage rise[19].

On top of the pandemic, the working class was quickly faced by further obstacles to the development of class consciousness, above all in the US where the Black Lives Matter protests focused attention on the “single issue” of race, followed swiftly by the huge election campaign which gave a new boost to democratic illusions. Both these campaigns had a major international impact. In the US in particular, the danger of the working class being pulled, via identity politics of right and left, into violent confrontations behind competing bourgeois factions remains very real: the dramatic assault on the Capitol by Trump supporters demonstrates that even if Trump has been removed from government, Trumpism remains as a powerful force on the level of the streets. Finally, workers are now facing a second wave of the pandemic and a new series of lock downs, which not only renew the state-enforced atomisation of the class but have also led to explosions of frustration against the lock-downs which have drawn some parts of the class into reactionary protests fuelled by conspiracy theories and the ideology of the “sovereign individual”.

For the moment, the combination of all these issues, but above all the conditions imposed by the pandemic, have acted as an important brake on the fragile revival of the class struggle between 2018 and 2020. It is difficult to predict how long this situation will persist and therefore we cannot provide any concrete perspectives for the development of the struggle over the coming period. What we can say, however, is that the working class will be faced by brutal attacks on its living conditions. This has already begun in a number of sectors where employers have drastically reduced their workforces. The governments of the central countries of capitalism are still showing a certain caution in dealing with the class, subsidising firms to enable them to hold on to employees, “furloughing” locked-down workers who can’t work from home in order to prevent an immediate plunge into impoverishment, taking measures to avoid evictions of tenants unable to pay their rents, and so on. This is costing governments vast sums, greatly increasing an already swollen burden of debt. We know that, sooner or later, the workers will be asked to pay for this.

 

Part 5. Debates about the balance of class forces

The dramatic developments in the world situation since the last ICC congress has inevitably given rise to debates both within the organisation and among our milieu of contacts and sympathisers. These debates have focused on the significance of the pandemic and the acceleration of decomposition, but they have also posed new questions about the balance of class forces. At the RI Congress in the summer of 2020, criticisms were made of the report on the class struggle, notably its assessment of the movement against pension reforms in France in early 2019. In a text in our internal bulletin in 2021, Comrade M in particular argued – we think correctly - that the report claimed that the movement had attained a certain level of politicisation, without providing sufficient evidence for such an advance; at the same time, there was a lack of clarity in the report regarding the distinction between the politicisation of struggles, and the politicisation of minorities – a distinction which the present report has aimed to elucidate. In this text, comrade M warns against an overestimation of the present level of the class struggle (a mistake we have often made in the past -cf the report to the 21st Congress):

“The tendency to politicise the struggles was by no means revealed in the movement against pension reform in France. There was no space for proletarian debate, no general assembly. The politicisation of the working class on its own class terrain will be inseparable from its emergence from the profound retreat it has undergone since 1989. The proletariat in France, as in all countries, has not yet found the way back to its revolutionary perspective, a path blocked by the collapse of the Eastern bloc. With the aggravation of the crisis and the attacks on its living conditions, it is obvious that the working class is today becoming more and more aware that capitalism has no future to offer it. It is looking for a perspective, but it does not yet know that it is in its hands and in its struggles that this perspective is hidden and buried. This awareness of the monstrous reality of today's world does not mean a politicisation on its own class terrain, i.e. outside the framework of bourgeois democracy. Despite its enormous potential for combativity (which has not been exhausted by the irruption of the pandemic), the proletariat in France does not yet pose the question of proletarian revolution. Even if the word ‘revolution’ has come back on some banners, what content is there? I don't think it's a question of ‘proletarian’ revolution. The working class in France has not yet recovered its class identity (which was still very embryonic in the movement against pension reform). There is still within it a rejection or at least a very deep mistrust of the word ‘communism’".

Furthermore, M argues that this overestimation of the tendency towards politicisation can open the door to a councilist vision: “The politicisation of struggles can only be verified when the revolutionary vanguard begins to have a certain influence in workers' struggles (especially in the general assemblies). This is not the case today. The RI Congress Report therefore opens the door to a councilist vision by affirming that there already exist ‘the indications of a politicisation of the struggle’".

The danger of a councilist vision is also raised in the divergencies expressed by comrade S during and after the 23rd Congress, though not from the same point of departure. These divergencies have since deepened and given rise to a public debate which has in turn had a certain impact on some of our contacts. Insofar as they relate to the problem of the balance of class forces, these divergencies touch on three key questions:

• The potential and limits of the economic struggles
• The question of subterranean maturation
• The question of “political defeats”. Here, the publication of the first round of the debate on the divergencies has led some of our contacts to pose questions about what happened in the 1980s.

Economic struggles and subterranean maturation

In his reply to our reply, in an internal bulletin in 2021, comrade S affirms where he agrees with the ICC on the necessity for the economic struggle: because workers have to defend their physical existence against capitalist exploitation; because workers need to fight to “have a life” beyond the working day so that they can have access to culture, to political debates, and so on; and because, as Marx put it, a class which cannot fight for its interests at this level certainly cannot put itself forward as a force capable of transforming society. But at the same time, he argues, in the conditions of decomposition, not least as a result of the undermining of a perspective for social revolution by the impact of the collapse of the eastern bloc, the historic links between the economic and the political dimensions of the struggle have been broken to the point where this unity cannot be restored by a development of the economic struggles alone. And here he quotes Rosa Luxemburg in Reform or Revolution to warn the ICC against any relapse into a councilist vision in which the “workers themselves”, without the indispensable role of the revolutionary organisation, can recover their revolutionary perspective: “Socialism is not at all a tendency inherent to the daily struggles of the working class. It is inherent only to the sharpening objective contradictions of the capitalist economy on the one side, to the subjective understanding of the indispensability of overcoming it through a socialist transformation on the other”.

From this, comrade S concludes that the main danger facing the ICC is a councilist deviation in which the organisation leaves it to the revival of economic struggles to “spontaneously” politicise themselves, and thus ignores what should be its primary task: carrying out the necessary theoretical deepening which would enable the class to regain confidence in marxism and the possibility of a communist society.

We have seen that the danger of councilism cannot be dismissed when it comes to understanding the process of politicisation: we have learned to our cost that the danger of becoming over-enthusiastic about the possibilities and depth of the immediate struggles is ever-present. We also agree with Luxemburg - and with Lenin – that socialist consciousness is not the mechanical product of the day-to-day struggle but is a product of the historic movement of the class, which certainly includes the theoretical elaboration and intervention of the revolutionary organisation. But what is missing from comrade S’s argument is any explanation of the actual process through which revolutionary theory can once again “grip the masses”. In our view, this is linked to a disagreement on the question of subterranean maturation.

In his text, he says: “the Reply asks if I consider the situation today to be worse than it was in the 1930s (when groups like Bilan contributed to a political and theoretical ‘subterranean maturation’ of consciousness despite the defeat of the class), whereas I deny the existence of such a maturation at present. Yes, at the level of subterranean maturation the situation is indeed worse than in the 1930s, since today the tendency among revolutionaries is more towards political and theoretical regression”.

In order to respond to this, it is necessary to go back to our original debate on the question of subterranean maturation – to the struggle against the councilist view that class consciousness only develops in phases of open struggle.

Thus, MC’s[20] argument in his text on “On subterranean maturation”, in October 1983, was that the rejection of subterranean maturation profoundly underestimated the role of the revolutionary organisation in the elaboration of class consciousness: ”The class struggle of the proletariat goes through ups and downs, but this isn’t the case with class consciousness: the idea of the regression of consciousness with the retreat of the class struggle is contradicted by the whole history of the workers’ movement, a history in which the elaboration and deepening of theory continues in a period of retreat. It’s true that the field, the extent of its action narrows, but not its elaboration in depth”.

Comrade S does not of course deny the role of the revolutionary organisation in the development of theory. So when he speaks about “subterranean regression” he means that the communist political vanguard (and thus the ICC) is failing to carry out the theoretical work needed to restore the confidence of the working class in its revolutionary perspective – that it is regressing theoretically and politically.

But we should recall that MC’s text does not restrict subterranean maturation to the work of the revolutionary organisation:

“The work of reflection goes on in the heads of the workers and will manifest itself in the upsurge of new struggles. There exists a collective memory of the class, and this memory also contributes to the development of the coming to consciousness and its extension in the class”. Or again: “This process of developing consciousness is not uniquely reserved to communists for the simple reason that the communist organisation is not the only seat of consciousness. This process is also the product of other elements of the class who remain firmly on a class terrain or tend in that direction”.

This is important because comrade S seems precisely to restrict subterranean maturation to the revolutionary organisation alone. If we understand him correctly, since the ICC is tending towards theoretical and political regression, this is evidence for the “subterranean regression” he speaks about. Of course, we don’t agree with this assessment of the current situation of the ICC, but that is another discussion. The point to focus on here is that that the communist organisation and the proletarian political milieu are merely the tip of the iceberg in a deeper process going on in the class:

In a polemic with the CWO in International Review 43 on the problem of subterranean maturation, we defined this process as follows:

“- at the least conscious level, and also in the broadest layers of the class, it (subterranean maturation) takes the form of a growing contradiction between the historic being, the real needs of the class, and the workers' superficial adherence to bourgeois ideas. This clash may for a long time remain largely unadmitted, buried or repressed, or it may begin to surface in the negative form of disillusionment with, and disengagement from, the principal themes of bourgeois ideology;

- in a more restricted sector of the class, among workers who fundamentally remain on a proletarian terrain, it takes the form of a reflection on past struggles, more or less formal discussions on the struggles to come, the emergence of combative nuclei in the factories and among the unemployed. In recent times, the most dramatic demonstration of this aspect of the phenomenon of subterranean maturation was provided by the mass strikes in Poland 1980, in which the methods of struggle used by the workers showed that there had been a real assimilation of many of the lessons of the struggles of 1956, 1970 and 1976….

- in a fraction of the class that is even more limited in size, but destined to grow as the struggle advances, it takes the form of an explicit defence of the communist programme, and thus of regroupment into the organized marxist vanguard. The emergence of communist organizations, far from being a refutation of the notion of subterranean maturation, is both a product of and an active factor within it”[21]

What’s missing from this model is another layer – elements, often not direct products of class movements, who are searching for communist positions, thus the swamp (or part of it – the part that is a product of a political advance, even if confused, rather than those degenerating elements who express a regression from a higher level of clarity), and those more explicitly moving towards the revolutionary organisations.

The emergence of such a layer is not the only indication of subterranean maturation, but it is certainly the most obvious. Comrade S has argued that the appearance of this layer can be explained merely by referring to the revolutionary nature of the working class, but since we understand the class not as a static, but as a dynamic force, it is more accurate to see this layer as a product of a movement towards the development of consciousness within the class. And it is certainly necessary to study the movement within the movement: to understand whether there is a process of maturation taking place in this layer– in other words, does the milieu of searching elements itself show signs of development? And if we compare the two “surges” of the politicised minorities that have appeared since around 2003, there are indeed indications that such a development has taken place.

The first surge took place in the mid-2000s and coincided with the what we termed a new generation of the working class, manifesting itself in the anti-CPE movement and the Indignados. A small part of this milieu gravitated towards the communist left and even joined the ICC, giving rise to hopes that we were encountering a new generation of revolutionaries (cf the Orientation Text on the Culture of Debate[22]). What we were actually experiencing was a movement (the French term “mouvance” would be more accurate) largely within the swamp and one which proved to be highly permeable to the influence of anarchism, modernism, and parasitism. One of the distinguishing features of this mouvance was, alongside a distrust of political organisation, a profound resistance to the concept of decadence and thus to the groups of the communist left, seen as sectarian and apocalyptic, above all the ICC. Some of the elements in this surge had been involved in the ultra-activism of the anti-capitalist movement in the 90s, and although they had made a first step in seeing the central role of the working class in the overthrow of capitalism, they retained their activist leanings, pushing some of them (e.g. the majority of the collective that organises libcom) towards a revived anarcho-syndicalism, towards ideas of “organising” at the workplace, which thrived on the possibility of winning small victories and turned away from any notion that the objective and historic unfolding of the crisis would itself be a factor in the development of the class struggle.

The second surge of searching elements, which we have become aware of in the last few years, although perhaps smaller in scale than the previous surge, is certainly situated on a more profound level: it tends to regard decadence and even decomposition as self-evident; it often by-passes anarchism, which they see as lacking the theoretical tools for understanding the present period, and have less fear of directly contacting the groups of the communist left. Often very young and lacking any direct experience of the class struggle, their primary concern is to deepen, to make sense of the chaotic world that confronts them by assimilating the marxist method. Here, in our view, is a clear concretisation of communist consciousness resulting, in Luxemburg’s words, from “the sharpening objective contradictions of the capitalist economy on the one side, (and) the subjective understanding of the indispensability of overcoming it through a socialist transformation on the other”.

In relation to this emerging layer of politicised elements, the ICC has a dual responsibility as a “fraction-like” organisation. On the one hand, of course, the vital theoretical elaboration required to provide a clear analysis of an ever-shifting world situation and to enrich the communist perspective[23]. But it also involves a patient work of constructing the organisation: the work of “formation of cadres” as the GCF put it after World War Two, the development of new militants who will last the course; of defending the organisation against the incursions of bourgeois ideology, the slanders of parasitism and so on. This work of organisational construction does not appear at all in S’s reply, and yet it is certainly one of the principal elements in the real struggle against councilism.

Furthermore: if this process of subterranean maturation is a real one, if it is the tip of the iceberg of developments taking place within far wider layers of the class, the ICC is correct in envisaging the possibility of a future re-connection between the defensive struggles and the growing recognition that capitalism has no future to offer humanity. In other words, it announces the intact potential for the politicisation of the struggles and their convergence with the emergence of new revolutionary minorities and the increasing impact of the communist organisation.

On “political defeats”

The publication of a first round of debate on the balance of class forces has brought out various divergencies among our milieu of close sympathisers. On the ICC forum, particularly in the thread Internal debate in the ICC on the international situation| International Communist Current (internationalism.org) [112], in an exchange of contributions with MH, Debate on the balance of class forces | International Communist Current (internationalism.org) [113], in our contact meetings, and on his own blog[24], comrade MH in particular has become increasingly critical of our view that it was essentially the collapse of the eastern bloc in 89 which precipitated the long retreat of the class from which we have yet to emerge. For MH, it was largely a political/economic offensive of the ruling class after 1980, spearheaded by the British bourgeoisie in particular which brought the third wave of struggles to an end (rather: strangled it at birth). In this view, it was the defeat of the miners’ strike in 1985 in the UK which marked the defeat of the struggles in the 1980s. This conclusion is currently leading MH to reassess our view of the struggles after 1968 and even to question the notion of decomposition, although his differences sometimes seem to imply that “decomposition has won out”, and that we need to face the reality of a grave historical defeat for the working class. Comrade Baboon largely agrees with MH about the key importance of the defeat of the miners’ strike but has not followed him to the point of questioning decomposition or concluding that the retreat of the working class has perhaps taken a qualitative step into a kind of historical defeat[25].

Comrade S, however, now seems to be increasingly explicit about this being the case. As he put it in a recent letter to the international central organ:

“Is there or is there not a fundamental divergence on the balance of class forces?

The position of the organisation is that the working class is undefeated. The opposite position also exists within our ranks, that the working class, in the past five years, has suffered from a political defeat, the main symptom of which is the explosion of identitarianism of all kinds, which results first and foremost from the failure of the class to recover its own class identity. The position of the organisation is that the situation of the class is better than it was in the 1990s under the shock of the ‘death of communism’, whereas the other position says that the situation of the class today is worse than in the 1990s, that the world proletariat today is on the brink of suffering a political defeat on a scale such as which it may need a generation to recover from”.

As we pointed out at the beginning of this report, the ICC’s recognition that the concept of the historic course no longer applies in the phase of decomposition means that it becomes much harder to assess the overall dynamic of events, and in particular to reach the conclusion that the door to a revolutionary future has been definitively closed, since decomposition can overwhelm the proletariat in a gradual process, without the bourgeoisie having to defeat it directly, in a face to face combat, as it did in the period of the revolutionary wave. It is therefore difficult to know what comrade S means by a “political defeat on a scale such as which it may need a generation to recover from”. If the proletariat has yet to take on the class enemy in an openly political struggle, as it did in 1917-23, what criteria are we using to judge that the retreat of the class struggle over the past three decades has reached such a point; and furthermore, since such a defeat would presumably be followed by a major acceleration of barbarism, and - in comrade S’s view – by a world war, or at least a “limited” nuclear holocaust – what possibilities for “recovery” would be left for the next generation?

On a final point: comrade S claims that we see the situation of the class being “better” than in the wake of the collapse of the blocs. This is inaccurate. We have certainly said that the conditions for future class confrontations are thus inevitably maturing, and, as the report on the class struggle to the RI Congress pointed out, this is in a context very different from the situation at the beginning of the phase of decomposition:

• whereas 1989 could be presented as the defeat of communism and the victory of capitalism, the pandemic cannot be presented as a vindication of the superiority of the present system. On the contrary, despite all the mystifications surrounding the origins and nature of the pandemic, it provides further evidence that the capitalist system has become a danger to humanity, even if for the moment only a small minority have grasped this clearly;
• whereas the events of 1989 constituted a major blow to class combativity and consciousness, and although the development of decomposition has tended to aggravate the loss of class identity, the pandemic has broken out in the context of a certain revival of the class struggle, while the bourgeoisie’s willingness to sacrifice health and life in the interest of profit, as well as its chaotic handling of the pandemic, tends to provoke an awareness that we are not “all in it together” – that the working class and the poor are the prime victims of the pandemic and the criminal negligence of the ruling class.

But all these “plus points” come on top of 30 years of decomposition – a period in which time is no longer on the side of the proletariat, which continues to suffer the accumulating wounds inflicted by a society that is rotting on its feet. In some ways, we would agree that the situation is “worse” than it was in the 1980s. But we will fail in our task as a revolutionary minority if we ignore any of the signposts that point towards a revival of the class struggle – of a proletarian movement that contains the possibility of preventing society from taking a definitive plunge into the abyss.

In the preceding parts of this series we have highlighted the opportunist weaknesses which were at the base of the constitution of the Communist International (CI), both on the programmatic and on the organisational levels. This part will tackle the final period of the CI as an organisation of the working class.

In the years which followed the Founding Congress (1919) and its Second Congress (1920), despite episodes of great combativity, the reflux of the revolutionary wave continued. The working class in Russia was more and more isolated, the Soviets were slowly dying, the Bolshevik Party was merging with the state, becoming more bureaucratic and losing its proletarian content. Insurrectional uprisings in Western Europe (Bulgaria, Poland and Germany)[1] were supported by the CI although conditions were becoming more and more unfavourable, ending in the disorientation and demoralisation of the proletariat.

The CI suffered from the effects of the isolation of the revolution in the sole Russian bastion and followed the same trajectory as the Bolshevik Party where the logic of the apparatus gradually worked against an authentic class policy. Its political vitality was dying, as in the Russian party which in the end led it to become a useful tool serving the imperialist interests of the Russian state. In other words, after having epitomised the highest expression of global proletarian unity in its revolutionary struggle, the CI entered a process of degeneration.

This fourth part will therefore try to show the way in which this tragic political evolution happened.

1. The Bolshevik Party is no longer what it was

The three years of civil war between 1918 and 1920, during the course of which the White armies and foreign battalions gave the revolution a hard test, led to the Soviet Republic adopting the policy of “War Communism”. But what was only to be a number of urgent measures in order to face up to a desperate situation gave rise to a militarisation of society under the authority of the Bolshevik Party and the state. During this period that necessitated very heavy sacrifices for the workers and other social layers, we saw “a progressive weakening of the organs of the dictatorship of the proletariat (the workers’ councils) and consequently the development of tendencies towards bureaucratic institutions.” [2]

If during the whole of the civil war privations were on the whole put up with by the workers and poor peasants, it didn’t last in the new conditions. The civil war left the social situation in Russia totally drained. The people lacked everything, from food to fuel, needed to stave off the rigours of winter. From summer 1920, the first signs of discontent were emerging, notably in campaigns around the uprisings of peasants in Tambov. But agitation spread rapidly through towns where, aside from economic demands, the workers also demanded the end of War Communism. As such these strikes didn’t only express a reaction faced with the degradation of living conditions; they also marked a desire for the soviets to return to the heart of political decision-making. It is in this context that the sailors’ insurrection at Kronstadt broke out on February 28, 1921. In reaction to the brutal methods of the requisition of wheat undertaken by armed detachments, and the privations suffered by workers and peasants alike, the sailors of the warship Petropavlovsk mutinied and adopted a ten-point resolution with the principal claim being the rapid regeneration of soviet power. The revolt of the Kronstadt sailors happened “during the course of a movement of the class struggle against the growing bureaucracy of the regime, it identified with this struggle and saw itself as a moment in its generalisation”[3]  

The terrible repression that the Bolshevik Party unleashed on the revolt marked a real turning-point of the revolution. Through the execution of close to 3000 sailors, the Bolshevik Party crossed the red line by exercising violence within the working class. This dramatic policy undertaken by the only organisation, up to then, defending the revolutionary line and the communist programme marked, to a certain extent, a point of no return and a slow, irredeemable rupture between the interests of the Bolshevik Party which was assimilating itself more and more with the state, and those of the working class.

If the working class had in one sense emerged victorious from the war against the counter-revolutionary forces, the concentration of authority in the hands of the party-state duo was the other side of the coin. The dissentions within the proletarian camp on this issue, notably incarnated in the workers’ strikes in Moscow and Petrograd and the revolt of the Kronstadt sailors, were expressed even within the party from the beginning of the civil war. They were to reach their paroxysm during the Tenth Congress of the Russian Communist Party (RCP)[4] notably through controversy over the union question and the critiques of the Workers’ Opposition group notably animated by A. Kollontai and Shliapnikov. Since autumn 1920, this group within the RCP was established during the course of the debate on the role of the unions in the dictatorship of the proletariat. Although the framework for the debate remained profoundly inadequate, the position of the Workers’ Opposition was that the industrial unions would have to manage production while being independent from the soviet state[5] thus expressing “in a confused and hesitant manner, the antipathy of the proletariat for the bureaucratic and military methods which were more and more marking the regime and the hopes of the working class that things were going to change now that the rigours of the war had ended.”[6] This debate gave rise to lively polemics throughout the winter of 1920-1921 while, according to Lenin in his opening speech to the congress, the party had need for unity in its ranks more than ever: “Comrades, we have lived through an exceptional year, we have allowed ourselves the luxury of discussions and debates within our party. For a party surrounded by enemies, the most powerful and strongest enemies who group together the whole capitalist world, for a party which has borne the most incredible burden, these luxuries are really surprising (...) In any case, whatever the discussions which have taken place up to now, whatever debates are taking place amongst us, while we must face up to so many enemies, the dictatorship of the proletariat in a peasant country is an immense task, so difficult that it’s not enough that our work is formally more unified, more planned than before, that your presence here at this congress already proves; it is also necessary that there remains not the least trace of a factional spirit whatever the place and form in which it has shown itself up to the present; in any case it is necessary that these traces do not continue.”[7] Following that, the congress had to endorse the objective fixed by this opening speech through the adoption of the resolution on “party unity” ordering “the immediate dissolution of groups without exception formed on such-and-such a platform, and give instruction to all the organisations to strictly insist on the inadmissible character on all types of fractional activity. The non-execution of this decision of the congress will result in the immediate and unconditional exclusion from the party.” This decision, also defended by a majority of the CI, reflected the profound change in the way in which the party treated disagreements expressed on subjects as fundamental as the role of the trade unions for example. The forbidding of fractions within the party showed in reality a deformation of the discipline within the latter since henceforth it demanded the strict submission to the decisions of the party once they had been taken. Critiques from militants or groups were tolerated but it was formally prohibited to put up an opposition to the official party decision on the basis of an organised defence of their positions[8]. With this decision, the Communist Party of Russia abandoned a whole part of its history since it itself had led such work in fighting against the opportunism which gangrened the IInd International, leading that organisation to its own bankruptcy at the outbreak of the First World War.

A good number of dishonest and inconsequential academics and journalists saw in this affair the definite proof of the “natural authoritarianism” of Lenin and a so-called Bolshevik tyranny. In reality, this process was above everything a product of the isolation and state of siege imposed on the revolution in Russia, expressing not a “natural authoritarianism” but a real deviation of the Bolsheviks from their own history. Furthermore, as Lenin indicated, the existence of opposition groups organised in a “fraction” could be used by counter-revolutionary forces with the aim of discrediting the party. But what Lenin was no longer seeing was that while the open enemies of the revolution could point to these disagreements within the party in order to discredit it, it was all the more true that the “hidden enemy” of the revolution, the counter-revolution from the inside, was served by the forbidding of fractions as a means of entirely Stalinising the party.

It was thus the isolation of the revolution to the Russian bastion which led the RCP to turn in on itself and prioritise the interests of the party and of the state through an “iron discipline” rather than guarantee the expression of disagreements so as to participate in the clarification of fundamental political questions for the whole of the revolutionary milieu and the world working class[9]. Floating the threat of exclusion of groups defending divergent positions, the Russian party deprived itself of vitality and opened itself up to the bureaucratic spiral.

2.  “Lenin’s last struggle”

If, as we’ve indicated, Lenin defended the ban on fractions and, consequently, tried to dissuade some militants from publicly criticising the “necessary discipline”, he wasn’t slow however in taking stock of the proliferation of bureaucrats and of the danger thus weighing on the activities of the party. The tendencies to bureaucracy were a constant preoccupation of Lenin since the taking of power in October 1917. The consciousness of this scourge continued to be affirmed with the accumulation of dysfunctions and the proliferation of arrivistes and the grip of functionaries  

The different oppositions appearing during the years 1920-1921 never ceased, although in a confused manner, to warn the party against the growing weight of the “Workers’ State”[10] and of the absorption of the party into it. A mortal danger for the revolution and the party that Lenin himself exposed at the time of the XIth congress of the RCP, affirming that “erroneous relations between the party and the Soviet administrations” were being established.

The “Georgian Affair”, which broke out during 1922, allowed Lenin to take stock of the breadth of the bureaucratic gangrene. The use of violence, repression and manipulation by Grigol Ordzhonikidze (Secretary of the Transcaucasian Regional Bureau) under the orders of Stalin (Secretary-General of the RCP) against members of the Georgian party who refused to go along with the planned Constitution of the USSR[11] very much scandalised Lenin.

These brutal methods, totally foreign to proletarian and communist morals, were never before seen in the ranks of the party. They demonstrated the all-powerful nature of the party machine over its members and the disastrous evolution of the party and the state, engendering practices coming from “an apparatus which is fundamentally foreign and represent a hodgepodge of bourgeois and tsarist vestiges (...) covered only with a soviet veneer”[12].

During the last two years of his life, Lenin tried to arrest the bureaucratic drift incarnated by Stalin and his minions. After the Georgian episode, he undertook a frontal combat, openly accusing the Workers and Peasants Inspectorate led by Stalin to be “at the forefront” of the development of bureaucracy.

It is thus guided by the flame of internationalism that Lenin put his meagre forces to work in order to try and repel the Stalin’s first offensives and his doctrine of “socialism in one country”. But the totally erroneous responses that he advocated , consisting more or less of restructuring of the state, in the (illusory) expectation of a revolutionary jump-start from the European proletariat, only confirmed the irredeemable impasse in which the Russian revolution and the entire world revolution found itself.

For decades, the dominant ideology has used every means in order to establish a link between the revolutionary combat of Lenin and the totalitarian power of Stalin. But facts are stubborn! “Lenin’s Testament” contains enough to warn against the future tyrant, dismissing any legitimising of gangster methods and the chauvinistic aims of Stalin and his clique. Moreover, the “Testament” was kept under wraps for a long time and it was only after guaranteeing his total power within the party and the state that Stalin indulged in a kind of confession regarding what the document said about him.

3. The Bolshevisation of the International

Because of the victory of the revolution in Russia and the weakness of other communist parties, the RCP played a preponderant role in the formation of the Communist International, whose executive seat was based in Moscow. But this preponderance itself took a disproportionate character in the life and the functioning of the CI.

Consequently, bureaucracy and rampant authoritarianism within the RCP soon ate into the ranks of the International. Lenin was one of the few concerned about the “Russification” of the CI. He firstly expressed this at the time of the Second Congress by proposing the installation of the executive seat to Berlin, then at the Fourth Congress where he criticised the “too-Russian” character of the “Theses on the Structures, Methods and Action of the Communist Parties”, although he fully supported their content. Concerned about the too-strong “dependence” of the CI on the RCP, he exhorted the other sections of the CI to appropriate without delay all the experiences and lessons of the revolution in Russia so as to affirm its cohesion through a greater association of the different sections in the life of the party. This was also a question of guaranteeing the vitality of the International by placing reflection and the study of revolutionary experience at the centre of the activity of the sections.[13] But these working perspectives were extinguished with the death of Lenin in 1924. From that moment we see a turnaround in the CI which more progressively became a weapon in the hands of the (Zinoviev-Kamenev-Stalin) Troika first of all, then of the Stalinist bureaucracy. The “Bolshevisation of the Communist Parties” announced at the Fifth World Congress in July 1924 aimed to suppress all opposition, as much Trotsky and his partisans as the groups of the left: “The key word of Bolshevisation is born in the struggle against the right. Naturally it will be led against it, but also, of course, against the ultra-leftist deviations and against the pessimism which, here or there, weighs heavily on us”.[14]

This new watchword thus formed a clear expression of the tighter grip in which the Russian revolution found itself after the setback of the German proletariat in 1923 at the time of its desperate attempt at insurrection. This only accelerated the grip of the bureaucracy henceforth using its authoritarian discipline against all those who opposed or criticised the policy of the party led by the Troika first of all and subsequently by the Stalinist clique. It was thus a matter of “breaking the back” of all forms of resistance against the degeneration of the International. Alfred Rosmer, a member of the Executive Bureau of the CI between 1920 and 1921, having participated in its Second, Third and Fourth congresses, gives an informed account of the appalling policy manoeuvred by Zinoviev, then the president of the International: “Through the means of emissaries that he sent to the sections before the congress, he suppressed all opposition. Where resistance was expressed, a great variety of methods were used in order to minimise them; it was a war of attrition where the workers were beaten in advance by functionaries who, having everything to lose, imposed interminable debates; war-weary and overwhelmed by the weight of the International, all those who had made criticisms temporarily gave up or simply left”.[15]

The “Declaration of the Committee of Entente” [16], addressed to the Executive Committee of the CI in July 1925 after the Fifth Congress denounced the same aberrations: “The serious problems of fractions and tendencies within the Party, which is posed historically, both as a consequence of the policy followed and as a repudiation of this type of tactic, as a symptom of its insufficiencies that it’s necessary to study with the greatest attention, they pretend they’ve solved through orders and by threats, submitting comrades to crude disciplinary pressures, thus leaving one to think that on their personal conduct depends the entire favourable development of the Party”.

Consequently, all the militants or tendencies which subsequently expressed disagreements with the orientations defended by the party confronted the following alternative: submit or be excluded! If excluded, they were replaced in the executive organs of the CP by docile, young or inexperienced militants, very quickly becoming apparatchiks with limitless fidelity to Moscow as in the KPD or in the image of Maurice Thorez within the French Communist Party. Henceforth, the CP’s incarnated the implacable defence of the foreign policy of the Russian state instead of playing an active role in the elevation of revolutionary consciousness among the masses. The new mode of organisation of the CP’s through “factory cells” constituted a clear expression of this unfortunate evolution since it kept the workers focussed on local and corporatist problems to the detriment, evidently, of a general vision and perspective for the proletarian combat.

Stalinist propaganda largely contributed to presenting “Bolshevisation” as being in continuity with the policy undertaken by the Bolsheviks since October 1917. It was part of a long series of falsifications set up by this bourgeois clique throughout the period of counter-revolution. In reality, this watchword was a total rupture with the history and spirit of the Bolshevik Party. But much more than that, it marked a significant stage in the degeneration of the Communist International which stayed on this trajectory and became a counter-revolutionary tool in the hands of the Russian state for the preservation of its imperialist interests. Only the left fractions tried to lead a determined combat to counter this involution and keep alive the flame of internationalism and the communist programme. It is this aspect that we will tackle in the last part of this series.

(To be continued)

Najek,

April 16, 2021

The present article follows on from the ones we have already published which denounce an attempt to falsify the real origins of the communist left, emanating from a blog called Nuevo Curso[1] (recently rebaptised Communia). This attempt is orchestrated by an adventurer, Gaizka[2], whose aim is in no way to contribute to the defence and clarification of the positions of this current but to “make a name for himself” in the proletarian political milieu. This attack against the historic current of the communist left seeks to turn it into a vague movement from which the rigorous proletarian principles which presided over its formation have been amputated, creating an obstacle to the transmission, to future generations of revolutionaries, of the acquisitions of the struggle of the left fractions against the opportunism and degeneration of the parties of the Communist International. As for the adventurer Gaizka, we have supplied a sizeable amount of information, which to this day has not been refuted, about this gentleman’s relations with the personalities of the world of bourgeois politics (of the left but above all of the right). This is the kind of behaviour and personality trait which he shares with better known adventurers in history such as Ferdinand Lassalle and Jean Baptiste von Schweitzer who operated within the workers’ movement in Germany in the 19th century[3], even if he is very far from having the same status as these personalities.

Following our exposure, Gaizka remained totally silent: refuting the reality of the turpitudes we proved was a “mission impossible” for him. Furthermore, he received very little support; virtually the only one, and the most explicit, coming from the International Group of the Communist Left (IGCL), which before changing its name in 2014, called itself the Internal Fraction of the International Communist Current (IFICC). This is a group whose prime vocation, for the last 20 years, is to slander the ICC, and their statement of position in favour of Nuevo Curso is accompanied by a new hate-filled attack on our organisation[4].

Having denounced the fraud of this so-called left communist Nuevo Curso and the real nature of its animator Gaizka, we now have to look at the profile of his “friends”. The question is obviously not without importance. The Holy Alliance between Nuevo Curso and the IGCL says a lot about the real nature of each of these groups and their “contribution” to the efforts of young elements searching for class positions. But before examining the pedigree of the IGCL, it’s worth quickly focusing on the way this group positioned itself with regard to Nuevo Curso when it first appeared.

The IGCL’s support for Nuevo Curso and Gaizka

It was with much enthusiasm and flattery that the IGCL saluted the entry of the Nuevo Curso blog onto the political scene:

“Nuevo Curso is a blog of comrades who have begun publishing regularly on the situation and on wider questions, including theoretical issues. Unfortunately, their blog is only in Spanish. The ensemble of positions they defend are class positions which are part of the programmatic framework of the communist left… We are very impressed not only by their affirmation of class positions with no concessions, but also by the ‘marxist quality’ of the comrades’ texts... ”(our emphasis. From Revolution or War no.9, “New communist voices: Nuevo Curso (Spain) and Workers’ Offensive (USA)”)

In the same vein, “the constitution of Emancipacion as a fully-fledged political group (which animates the blog Nuevo Curso) is an important step whose political and historical significance goes well beyond the mere appearance of a new communist group… it expresses the fact that the international proletariat, although subjugated and very far from being able to push back the various attacks of capital, is tending to resist through struggle and to break out of the ideological grip of capital, and that its revolutionary future remains intact. It expresses the (relative) ‘vitality’ of the proletariat”. (Our emphasis, Revolution or War 12, IGCL letter to Emancipacion on its first congress).

The IGCL could not however avoid raising the problem posed by Nuevo Curso’s interpretation of the communist left which includes the “Trotskyist” current before its betrayal during the Second World War. The absence of any criticism by the IGCL on this question would have made it obvious that the group is not at all concerned with the real defence of the communist left, that its proclamation about being part of it and claim to defend it is nothing but a deception serving its sordid manoeuvres aimed at discrediting the ICC. That said,  the “timidity” and “gentleness” of the IGCL’s criticisms of Nuevo Curso hardly hides its benevolent attitude to this attack on the communist left: “We want above all to draw the comrades’ attention to the programmatic, theoretical and political dead-end into which the claim of continuity with the Fourth International is leading Emancipacion… Its passage to becoming a fully-fledged political group is extremely positive in itself, and at the same time raises new questions and responsibilities. These came to light at the congress. And one of them is that this reference to the Fourth International needs to be discussed – and in our view combated – in order to allow Emancipacion and its members to fulfil in the best way possible the historic task that the proletariat has conferred on them” (our emphasis – Revolution or War, IGCL letter to Emancipacion on its first congress). Instead of clearly denouncing an attack on the communist left, the IGCL evades this fundamental problem by trying to pull the wool over our eyes with phrases about the “programmatic, theoretical and political dead-end” into which Emancipacion is being led, and by evoking, no less, “the historic task that the proletariat has conferred on them”. Moral: the IGCL doesn’t give a fig about the defence of the communist left but is very concerned about the future of Emancipacion.

Furthermore, as soon as our organisation had provided sufficient information to characterise Gaizka (the main animator of Nuevo Curso) as an adventurer who, between 1992 and 94 had developed a relationship with the most important bourgeois party in Spain at the time, the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE), there was no room for doubt regarding the approach of Nuevo Curso – this was an attempt to distort the real history of the communist left. And there was even less room for doubt for the members of the IGCL since they were still militants of the ICC in 1992-94 and had full knowledge of the trajectory and activities of this individual.

However, this information, accessible to anyone (and, we repeat, denied by no one) did not prevent the IGCL from rushing to the assistance of the adventurer Gaizka faced with the denunciation we had made: “We must point out that to this day we have not seen any provocation, manoeuvre, denigration, slander or rumour launched by the members of Nuevo Curso, even on an individual basis, or any policy of destruction against other revolutionary groups or militants”[5]. Evidently, Gaizka doesn’t function in the same way as the IGCL, since the list of repulsive behaviours mentioned here is a very good summary of the IGCL’s own way of acting. And it’s no mean achievement of these gangsters and cheats to tell us that there’s no problem with Gaizka because he doesn’t conduct himself in the same way as they do.

With Gaizka, it’s his political persona which is the issue, the fact that, like other better-known adventurers before him, he is distinguished by the fact that “Contrary to sincere fighters who selflessly join a revolutionary organisation in order to help the working class to fulfil its historical role, adventurers join revolutionary organisations to fulfil their own ‘historical mission’. They want to place the movement at their service and constantly look for recognition with this purpose”[6].  For Gaizka, it’s the rewriting of the history of the communist left, its disfigurement, which is his selling point and which will puff him up if the operation succeeds[7].

Back to the list of misdeeds by the IFICC/IGCL

The IFCC was formed in 2001 on the basis of hatred of the ICC and the will to destroy it. Not succeeding in doing so, it tried to harm it as much as it could. Under the pretext of wanting to "straighten out the ICC", which according to them was threatened with "opportunist degeneration", the small group of ICC militants who founded the IFICC had, from the outset, been characterised by intrigue (holding secret meetings[8]), by thuggish actions such as theft and blackmail, and by the work of provocateurs, in particular through a smear campaign against a comrade publicly accused by them of being a state agent indirectly manipulating our organisation.

Since we cannot here give a detailed account of the misdeeds of the IFICC/IGCL, we refer the reader to the main articles of denunciation that we have written on this subject[9] and we will limit ourselves here to a number of concrete illustrations.

The members of the IFICC deliberately placed themselves outside our organisation as a consequence of the following behaviour:

    - Repeated violations of our statutes (in particular the refusal to pay their dues in full) and their refusal to commit themselves to respecting them in the future;

    - Refusal to come and present the defence of their behaviour within the organisation in the face of our criticism of it, before an extraordinary conference of the organisation which specifically put this issue on its agenda;

    - Theft of ICC’s money and material (address files and internal documents).

The IFICC as a police-like group

In the end, the members of the IFICC were excluded[10] from our organisation, not for these intolerable behaviours but for their activities as spies, with several acts of snitching to their credit. For example, they published on their website the date on which an ICC Conference was to be held in Mexico with the participation of ICC militants from other countries. This repugnant act of the IFICC, which could only facilitate the work of the repressive forces of the bourgeois state against revolutionary militants, is all the more despicable because the IFICC members knew full well that some of our comrades in Mexico had already been directly victims of repression in the past and that some had been forced to flee the countries they were born in.

But the snitching behaviour of IFICC members is not just about this episode. Before and after their exclusion from the ICC, they systematised their spying work on our organisation and regularly reported the results in their newsletters. Some of the "information" thus published, quite worthy of the gutter press (for example, "revelations" about militants who were a couple), is of interest only to the few imbeciles (if any exist outside the IFICC’s own members) who take pleasure in fantasising about a family oligarchy within the ICC. Far from being harmless, these are activities worthy of police agents. Here is a small sample:

    - IFICC Bulletin n° 14 is filled with prose worthy of the most zealous police reports: "This text written by CG[11], alias Peter, which is proved by the style and especially by the (rather fanciful) reference to a lamentable recovery operation carried out under his direction. This same Peter is the one who heads the ICC and who, after having excluded or pushed out most of the founding members of the ICC, claims to be the sole heir of MC[12]. But it is also important to know that if Peter is leading this hateful cabal against our comrade Jonas, it is for the simple reason that Louise (alias Avril), the militant about whom Jonas dared to express clear doubts, is none other than the partner of the leader".

    - In Bulletin n° 18, we are treated to a detailed report (typical of the informers’ reports found in police archives) on a public meeting of the International Communist Party (PCI-Le Prolétaire), where all the deeds and actions of "Peter alias CG" are reported.

    - Bulletin n° 19 returns to the charge about Peter "who was distributing publications on his own” in such and such a demonstration and raises a "highly political" question: "Finally, and you will understand that we also ask this question: where is Louise? Absent from the demonstrations, absent from public meetings, is she 'sick' again?".

The above sample of the sordid gathering of information by IFICC members is quite significant of the way these people conceived their "fractional work" (as gossip, police reports, etc). Indeed, the exhibition of such information is also aimed at the whole ICC, with a view to putting pressure on its militants by making them understand that they are "under surveillance", that nothing they do will escape the vigilance of the "Internal Fraction". This is evidenced by the innocent information published in Bulletin No. 13, which reports that the ICC has rented a "luxury room" for a public meeting, information whose sole function is to contribute to this atmosphere of being under permanent surveillance. It is with the same objective that the members of the ICC, as well as our contacts, regularly received in their mailboxes, even when some of them had changed address, the famous "Bulletin Communiste", despite protests and repeated requests to stop such mailings. It was a way of saying to the recipients: "We are watching you and we won't leave you alone".

It is not because it emanates from the sick brains of obsessive persecutors that such a job of policing our organisation, and especially some of its members, should be taken extremely seriously.

To conclude on the IFICC’s police-like behaviour, it is worth mentioning the publication by the IFICC of a 118-page text in A4 format and in small print (about 150,000 words!) entitled "The History of the International Secretariat of the ICC". This text, according to its subtitle, claims to tell "How opportunism imposed itself in the central organs before contaminating and beginning the destruction of the whole organisation...". It is a tale that can, in many ways, be described as a detective novel.

In the first place, it is a novel, that is to say a fiction and by no means a historical text, even if it refers to real facts and characters. It is a bit like considering Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers as the true story of d'Artagnan (who really existed) and his friends. Obviously, even if there is no possible comparison between Dumas' romantic imagination and the sick and paranoid imagination of the authors of this "story", we are entitled to a "thriller" with highly stereotypical characters, notably Louise and Peter. Louise is the main "villain" in the story, a true Lady Macbeth. She had pushed her husband to assassinate King Duncan so that he could take the throne. For her part, Louise, in conjunction with the state's specialised services, devilishly manipulates her partner Peter, inciting him to commit all kinds of crimes against the ICC and its militants[13]. Peter thus became the "leader", the one "who runs the ICC" (sic) after having eliminated "most of the CCI's founding members" and who "claims to be the sole heir of MC". It is no longer Peter-Macbeth we are dealing with but Peter-Stalin. And it is here, once again, that the police-like character of this text is manifested. Indeed, it explains the so-called "opportunist evolution" of the ICC by the intrigues of a number of evil characters, as if the degeneration and betrayal of the Bolshevik party had been the result of the action of the megalomaniac Stalin and not the consequence of the failure of the world revolution and the isolation of the revolution in Russia. This text comes from the purest police conception of history, which has always been fought by marxism, and its authors must be recognised as having been somewhat in advance of all the "conspiracy theorists" who today abound on the social networks and in the entourage of Donald Trump.

But the most odiously police-like character of this text is indeed the fact that it discloses many details about the internal workings of our organisation, which are blessed bread for the police services. The depths to which the IGCL can sink has no limits.

The IFICC’s efforts to build a "cordon sanitaire" against the ICC

Having failed to convince the militants of the ICC of the need to exclude the "leader" and the "partner of the leader", this parasitic group has set itself the objective of dragging other groups of the communist left behind its slanders, in order to establish a cordon sanitaire around the ICC and discredit it (see below the episodes of the "Circulo" and the "public meeting of the IBRP[14] in Paris). The IFICC thus asked the PCI (Le Prolétaire), in a letter sent on 27 January 2002, at the same time as to other groups of the communist left, to take a stand in its favour against the ICC: "Today we see only one solution: to address you so that you ask our organisation to open its eyes and regain its sense of responsibility. (...) Because we are in disagreement, today the ICC is doing everything it can to marginalise us and demolish us morally and politically "[15]. In spite of this letter, the IFICC had the nerve to write in its Bulletin n° 13: "we want to affirm that, for our part, we have never asked anyone to take sides between the ICC and the Fraction".

The desire to isolate the ICC meant trying to establish a perimeter wider than the organisations of the communist left. It involved building a fence, wherever possible and through different means, between the ICC and all those who, at one time or another, were likely to be interested in the content of our intervention. This is the meaning of its smear campaigns on its website, sometimes even through leaflets dedicated to this purpose, and in all the discussion forums that were accessible to it.

While we could not forbid IFICC members to go to street demonstrations to keep an eye on us, we could, on the other hand, prevent them from doing their dirty work of spying on our public meetings. This is why the ICC finally decided to ban the presence of members of the so-called "Internal Fraction" of the ICC from its public meetings and open contact meetings[16]. On several occasions we had to face threats (including the loud threat to slit the throat of one of our comrades[17]) and physical assaults from these thugs.

The opportunist degeneration of the ICC, proclaimed but never demonstrated by the IFICC!

The IFICC presented itself as "the true continuator of the CCI" which had allegedly gone through an "opportunist" and "Stalinist" degeneration. It declared that it was continuing the work, supposedly abandoned by the ICC, of defending the "true positions of this organisation", now threatened by the development of opportunism in the ICC and affecting in particular the question of its functioning. We have seen in practice the IFICC’s own conception of respect for the statutes and even the most elementary rules of behaviour of the workers' movement.

Moreover, nowhere is there any trace of a "political" argumentation by the IFICC, clearly highlighting its "fundamental divergences" with the ICC, which would have justified the constitution of an "internal fraction" situated in the continuity of all the left fractions of the workers’ movement, from the Spartacus League to the Italian Left Fraction[18]. Having always been incapable of developing the necessary political rigour by drawing inspiration from the experience of the workers' movement, it preferred to set up the scarecrow of popular vindictiveness by repeating endlessly that the ICC is a sect "without hope of recovery, and which has largely marginalised itself from the proletarian camp, or even put itself out of action, because of its opportunist positions". (Activities report of the 2nd General Meeting of the IGCL. Revolution or War n° 12).

Why and how the ICC has put itself "out of the action in the proletarian camp", a concept that we don't find anywhere in our predecessors of Bilan and Internationalisme[19] (descent from which the IFICC-IGCL has the indecency to claim, in particular its alleged continuity with our comrade MC[20]).

The IFICC-IGCL suggests that have betrayed, or are on the way to betraying, proletarian internationalism, which would indeed constitute a valid reason to denounce the opportunism leading in that direction. But, to date, the IFICC-IGCL has in no way demonstrated how our characterisation of the current phase of capitalist decadence, that of its decomposition[21] - which, according to these people, is a masterpiece of the opportunism of the ICC - is an illustration of this betrayal!

The IGCL-IFICC suggests that our sectarianism is expressed through our conception that there are parasitic groups acting in the milieu of the communist left[22]. This, as well as the idea that parasitism poses a danger to the proletarian political milieu, is what they claim marginalises us in relation to this milieu and even constitute a threat to it. In reality, this conception only constitutes a danger for the parasites and we defend its validity in the same way as we reclaim the fight of Marx and Engels against the Alliance of Bakunin within the First International: "It is high time, once and for all, to put an end to the daily internal struggles provoked in our Association by the presence of this parasitic body". (Engels, "The General Council to all members of the International", warning against the Bakunin Alliance).

The method of "suggesting" while avoiding the underlying political problem appeals to vulgar common sense[23], to the methods of witch-hunting practised in the Middle Ages, and which is experiencing a revival in today's decaying society - in particular, the all-out search for scapegoats for all the ills of society.

In reality, the IFICC-IGCL has never explained that, when its members were part of the ICC, they always supported the Theses on Parasitism and the Theses on Decomposition. Their attack on our organisation in 2000 made no reference to disagreements on these issues. It was only later that they "discovered", very conveniently, that they disagreed with these analyses. The challenge for them was to remove obstacles to the justification of their new political project:

    - By becoming in their turn cartoon caricatures of parasites, they obviously could not bear the image that the mirror of our analysis of parasitism reflected back on themselves and their behaviour. They had to break this mirror in order to make the ICC guilty of their own exactions, and to try to deprive the ICC of an adequate method for fighting them;

    - By rejecting the theory of the decomposition of capitalism elaborated by the ICC, which it is the only organisation of the communist left that defends this conception, the IFICC could gently flatter the other groups of the communist left, who are very critical of this analysis.

In addition, the ICC has been the target of many other accusations by the IFICC that we have not mentioned so far. Generally speaking, these are expressed by means of "shock formulas" based on lies and deformations, worthy of the motto of Goebbels, head of Nazi propaganda, according to which: "A huge lie carries with it a force that drives away doubt". Fortunately, medieval obscurantism does not prevent stupidity from being expressed and, with it, the possibility of arousing the incredulity of IGCL supporters. For their attention we reproduce a very small sample of the accusations brought against us by the IFICC: the ICC today is marked by "a progressive distancing from marxism and an increasingly assertive tendency to put forward (and defend) bourgeois and petty bourgeois values in vogue ("the cult of youth", feminism and above all "non-violence")[24] ; the ICC is also accused of playing the game of the forces of repression[25].

The police-like use by the IGCL of the ICC’s internal bulletins

No sooner had the old "IFICC" sign been put away and the news about the "IGCL" been posted than this parasitic group attempted a stunt, again of a police-like nature, against the ICC.

Although the IFICC’s anti-ICC campaigns initially had some impact on the proletarian political milieu, they did not succeed in marginalising our organisation, especially because we vigorously fought against them. The IFICC had had to resign itself to this situation until history seemed to smile on it again thanks to the providential arrival into its hands of some ICC internal bulletins[26].

Thinking that their hour of glory had finally arrived, these parasites, reinvigorated by this new "asset", unleashed some hysterical propaganda against the ICC, as evidenced by the (jubilant) advertising placard posted on their website: "A new (final?) internal crisis in the ICC!", accompanied of course by an "Appeal to the proletarian camp and ICC militants". For several days, they carried out a frenetic activity, addressing letter after letter to the whole "proletarian milieu" as well as to our militants and some of our sympathisers (whose addresses they continued to use after having stolen them from the ICC). This so-called "International Group of the Communist Left" rang the bell and shouted at the top of its voice that it was in possession of the internal bulletins of the ICC. By showing off their war trophy and making such a racket, the message that these experienced snitches were trying to get across was very clear: there was a "mole" in the ICC who was working hand in hand with the ex-IFICC! It was clearly police-type work with no other objective than to sow widespread suspicion, disorder and discord within our organisation. These were the same methods used by the GPU, Stalin's political police, to destroy from within the Trotskyist movement of the 1930s. These are the same methods that members of the former IFICC (including two of them, Juan and Jonas, founding members of the IGCL) had already used when they made "special" trips to several sections of the ICC in 2001 to organise secret meetings and circulate rumours that one of our comrades (the "wife of the head of the CCI", as they called her) was a "cop".

How did the ICGL benefit from such a godsend? An accomplice who had infiltrated our organisation? Could the police themselves have obtained it by hacking into our computers and then passing it on to the ICGL by some means? If, instead of being a gang of thugs, the IGCL had been a responsible organisation, it would have been eager to solve this enigma and to inform the political world of the outcome of its investigations.

Our article denouncing this new attack was enough to suddenly calm the IGCL's ardour, but it is interesting to note its response: "Our group takes note of the ICC’s silence and the absence of denial of the reality of a serious organisational crisis within the ICC and the new questioning within the ICC itself of the behaviour of the 'militant' Avril-Louise-Morgane. The ICGL will not respond to the cascade of grave insults that the ICC is currently pouring on our group (as it did yesterday on the IFICC). We have other things to do. (…)". This answer was revealing in several ways:

    - The ICGL refused to answer the "cascade of insults", so it avoided having to answer the only question of interest and which understandably embarrassed it: how had it obtained our internal bulletins?

    - It accused the ICC of hiding its organisational problems, whereas a reading of all our press reveals that this is a lie and a slander, since, like the Bolsheviks (see in particular Lenin's book One Step Forward, Two Steps Back) we are the only organisation to systematically report on them and learn from them.

    - Being in possession of our internal bulletins, the ICGL knew perfectly well that, once again, our problems would not be hidden. Consequently, publicising the organisational problems affecting the ICC could not be expected before a general meeting of the organisation (a congress or a conference) given the task of dealing with them was held; it could therefore only take place as part of a review of the work of such a meeting. The outcome of our extraordinary conference in May 2014 was published in an article in September 2014 in International Review No. 153, entitled "ICC Extraordinary International Conference: The news of our death is greatly exaggerated".

The IFICC are parasites, but not only on the ICC

We have shown how the IFICC tried to use the PCI to support it against the ICC (by sending them a letter) and we will illustrate how it used the same approach vis-à-vis the IBRP but on a bigger scale. This attempt to corrupt these two organisations, by leading them onto a terrain foreign to the rules that should preside over relations within the communist left, also constitutes a parasitic attack against them.

Thus, the IBRP was the target in particular of an audacious manoeuvre on the part of the IFICC, consisting in organising a public meeting for the IBRP in Paris on 2 October 2004. In fact, as we shall show, it was a public meeting that was aimed at boosting the reputation of the IFICC, to the detriment of that of the IBRP, and with a view to carrying out an attack against the ICC.

The announcement of this meeting by the IBRP indicated that its theme was the war in Iraq. On the other hand, the IFICC’s announcement stressed the importance of its own approach: "At our suggestion and with our political and material support, the IBRP will organise a public meeting in Paris (a public meeting which we hope will not be the last) in which we call on all our readers to participate" (emphasis added). What emerges from this appeal is that, without the IFICC, this organisation of the communist left, which exists internationally and has been known for decades, would not have been able to take the initiative and organise the public meeting!

In fact, this parasitic group used the IBRP as a "straw man" for its own publicity in order to obtain a certificate of respectability, of recognition of its membership of the communist left. And this shameless little thugocracy did not hesitate to use the address book of ICC contacts (which it had stolen before it left the organisation) to broadcast its call for this public meeting.

As we pointed out at the time, the IFICC had not deemed it useful to include in its announcement a single sentence of analysis denouncing the war in Iraq (contrary to the announcement made by the IBRP). Likewise, its announcement was exclusively dedicated to a question: "how to rebuild a pole of revolutionary regroupment in the French capital after the collapse of the ICC, following which its public meetings are now deserted and no longer constitute a place for debate".

In fact, it was quite the opposite that the IBRP's public meeting highlighted. According to the IFICC, this was to be the proof that the IBRP was now the "only serious pole" of discussion and reference for the communist left. However, it would have been a total fiasco if the ICC had not participated and invited its contacts to do the same. In fact, an important delegation of militants of the ICC and about ten sympathisers of our organisation were present.

In reality, the multiplication of compliments paid by the ICGL-IFICC to the IBRP was nothing but pure hypocrisy. From its constitution, the IFICC had sought support within the proletarian political milieu, essentially from the IBRP, in its parasitic crusade against the ICC, in particular by "electing" the IBPR as the only viable pole for the regroupment of revolutionary forces. Like the gadfly in the fable of Jean de La Fontaine, it gave advice, distributed good points to the political milieu, reproduced some of its articles ... At that time, relations between the IBRP and the IFICC were at their high point. The report by the IFICC of a meeting with the IBRP in June 2004 set out the following analysis of the existing dynamics within the proletarian camp: "These different elements reviewed allow us to conclude that there are indeed two dynamics within the present proletarian camp, going in two opposite directions: one towards creating a framework to gather revolutionary energies, to favour and orient debates and collective reflection, to allow the widest possible intervention within the working class. This dynamic, of which our Fraction is a part, is carried, today, essentially by the IBRP. The other, going in the opposite direction, that of maintaining, even increasing dispersion, political confusion, is carried by the ICC, and this what our Fraction is openly struggling against. " (Minutes of a meeting between the IBRP and the Fraction; September 2004 – IFICC Bulletin Communiste 27)

Fifteen years later, the Activities Report of the 2nd General Meeting of the ICGL (April 2019) gives us a much less idyllic picture of its relationship with the ICT (formerly the IBRP). In fact, it informs its readers that "... new communist forces have emerged of which Nuevo Curso is the expression and a factor, thus directly facing the historical groups of the communist left with their historical responsibility towards this new dynamic; but the Internationalist Communist Tendency, the main organisation of this camp, began by locking itself into an attitude, or reflexes, which were relatively sectarian towards us and immediatist as regards these new forces" (underlined by us - Activities Report of the 2nd General Meeting of the IGCL, Revolution or War n°12).

Moreover, "the ICT, although organically linked with the Italian CP and the Communist Left in Italy, suffers the weight of relative informalism, personalism and individualism, and therefore of the circle spirit" (ibid, our emphasis), which, according to the IGCL, hinders the application of a party method by the ICT, especially in the relationship with its contacts.

So what happened that made the IFICC-IGCL, those patented bootlickers of the ICT, rebel in this way? Today they discover that the ICT has been engaging in what looks like an opportunist approach to intervention towards contacts: "The article, written by a member of the CWO, the British ICT group, clearly rejects 'fractions or discussion circles'. Beyond the rejection of an organisational form per se, and more seriously, it underestimates, ignores, and in fact rejects, any process of political confrontation and clarification as a central means and indispensable moment of the struggle for the party" (ibid, underlined by us)

In fact, it is certainly not an approach that it characterises as opportunist (without using the term) that disturbs the ICGL, but rather the fact that the faithful "gadfly" has much less success than the ICT with the new elements approaching the communist left. Above all, the ICGL is having a hard time digesting the fact that its members in Canada have left it to join the ICT.

This criticism of the ICT by the IGCL is revealing, not of the recruitment methods of the ICT, but of the bottomless hypocrisy of the ICGL. In fact, in addition to the political/theoretical compromises that the IFICC had made to be more in tune with the proletarian political milieu (abandoning the theory of decomposition and the theses on parasitism), its members had stifled another divergence with the IBRP, one of great importance, that the IFICC had always had (and that they shared with the ICC when they were in our organisation) about the principles that should govern the formation of the party. Suddenly, IFICC members had "forgotten" the criticisms that they and the ICC had previously made of the Partito Comunista Internazionalista (PCInt) and the IFICC on this issue, including the opportunist approach that had presided over the formation of the Partito in 1945. Today, the ICGL is "discovering" that the recruitment methods of the ICT are a little opportunist but it is not, as the ICGL would have you believe, the ICT that has changed its methods but the ICGL that is abandoning its attitude of bootlicker owing to its bitterness at having been double-crossed by the ICT, which has taken some of its members from it.

There are indeed disagreements between the ICT and the ICC over the method of regroupment that can lead to the constitution of the world party, but this disagreement is within the proletarian camp and will give rise to political debate and confrontation between comrades fighting for the same cause. And it is unacceptable that it should be polluted by the Jeremiads of the IGCL.

The lessons of a fight against the IFICC’s alliance with an adventurer (citizen B) in 2004

To conclude on the IGCL-IFICC’s history of valorous deeds, and on their eminently harmful character, it is necessary to come back to an episode which presents similarities with the recent situation where the parasitism of IGCL came to support the shenanigans of an adventurer. An episode in which the alliance between these two elements had destructive effects, particularly in relation to elements approaching class positions.

In 2004, the ICC entered into a political relationship with a small searching group in Argentina, the NCI (Nucleo Comunista Internacional)[27]. Having undertaken a study of the positions of the currents of the communist left, its members were oriented towards the positions of the ICC. The discussions on the question of unacceptable organisational behaviour within the proletariat had convinced these comrades, on the basis of the study of the IFICCs position papers and our own articles on the subject, that the IFICC "had adopted a behaviour alien to the working class and the communist left". This had then given rise to a position paper in this sense written on 22 May 2004 by these comrades[28].

It turned out that a problem was beginning to arise within the NCI because one of its members - who we will call citizen B in the rest of the narrative - had a practice in total opposition to a collective and unified functioning, a fundamental condition of existence for a communist organisation. Having initially pushed for contact with the ICC (he was the only one who was in a position to use the internet), he conducted individual discussions with each of the members of the group, but he manoeuvred to avoid the development of any serious and systematic discussion of the group as a whole, which allowed him to "keep control" of it. This organisational practice, radically foreign to the proletariat, is typical of bourgeois groups, particularly of the left or extreme left of capital. In reality, Mr B intended to use his comrades as a springboard to become a "personality" within the proletarian political milieu. However, the systematic work of discussing political positions with the ICC over time, as well as our insistence on joint meetings of all comrades, increasingly thwarted his immediate plans as an adventurer.

Thus, at the end of July 2004, Mr B attempted a bold manoeuvre: he demanded the immediate integration of the group into the ICC. He imposed this demand in spite of the resistance of the other comrades of the NCI who, even if they had also set themselves the objective of joining the ICC, felt the need to carry out beforehand a whole in-depth work of clarification and assimilation, since communist militancy can only be based on solid convictions. The ICC rejected citizen B’s demand in line with our policy of opposing hasty and immature integrations which contain the risk of destroying militants and are harmful to the organisation.

In parallel to all this, an alliance had been forged between the IFICC and the adventurer B, certainly on B's initiative, with the aim of carrying out a manoeuvre against the ICC, using the NCI without its knowledge.

The manoeuvre consisted in circulating within the proletarian political milieu a denunciation of the ICC and its "nauseating methods", a statement which seemed to emanate indirectly from the NCI, since it was signed by a mysterious and fictitious "Circulo de Comunistas Internacionalistas" (or "CCI" for short!), led by citizen B and which, according to him, was supposed to constitute the "political supersession" of the NCI. These calumnies were conveyed by means of a leaflet by the "Circulo" and distributed by the IFICC on the occasion of the public meeting in Paris of the IBRP on 2 October 2004.

It was also put online in different languages on the IBRP website. In addition to directly targeting the ICC, the leaflet in question defended the IFICC, totally negating the NCI's position paper of 22 May 2004 which had denounced this group.

When they later discovered the manoeuvres Citizen B had been carrying out behind their backs, in particular the creation of the puppet "Círculo de Comunistas Internacionalistas", as well as his position in support of the IFICC and the denunciation of the ICC, the NCI members analysed the situation as follows: "It is highly probable that he (B.) had already made clandestine contact with the IFICC, while continuing to deceive us to the point of wanting to rush the integration of the NCI into the ICC" (Internationalists in Argentina - Presentation of the NCI Declaration)[29].

The way in which Citizen B elaborated his manoeuvre is typical of an adventurer, of his ambitions and his total lack of scruples and concern for the cause of the proletariat. The recourse to the services of an adventurer, by the IFICC, to satisfy its hatred of the ICC and to try to reinforce, by public denigration, the political isolation of our organisation, is worthy of the pathetic and despicable characters who populate the sordid world of the petty and big bourgeoisie.

At the time, the ICC had fought back, sometimes on a daily basis, against the false and usurping campaign of Citizen B until, unable to refute the public exposure of his manoeuvres, he decided to disappear politically. Unfortunately, the other members of the NCI, deeply demoralised by the way they had been used and manipulated by Citizen B, were unable to recover and continue their efforts to reflect, and eventually abandoned all political activity.

As for the IFICC, which was up to its neck in this affair and which had relied heavily on Citizen B to discredit the ICC, it seems not to have learned its lesson from this misadventure where it made a fool of itself since, recently, it has been relying on the actions of another adventurer.

Today, unlike the episode of Citizen B, it is not the ICC that is specifically targeted by the policy of the adventurer Gaizka but the whole communist left[30], whose reputation will suffer political damage if the latter is not unmasked and put in a position where it is impossible to do any political harm. As the tradition of the workers' movement teaches us, and as the recent experience of the ICC with the manoeuvring and slanders of citizen B shows, there is no other choice than to defend the honour of organisations which are the target of parasitic attacks and the action of adventurers[31] , even if this requires a great deal of energy which could usefully be put at the service of other organisational tasks[32].

At present, in several parts of the world, we are witnessing the emergence of a growing interest in the positions of the communist left on the part of young elements. And this is where the ICGL and Citizen Gaizka have a role to play. Not to contribute to the reflection and the evolution of these elements towards the communist left, but on the contrary to use their inexperience in order to lead them into dead ends, to sterilise and destroy their militant conviction[33]. If the IGCL and Gaizka claim to be part of the communist left, it is above all to trap these young elements for the sole benefit of their sordid interests. In the case of the IGCL, it is to establish a cordon sanitaire around the ICC in order to satisfy its hatred towards our organisation. In the case of Gaizka, it is a matter of realising his megalomaniacal ambitions as an adventurer. The motivations are not identical, but if, as in 2004, with the episode of Citizen B, there is a convergence between parasites and adventurers, it is obviously because they are, each in their own way, mortal enemies of the communist left, its traditions and principles. In the difficult path towards the full understanding of these traditions and principles, it will be necessary, on the basis of all the experience of the workers’ movement, to fight against the manipulations and traps of these out-and-out enemies of the workers’ movement.

ICC

In December last year the ICC wrote to the Internationalist Communist Tendency, asking them to publish a letter of correction of serious falsifications made about our organisation that appeared on the ICT website in an article entitled ‘On the forty-fifth anniversary of the Founding of the CWO’[1].

The ICC does not request such rectifications from the bourgeois camp. We expect lies coming from this direction and simply denounce any such defamations as the trademark of the enemy class.

If we asked the ICT for a correction of important defamations of the ICC it’s because we consider the ICT, whatever our political differences with this tendency, part of the internationalist proletarian camp, and we therefore assumed a common interest in rectifications of any important deviations from a truthful picture of the history of the Communist Left[2].

We expected that the ICT would either recognise these important inaccuracies and agree to rectify them or would provide evidence to refute our corrections.

Unfortunately though, the ICT replied angrily to our request, refusing to publish any correction, suggesting the request was a ‘provocation’ or a ‘political game’. They declared in their reply that this would be their last word on the subject and the correspondence was now closed.[3]

Nevertheless, despite this rebuff, the ICC wrote again hoping to effect a change of mind, explaining that our request for a rectification was not a provocation or a game or a dispute over the CWO’s interpretation of their history, or an attempt to try and impose our own interpretation of it, but a desire to reestablish important facts. And we noted in our second letter that despite the irate refusal of the ICT to publish our correction their reply did not refute the facts in question and were as we described them. But the ICT was consistent on one thing: they have so far stood by their unilateral ending of the correspondence and three months later have not replied to our second letter.

If we now publish this correspondence with the ICT it is because it was obviously impossible to arrive at a commonly agreed solution with them and because we nevertheless consider the falsifications serious enough to need a public correction. Given the ICT’s refusal to discuss a mutually acceptable public rectification further in private, which we would have preferred, we are obliged to make the facts public ourselves.

Our first letter

ICC to ICT, 8/12/2020

Dear comrades,

We ask you to publish the following corrective on your website:

"We noticed that an article on your website ‘On the 45th Anniversary of the founding of the CWO’ contains some falsehoods that defame our organisation. Three particularly stand out and they need to be corrected:

Firstly, the article claims that the ICC ‘slandered’ Battaglia Comunista concerning its origins in the Internationalist Communist Party founded in 1943:

‘We also discovered that the ICC slanders that they [the ICP] worked ‘inside the partisans’ were not true except in the fact that they had worked wherever the working class was present’.

In a letter from Battaglia Comunista to the ICC reprinted in an article “The ambiguities of the Internationalist Communist Party over the ‘partisans’ in Italy in 1943” in International Review No8 1977 it says:

“The comrades who came from the Communist Left and who constituted the [Internationalist Communist] party were the first both in Italy and outside it to denounce the counter-revolutionary policies of the democratic bloc (including the Stalinist and Trotskyist parties) and were the first and only ones to act inside the workers’ struggles and even in the ranks of the Partisans, calling on the workers to fight against capitalism no matter what kind of regime it was hiding behind.

The comrades who RI calls ‘Resistance fighters’ were revolutionary militants who engaged in the task of penetrating the ranks of the Partisans in order to disseminate the principles and tactics of the revolutionary movement, and who paid for this work with their lives.”

The Internationalist Communist Party, in which Battaglia Comunista originated, acted inside and penetrated the ranks of the Partisans – according to its very own testimony. So the ICC recognition and criticism of this fact is no slander.

Secondly, the “Timeline Summary” at the end of the CWO’s recent article says:

“1980: Third Conference of the International Communist Left (Paris) lead to the abandonment of the conferences by the ICC and other smaller groups”.

To affirm that the ICC abandoned the conferences is a pure falsification of reality, a falsification which is moreover contradicted by what is written earlier in your article:

“On the floor of the meeting [of the Third Conference] the CWO and the Belgian GCI separately announced that they would not attend the next conference. The CWO did not consult with the PCInt [ie, Battaglia Comunista] before doing this but the PCint, as the initiators of the conferences, tried to salvage something from them by proposing a new criterion for the next conference which would satisfy (or so they thought) some elements like the CWO and GCI and it would force the ICC to take a clearer stand. It did not work out like that as the ICC argued that the resolution was only intended to exclude them. They tried to get the PCInt to change the words of the criterion so that it would allow for the confusion on the party question to continue. PCInt stuck by the original formulation and the CWO delegation decided to support them.”

So it was not the ICC but the CWO which wanted to abandon the Conferences. The PCInt, in order to ‘salvage something’ introduced a new criterion (which they refused to alter, but which the CWO supported) for participation in the conference which the ICC could not accept. The debate on the nature of the party between the groups of the Conferences had been artificially closed. The ICC was in fact excluded by the two groups and did not abandon the Conferences.

Thirdly, the article says that:

‘When the ICC started breaking into people’s houses (ostensibly to recover ICC property) including that of JM who left alongside the splitters, Aberdeen threatened them with calling the police’.

The affirmation that the ICC ‘started breaking into people’s houses’ is a malicious lie put out by parasites like the long defunct Aberdeen ‘Communist’ Bulletin Group in order to justify the theft of ICC material resources and to excuse their threats to call the police against the ICC. The insinuation in the article – by the use of the adverb ‘ostensibly’ – that the recuperation of material by the ICC was a pretext for intimidation, was another lie put out by the parasites to excuse their own villainy.

One of the principles by which the communist left tradition has distinguished itself from Stalinism and Trotskyism has been to speak the truth and unmask the lies of the counter revolution, in particular the latter’s falsification of historical facts. This principle of factual accuracy is particularly important in a history of the communist left. The falsifications in the article need to be corrected in order to give a truthful picture of this history for new generations of communist militants.

The article has now been on your website for some time and could have been read by many people, so we ask that the corrective above appears within the next two weeks in a prominent place on your website.

Communist greetings, The ICC.”

Our second letter

Despite refusing to publish this letter the ICT effectively corroborated our corrections, as we pointed out in our second letter:

“…we note that in your letter you actually confirm the validity of the corrections that we asked for:

1. That it wasn’t an ICC slander to say that the PCInt entered into the Partisans at the end of the 2nd World War in Italy.

“PCInt members entered the partisans to win workers away from anti-fascism, Stalinism (and the CLN)”

2) That the ICC did not abandon the Conferences of the Communist Left:

“[The PCI] certainly did not want positive invitations to participate in the conferences to be reduced to only the ICC”

(In other words, there was no likelihood that the ICC would refuse to participate in the conferences.)

3) That the ICC did not commit any ‘break-ins’ during the recuperation of political material in 1981:

‘As to the question of “break-ins” you are right.”

The integrity of the ICC put in question

The facts in question, which we rectify in our first letter and confirm in our second letter, and which the ICT does not contest but refuses to correct publicly, are clearly not trifles but pertain directly to major aspects of the integrity of the positions of the ICC.  The CWO article suggests that the ICC's differences with the conduct of the PCint toward the Partisans in Italy in World War 2, – that helps to explain the different trajectory of the ICC’s antecedents, the Gauche Communiste de France, to that of the PCInt during the 1940s – was built on, a ‘slander’.

Then the article says that we abandoned the International Conferences of the Communist Left of the 1970s which we in fact defended tooth and nail. The negative impact of the failure of these conferences is still being felt today. And finally, the article pretends that the ICC, which has always defended revolutionary organisation and its honest behaviour, used the same kind of thuggery as those who were attempting to destroy it by theft, slanders and threats of the police. In a word, completely contrary to the facts, we come across in the article as slanderers, thugs, and deserters.

This is not a question of polemical exaggeration but of fabrications that defame us.

Obviously, the ICC is obliged to publicly defend itself against such denigrations.

The CWO intended their history for new members and contacts to know the ‘bedrock of our political awareness and perspectives today’. And as such their history was bound to have a polemical side since their past intersects at many points with that of the ICC. But this is all the more reason to keep to the facts in order for new militants to know the actual history of its divergences with other tendencies. The deep conviction of new militants in the politics of the ICT, or any other tendency of the Communist Left, can’t be formed on the basis of denigrations and falsehoods about opposing tendencies. On the contrary the formation of new militants of the Communist Left demands a knowledge of the facts.

Unfortunately, as the fate of the ICC’s request to the ICT shows, the collective determination to defend the truth within the Communist Left as a whole – part of its historical tradition – despite its mutual political disagreements, has been more and more forgotten and the attempt to rectify falsehoods is instead deemed by the ICT to be ‘playing a game’ - i.e, the demand by the ICC for factual honesty is itself considered to be dishonest. And then refused.

This wretched disregard for establishing the facts is however a fairly recent departure from the tradition of the marxist left and the Communist Left in particular.

‘The truth is revolutionary’ - Marx

The revolutionary nature of the truth has a general meaning for marxism in the sense that the sequence of historical changes from one mode of production to another throughout human history can only be understood scientifically, and therefore truthfully, as the result of class struggle. And it has a specific meaning for the struggle of the working class, which needs to unmask the lies the capitalist class uses to justify its rule of pitiless exploitation, economic crisis and destitution, endless war and catastrophe. Since the communist goal of the revolutionary proletariat is not to justify a new mode of exploitation but to abolish classes and create a society of the free association of the producers, the pursuit of the truth is the greatest political and theoretical weapon of the working class and its communist minorities, both against the bourgeoisie and in the reinforcement of its own ranks.

The theoretical, political and organisational development of the marxist tradition has occurred mainly through factually accurate polemics. There are the famous polemics by Marx and Engels against the Left Hegelians, (Holy Family, German Ideology) against Proudhon (Poverty of Philosophy), the Anti-Dühring, the Critique of the Gotha Programme, the polemic by Rosa Luxemburg against Eduard Bernstein (Reform or Revolution) Lenin’s polemic with the Russian populists in Who the friends of the people are and how they fight the social democrats, etc. They are all based on extensive quotations from the writings and the accurate, evidential accounts of the actions of those they are criticising, and were all the more powerful and vehement for that. Conversely the marxist tradition was determined to answer publicly all fabrications of its politics and most particularly expose the slanders and manoeuvres serving the enemy camp, such as Marx’s book- length exposure of the police spy Herr Vogt, or the report of the First International into the Bakunin conspiracy.

These principles of accuracy and honesty began to weaken in the marxist camp with the opportunist degeneration of the 2nd International. After the collapse of the latter in 1914 and the support of the main Social Democratic Parties for the imperialist war and active hatred for the revolutionary wave that emerged in 1917, the slanders against the marxist international left intensified and were the prelude to the attempt to exterminate its militants. The vilification of Rosa Luxemburg by the Social Democratic press, for example, created the climate for her assassination in 1919. Lenin and Trotsky narrowly escaped the same fate in the summer of 1917 after being slandered as German agents by the Mensheviks and others.

The long Stalinist counter-revolution that followed the end of the revolutionary wave from 1917-23 intensified this attack against the principles and honour of the revolutionary vanguard in the name of marxism and the working class –  a hypocrisy unprecedented in history. Stalinist attacks, dressed up as ‘marxist polemics’, aimed at the destruction of those that maintained the internationalist core of the marxist programme in the face of the degeneration of the October Revolution and the Communist International - that is, the opposition aroundTrotsky but above all the Communist Lefts of Germany and Italy. Falsifications of history, lies and denigrations prepared the ground for expulsions, imprisonment, torture, show trials and murder.

Trotsky attempted to uphold the true marxist tradition with the Dewey Commission in 1936 that exposed the frame-ups of the Moscow Trials with systematic and testimonial evidence.

But Trotskyism joined the bourgeois camp during the Second World War by abandoning internationalism, and in the process its methods became more akin to those of the Stalinist and Social Democratic counter-revolution. Lying and slandering became normal behaviour within the left and extreme left of the bourgeois counter-revolution. Only the Communist Left remained on the side of the proletariat and the defence of the truth during the imperialist butchery 1939 - 45. And today the Communist Left still has to contend with and sharply distinguish itself from the ignominious methods of the counter revolutionary left.

In the resurgence of the Communist Left tradition after 1968, despite the weight of sectarianism amongst the different groups and the difficulty of new militants breaking from the mores of leftism, the need for a common effort to establish the truth was mutually recognised by the different groups. As the ICC letter to the CWO above shows, the ICC published in 1977 in its International Review the request of Battaglia Comunista (that is the PCint/ICT) for a correction of its article on the partisans and the origins of the PCint. And at this time the request of the PCInt referred to this revolutionary principle of historical accuracy, an episode which we recall in our second letter to the ICT:

“In 1976, comrade Onorato Damen, in the name of the Executive of the Partito Comunista Internazionalista, addressed a letter to our section in France asking it to rectify certain statements contained in a polemic with the Bordigist PCI published in No. 29 of our newspaper Révolution Internationale. He protested, in particular, against what we had written about the Partito's policy on the partisan issue. And he concluded his letter with the following: "We want all revolutionaries to know how to carry out a serious critical examination of positions on the main political problems of the working class today, documented with the seriousness that is proper to revolutionaries, when it is a question of returning (and this is something that is always necessary) to the errors of the past”. We published his entire letter in the International Review No. 8, with, of course, our own reply.

Our question to you is: do you think that comrade Damen and the Executive of the PCInt had engaged in "provocation", in "political games" by asking us to publish a correction?

Of course, there can be a dispute over the reality of the facts. In International Review 87 for example, we published a letter from the CWO (written as "provocation" and for "political games" ?) that claimed there were falsehoods in an earlier polemic of the ICC. We argued that they were in fact true.

More recently in the last few decades, though this revolutionary tradition recalled by Onorato Damen has been forgotten, partly as a result of the failure of the Conferences of the Communist Left referred to earlier, and the resulting rise, despite the best efforts of the ICC, of a destructive ‘each against all' mentality, where the principle of honesty within the Communist Left was more and more forgotten. The principle of mutual discussion and common action established by Marx during the Ist International as the ethos of all the different tendencies within the proletarian movement was increasingly ignored. Connected to this failure, and exacerbating it, was the proliferation of groups - often no more than disaffected bloggers - who verbally claimed to be part of the Communist Left but whose function in reality proved to be to denigrate and slander this organised tradition of left communism. However the latter as a whole has so far failed to close ranks against this malignant phenomena which further weakens the principle of honesty within the Communist Left.[4]

The ‘Circulo’ Affair

The infection from the dishonest practice of leftism, symptoms of which appear in the falsifications in CWO’s latest article on its history, is reminiscent of an earlier episode of a similar kind, the infamous scandal of the ‘Circulo Affair’ when the ICT (then called the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party) re-published on its website, without any criticism, a litany of slanders against the ICC that originated from an imaginary group in Latin America called the ‘Circulo de Comunistas Internacionalistas’.

 In the early 2000s the ICC started discussions with a group in Argentina about the positions and organisational principles of the Communist Left and about the analysis of the piqueteros movement in that country in December 2001. As a consequence this group, the Nucleo Comunista Internazionalista, launched an international appeal to the groups of the Communist Left for organised discussion, to which, unfortunately, only the ICC responded positively. The NCI also made a statement condemning the actions of a parasitic group against the ICC.[5]

However, the difficulties faced by new groups coming to the Communist Left was revealed by a bizarre and destructive episode.

An ambitious individual, within the NCI, (who came to be known as Citizen B) was displaying a decidedly adventurist behaviour within the group with the air of a guru, and peremptorily demanded immediate membership of the ICC. When the conditions of this demand were rejected he took revenge by pretending that the NCI had transformed itself into an imaginary political group, the ‘Circulo de Comunistas Internacionalistas’ ! This outrageous usurpation took place entirely without the knowledge of the other members of the NCI.

On behalf of this phantom group, Citizen B then began to produce statements on the internet and on his own account personally reversing the previous position of the NCI against parasitism and instead taking up the very attacks of the latter against the ICC.

The first of these statements, which was physically distributed at an IBRP public meeting in Paris by the parasitic group the IGCL[6] declared:

“It is the one-sided voice of the ICC which, adopting the harmful lessons of Stalinism in 1938 to liquidate the Bolshevik old guard, is today trying to do the same: politically liquidate revolutionary comrades for the simple fact of disagreeing with its political line.”

Not only Stalin but Goebbels:

“It is necessary to put a stop to the slander and to Goebbels' policy of lying and lying again and again so that there is always something left of it”.

All this slanderous rubbish against the ICC from the statement of the bogus ‘Circulo’, unsupported by a single shred of evidence, was published without comment, and without any attempt to verify it, in several languages, on the ICT website. The non-existent ‘Circulo’ was even welcomed as a genuine addition to the ranks of revolutionaries.

The ICC, alarmed that such calumnies were published on a Communist Left website against another tendency of the Communist Left, immediately wrote to the ICT giving comprehensive evidence that the ‘Circulo’ was the grotesque invention of an adventurer and demanded that our statement of rectification of its slanderous statement be published by the ICT. It took three letters from the ICC and three weeks before this was finally done. But the matter didn’t end there.

The ICC contacted the other members of the NCI to corroborate the facts of the situation and found that the comrades were dumbfounded to learn of the usurpation and slanders of Citizen B and his ‘Circulo’ and decided to write a statement themselves denouncing the imposture and supporting the facts as presented by the ICC.[7]

Learning of this contact Citizen B then doubled down on his slanders from his first statement and produced a second tirade.

“…these telephone calls were not innocent. They had the devious intention of destroying our small nucleus, or its individual activists, by provoking mutual mistrust and sowing the seeds of division in the ranks of our small group.

…the current policy of the ICC provokes doubts and an internal atmosphere of mutual distrust. It uses the Stalinist tactic of ‘scorched earth,’ that is, not only the destruction of our small and modest group, but also the active opposition to any attempt at revolutionary regroupment which the ICC does not lead, through its sectarian and opportunistic policies. And for this, it does not hesitate to use a whole series of disgusting tricks with the central objective of demoralizing its opponents and, in this way, eliminating a ‘potential enemy’”.

Citizen B got so caught up in his manoeuvres and slanders that he found himself accusing the ICC of destroying a group that he himself had tried to replace with a completely fictitious group of his own imagination! But when this second slanderous declaration of the ‘Circulo’ appeared on the ICT website, the ICT refused to publish the statement of the NCI which completely exposed at first hand the fraud of the ‘Circulo’ and would have independently clarified and verified the whole episode. Nor did the ICT, once the facts had become obvious, and the ‘Circulo’ and Citizen B disappeared without trace, publish any retraction or explanation why the slanders against the ICC had appeared on their website or any recognition of the damage this had done to the reputation not only of the ICC but the whole Communist Left. The lying statement of the Circulo still remained for some weeks on the ICT website before it was quietly removed as though nothing had happened.

The ICC subsequently wrote an open letter to the militants of the ICT on the extreme gravity of facilitating the infiltration of the rotten methods of leftism into the behaviour of the Communist Left. We promised in this open letter that any further actions of the same type as the Circulo scandal would be exposed, particularly if the ICT again tried to extricate itself from the scandal by giving our letters the ‘silent treatment’ [8]. The present article is a fulfilment of that promise.

Instead of drawing the lessons of the experience and recognising the attacks of the ‘Circulo’ for what they were, and their own grave error of republishing them, the ICT responded at the time by adding insult to the injury on the ICC. Instead of denouncing the fraud of the ‘Circulo’ they denounced the ICC as a paranoid organisation in the process of disintegration, and posed instead as a victim of the ‘vulgar and violent’ attacks of the ICC.

The crime of the ‘Circulo’ fiasco, therefore, according to this scenario, was not that the ICT had facilitated a malicious attack on another group of the Communist Left but the fact that the ICC had reacted to this outrage and exposed it for the fraud it was.

The insolence didn’t end there. Having played a significant role in creating the ‘Circulo’ mess the ICT pretended that it was now much too busy to help clean it up and answer the critiques of the ICC. It implied that its important work toward the class struggle meant that it didn’t have time for the disputes of small groups, as though the attempt to drag a group of the Communist Left through the mud was of minor concern. 

……………….

If we recount the history of the ‘Circulo’ in this article it is to show the lessons haven’t been learnt and the same damaging mistakes are still being made. In a similar way to the episode of the ‘Circulo' the recent defamatory fabrications about the ICC contained in the article on the CWO’s history remain on their website. Not only has the ICT refused the request to publish the ICC rebuttal but it has refused to further discuss the question with the ICC, even though privately they do not contest the facts in question.

In its letter the ICT in effect responds to our request for the establishment of the facts with similar insults to those of the response of the ICT to us in 2004. According to them the problem is not the falsifications in the article but the ICC causing trouble by demanding that they be corrected publicly. The CWO pretends that the ICC is making a political game to discredit them. And they make believe they are much too busy anyway to pursue this question further; goodbye.

In reality the ‘political game’ is in this attempt to hide the falsifications in the article by further compounding them. The main discredit is here. The public rectification of the original falsifications in fact would have been to the credit of the CWO.

The Communist Left: revolutionary positions and revolutionary behaviour

The implication of the responses of the ICT to our critique is that the ICC is not concerning itself with the class struggle but only with the disputes between revolutionary groups. A glance at the work of the ICC on this site over the past 45 years will immediately reveal that this isn’t true.

It is no use pretending, in order to hide failures in this regard, that the question of the honest comportment of revolutionary organisations amongst themselves is secondary or irrelevant to the general political goals, analyses and intervention of the Communist Left. The organisational honesty of the latter in the working class is indispensable to its ultimate success. Conversely adopting, or excusing, behaviour that is more akin to leftism can only risk demoralising those who are breaking with the counter-revolutionary left to come to internationalist positions.

If the Citizen B and his ‘Circulo’ failed to make the NCI disappear immediately in 2004 as he wanted, the NCI nevertheless did not survive this whole fraudulent episode which, as we have explained, was more typical of the leftist milieu they had just escaped from than the milieu of the Communist Left which they believed they had joined. The experience had a long-term demoralising effect on them.

Today, without a revolutionary behaviour by groups of the communist left, there is a real danger of destroying the potential for new militants coming to their class positions.

Without a revolutionary behaviour, new revolutionary militants will find it difficult to distinguish not only the Communist Left from all strands of leftism but the real from the fake Communist Left. The numerous micro-groups, adventurers, individuals with a grudge, who today pretend to be part of the Communist Left tradition while devoting themselves to discrediting it, like the infamous ‘Circulo’, are proof that the internationalist platform is more than a document but a way of life, of organisational integrity.

However, upholding a common standard of behaviour amongst its different groups would strengthen the political presence of the Left Communist milieu within the working class as a whole.

The political programme of the Communist Left, that is the elaboration in the working class of the revolutionary truth of  the proletarian struggle, depends on an organisational behaviour that is consistent with these political ideals. The combat for the internationalist unity of the proletariat against the lies of imperialism and all its apologists for example, cannot be waged with the same morals as the latter and their contempt for the truth.

This is not an appeal to an eternal moral ideal but the recognition that the ends and means of the revolutionary organisation, the goal and the movement, are inseparable and constantly interrelate.

The ICC, in bringing to light the falsifications of the article on the CWO’s history is not playing a ‘game’. It is in earnest and will continue to make the question of revolutionary honesty and accuracy a central aspect of its communist intervention.

“Participating in the combat of the Communist Left does not only mean defending its political positions. It also means denouncing political behaviour such as rumours, lies, slander and blackmail, all of which are diametrically opposed to the proletariat’s struggle for its emancipation.” [9]

ICC (14/04/2021)

We republish here a letter we addressed to the IBRP in December 2004 following the appearance on its website of a declaration emanating from a mysterious “Circle of Internationalist Communists”, containing extremely grave accusations against the ICC. Despite the protests of our organisation, which it did not take into account, the IBRP did not make any attempt to verify the reality of this group or the content of the accusations in question.

Paris, 7th December 2004

Comrades,

Since 2nd December we have noted that some discreet changes have been made to the IBRP's web site. One at a time, the English version and then the Spanish version of the "Declaration of the Circle of Internationalist Communists (Argentina): against the nauseating method of the ICC" dated 12th October, that were present on the site for more than one and a half months, have disappeared (curiously enough, the French version of this declaration is still present at the time of sending this letter:[1] does the IBRP have a different policy according to the specific country and language?[2] In addition, the introduction to the "Position statement of the Circle of Internationalist Communists on the events at Caleta Olivia" present on the Italian pages of your site, has been reduced by a quarter because the following passage has been eliminated: "The International Communist Nucleus of Argentina has recently broken with the International Communist Current, which we have considered for a long time now to be a useless political residue, that is unquestionably unfit to contribute to the formation of the international party. The Argentinian organisation has also changed its name to 'Circle of Internationalist Communists." (“Recentemente il Nucleo Comunista Internazionalista di Argentina ha rotto con la Corrente Comunista Internazionale, che da tempo indichiamo come ormai inutile sopravvivenza di una vecchia politica sicuramente non adeguata a contribuire alla formazione del Partito internazionale. L'organizzazione argentina ha anche cambiato nome assumendo quello di Circolo di Comunisti Internazionalisti.”).

These changes show that the IBRP has (perhaps) begun to realise that it's stirred up a hornet's nest by taking as gospel what the so-called "Circle" has recounted in its various "declarations", in particular as regards the behaviour of the ICC, and by publishing them in an extremely imprudent way. In other words, the IBRP is no longer able to hide from itself, and above all, hide from the readers of its website, what the ICC has asserted for nearly two months: that the accusations levelled against our organisation are pure lies, invented by a shady element, an unscrupulous impostor who also a compulsive liar. However, the discreet and gradual removal of these "declarations" does not erase or correct in any way, the serious political error, let alone the indefensible behaviour, of your organisation. Quite the contrary.

That is why this letter is intended as a solemn appeal to the militants of the IBRP about the behaviour of their organisation, which has been absolutely scandalous and incompatible with the bases of proletarian conduct.

Let us briefly recall the facts:

Towards mid-October the IBRP published in several languages on its web site the famous "Declaration against the nauseating methods of the ICC" of the so-called “Circulo de Comunistas Internacionalistas”. The latter presented itself as the successor of the “Nucleo Comunista Internacional”, with which the ICC has been discussing for several months (including two meetings in Argentina between the NCI and ICC delegations).

What was the substance of this "Declaration"? It contained a series of very serious accusations against our organisation:

- the ICC uses "practices which don't belong to the legacy of the Communist Left, but rather to the very method of the bourgeois left and of Stalinism" with "the underhand intention to destroy our small nucleus [that is, the “Circulo”, the new name given to the NCI], or its militants in an individual way by provoking mutual distrust and by sowing the germs of division in the ranks of our small group";

- the ICC "engaged itself in a destructive dynamic not only against those who dare to defy the ‘unchanging law and theories’ of the gurus of this current but also against those who try to think by themselves and do say NO to the ICC blackmails";

- the ICC uses "the Stalinist tactic of the scorched earth policy, it means not only the destruction of our small and modest group, but also the active opposition to any attempt towards revolutionary regroupment which the ICC wouldn't be leading for its sectarian and opportunist orientations. And for that, it doesn't hesitate to utilize a whole series of repugnant ruses whose central aim is to demoralize its opponents and, thus, to be able to eliminate a 'potential enemy'";

- "lacking agreement with its positions which have nothing to do with the revolutionary tradition, the ICC tries to sabotage any attempt of revolutionary regroupment as it has been the case with the public meeting [of the IBRP] of October 2nd, 2004 in Paris (France) and (…) it aims today at destroying our small group of Argentina"

Any reader who has any experience at all relating to the Communist Left (or those who claim continuity with it) can recognise here the same kind of slander that the IFICC has been using against our organisation for several years. But the analogy doesn't end there. It is also to be found in the aplomb with which the grossest lies are spouted:

"At their unanimous request, the comrades that the ICC has called by phone in order to sow the germs of distrust and of destruction of our small group, propose to the whole members of the Circle of Internationalist Communists the total rejection of the political method of the ICC that they consider as typically Stalinist and whose central aim, aim of the present ICC leadership, is to avoid the revolutionary regroupment for which various currents and groups do struggle for ; they propose to denounce these intrigues to the whole currents who declare to be within the continuity of the Communist Left."

The reality is very different, as we have already said in other texts and as is stated in the NCI declaration of 27th October: we did in fact phone a comrade of the NCI but it wasn't at all with the intention of "destroying [the NCI] or its militants in an individual way".

The aim of our first phone call was to try and understand how the "Circle of Internationalist Communists" was formed. Also to ascertain why comrades who had shown a very fraternal attitude to our delegation a few weeks earlier and who hadn't expressed any disagreement with the ICC (especially in relation to the behaviour of the IFICC), should, on 2nd October, draft a "Declaration" that was particularly hostile to our organisation and turn their backs on everything they'd defended up until that moment. At the time we had doubts as to whether all of the comrades of the NCI were involved in this "Declaration" (in spite of what it says about the "unanimity" of the members of the NCI in favour of this trajectory). The telephone discussions with the comrades of the NCI made it possible for us to inform them of what was going on: that a "Circulo" had appeared that presented itself as the continuation of the NCI and which was attacking the ICC. We were also able to ascertain that these comrades had no idea of the new policy being carried out by citizen B (the only one with access to Internet) in their name. When we asked the comrades, whom we contacted first, if they wanted us to call again, they replied in the affirmative. They insisted that the calls be as frequent as possible and they suggested that we phone when they were with the other comrades, so that we could talk to them as well. So in fact there is "a unanimous request on the part of the comrades that the ICC call them": they by no means "propose to the whole members of the Circle of Internationalist Communists the total rejection of the political method of the ICC", instead they warmly approved it. And the method that "they consider typically Stalinist" is that of Señor B.

At the beginning of his 12th October declaration, this intriguing character warns us that what he states about the "methods of the ICC" may "seem like a lie". In fact, the "declarations" of Señor B may indeed "seem like a lie". There's a good reason for that: they really are lies, utter lies. Needless to say, the IFICC immediately believed this lie which looked like a lie. Anything that can enable them to fling mud at our organisation is all grist to their mill and they couldn't care less if the accusation "can seem like a lie". After all, lying is second nature to them, it's their trade mark (in addition to blackmail, theft and grassing). But what is incredible, by contrast, is that an organisation of the Communist Left, the IBRP, has followed in the footsteps of the IFICC by publishing on its web site the infamous flights of fancy of Señor B without any critical comment, which means giving them total support.

The IBRP is very fond of giving lessons to others, for example by giving its own interpretation of the ICC's crisis, taking the lies of the IFICC for gospel truth without even making the effort to examine seriously the analyses made by the ICC itself (see, for example, "Elements of reflection on the crises of the ICC" on the IBRP web site[3]). On the other hand it doesn't like to receive suggestions on its own behaviour: "we reject the ridiculous warnings (of the ICC)", "We don't have to account to the ICC or anyone else for our political actions and the ICC's pretensions to represent the so-called traditions of the Communist Left is simply pathetic" (see “Reply to the stupid accusations of an organisation in the process of disintegration”, on the web site of the IBRP[4]). Nevertheless, allow us to say how we would have behaved if we had received a declaration such as that of the "Circulo" raising serious doubts about the IBRP.

The first thing that we would have done, would have been to contact the IBRP and ask it what was its response to such accusations. We would also have checked the credibility and the honesty of the author of such accusations. If it had been demonstrated that the accusations were untrue, we would immediately have denounced this behaviour and have offered our solidarity to the IBRP. If the accusation were true, and we thought it necessary to make this known in our press, we would have asked the IBRP for a position statement in order to publish it alongside the document accusing them.

Maybe you think that these are empty words and that in fact we would have done no such thing. But our readers at any rate know that this is how the ICC reacts and that we already did so when LA Workers' Voice mounted a campaign denigrating the IBRP (see Internationalism n°122).

How did the IBRP react when it received the "Declaration of the 'Circulo'"? Not only was it content to support it by publishing it in several languages on its site without making the least attempt to verify its authenticity, but it also refused for more than a dozen days to publish the denial that we asked it several times to publish alongside the declaration of the "Circulo" (see our letters of 22nd, 26th and 30th October).

Publishing our denial was the least that the IBRP could have done (and something that any bourgeois newspaper is generally willing to do) but it took three letters before it was published; three letters and a number of incidents which began to make it clear that the "declaration" was lies. The inclusion of our denial was the minimum, but that doesn't mean that it would have been sufficient because, by failing to take a position itself on the declaration of the "Circulo", the IBRP continued to support its lies. That's why, in our letters of 17th and 21st November, we asked you "to publish immediately (that is, on receipt of this letter) on your web site the Declaration of the NCI of 27th October, which is published on our own site in all relevant languages". This declaration isn't an emanation of the ICC, which you may suppose capable of saying anything, but comes from the principal witnesses to the falsifications and slanderous lies of Señor B. To this day, you still haven't published this declaration of the NCI (which was sent to you by post from Buenos Aires), which you know quite well is true as you've gradually and discreetly withdrawn the declaration of the "Circulo" from your site.

For several weeks you've "played dead" when the ICC asked that the truth be established. Now that it is gradually coming out (not thanks to you), you choose the most hypocritical way possible in order to avoid getting sullied: you withdraw a document that has been slinging a load of mud at our organisation for nearly two months with the same silence with which you circulated it in the first place.

Comrades, are you aware of the seriousness of your behaviour? Are you aware that this attitude is unworthy of a group that lays claim to the tradition of the Communist Left but belongs rather to the methods of degenerated Trotskyism, if not to Stalinism? Are you aware that you are doing the same thing as Señor B. (whose recent negotiations with the site "Argentina Roja" demonstrate that he has returned to his old Stalinist loves), who spends his time making documents appear and disappear on his web site in order to try and hide his underhand manoeuvres?

In any case, as you've placed your means of communication at the service of slander against the ICC, it isn't enough to retract this slander discreetly as if nothing has happened. You have committed a very serious political error and now you must rectify it. The only way worthy of a proletarian organisation is to announce on your web site that the document that was to be found there for almost two months is a pack of lies and to denounce Señor B's intrigues.

We understand that discovering the truth must have been a bitter disappointment for you: the NCI hasn't broken with the ICC and the "Circulo", in which you had the greatest hopes (see your article in the October issue of Battaglia Comunista" In Argentina too something is on the move"), is no more than an invention of Señor B’s imagination. Nevertheless, this is no reason to avoid taking a position on the methods of this impostor. It is also a matter of basic solidarity with the militants of the NCI, who were the main victims of the infamous manipulations of this element who usurped their name.

Likewise, we understand that it would be painful for you to recognise publicly that once again (after your communiqué of 9th September 2003 on the "Radical Communists of the Ukraine") you have been the victims of a fraudulent invention. When this mishap befell you, the ICC made no comment. Rather than twist the knife in the wound, we thought that it was up to you, as a "responsible leading force" (in your own words), to draw the lessons of this experience. However, it did not surprise us given the set-backs that you have experienced in the past (in particular with the SUCM and LAWV), and this despite our warnings that you "reject as ridiculous". But today the problem is much more serious than suffering the ridicule of being taken for a ride. Behind the touching ingenuousness with which you believed the word of a swindler and a compulsive liar, there was also duplicity in the fact that you gave space on your site for this individual's infamy. This behaviour is absolutely unworthy of an organisation that lays claim to the heritage of the Communist Left.

The IBRP claims that the ICC has "forfeited any capacity/possibility to contribute positively to the indispensable process towards the formation of the international communist party" ("avendo cioè perso ogni capacità/possibilità di contribuire positivamente al processo di formazione dell'indispensabile partito comunista internazionale", “In Argentina too something is on the move”, Battaglia Comunista of October 2004). Unlike the IBRP (and the various denominations of the Bordigist current), the ICC has never thought it was the only organisation able to contribute positively to the formation of the future world revolutionary party, even if it judges that its own contribution will be the most decisive, of course. This is why, since its appearance in 1964 (even before the actual founding of the ICC), our current took up the same orientation as that of the Gauche Communiste de France and has always defended the need for fraternal debate and co-operation (obviously on the basis of clarity) between the forces of the Communist Left. Even before 1977, when Battaglia Comunista made the proposal to organise international conferences of the groups of the Communist Left, we had already proposed that it do so several times, but in vain. This is why we were enthusiastic about Battaglia's initiative and committed ourselves seriously and determinedly to it. That is also why we deplored and condemned the decision of Battaglia and the CWO to put an end to this attempt at the end of the 3rd Conference in 1980.

In fact, our opinion is that certain of the IBRP's positions are confused, erroneous or incoherent and that they can create or maintain confusions within the class. This is why we publish polemics criticising these positions regularly in our press. However, we think that the IBRP is a proletarian organisation because of its fundamental principles and that it makes a positive contribution within the working class against bourgeois mystifications (in particular when it defends internationalism against imperialist war). This is why up to now we have always thought that it was in the interests of the working class to preserve an organisation like the IBRP. You do not have the same analysis as regards our own organisation as, having stated in your meeting with the IFICC in March 2002 that "if we come to the conclusion that the ICC has become 'invalid' as an organisation, our aim would be to do all that is possible to push for its disappearance" (IFICC Bulletin n°9), you have now in fact done all that is possible to attain this end.

The fact that in your opinion the ICC constitutes an obstacle to the development of consciousness in the working class, and that it would be better for the struggle if the ICC disappeared, doesn't pose problems for us. After all, it's the position that the various denominations of the Bordigist current have always defended. In the same way, it isn't a problem in our view that you try to achieve this aim. The question is: what means do you use? The bourgeoisie too has an interest in seeing the ICC disappear, as it has an interest in the disappearance of the other groups of the Communist Left. This is why it has unleashed disgusting campaigns against the Communist Left by identifying it with the "revisionist" current, which is linked to the far right.[5] For the ruling class ANY means are acceptable, including, and especially making use of lies and slander. But this isn't true for an organisation that claims to fight for the proletarian revolution. Just like the other revolutionary organisations of the workers' movement which have gone before it, the Communist Left isn't marked out only by its programmatic positions, such as internationalism. In its fight against the degeneration of the Communist International and against the opportunist deviation of Trotskyism, which led the latter into the bourgeois camp, the Communist Left has always defended a method based on clarity, and therefore on the truth, in particular against all the falsifications that Stalinism disseminated. Marx said "the truth is revolutionary". In other words lies, and slander in particular, aren't weapons of the proletariat but of the enemy class. So an organisation which uses them in its combat, whatever the validity of the positions inscribed in its programme, takes the path towards betrayal or at the least becomes a decisive obstacle to the development of consciousness in the class. In this case it is in fact preferable, from the point of view of the interests of the proletariat, that such an organisation disappear, much more than it would be because of errors in its programme.

Comrades,

We tell you frankly: if the IBRP persists in its policy of using lies, slander and, worse still, of "allowing" these to be used and abetting them by remaining silent when faced with the intrigues of grouplets, such as the "Circulo" and the IFICC, of which they are the trade mark and raison d'être, then it will have demonstrated that it too has become an obstacle to the development of consciousness in the proletariat. It will have become an obstacle, not so much because of the damage that it can do to our organisation (recent events have shown that we are able to defend ourselves, even if you think that "the ICC is in the process of disintegration"), but because of the damage and the dishonour that this kind of behaviour can inflict on the memory of the Italian Communist Left and thus on its invaluable contribution. In fact, in this case it would be preferable if the IBRP disappeared and "our aim would be to do all that is possible to push for its disappearance" as you so excellently put it. It is of course clear that to attain this end, we would use only weapons belonging to the working class and it goes without saying that we would never permit the use of lies or slander.

One last point:

The "Circulo's" declaration of 12th October, as well as the IFICC article in its Bulletin n°28, refers to our so-called "attempts to sabotage" your public meeting in Paris on the 2nd October. You are not yourselves strangers to this kind of accusation, as in the first version of your position statement on this public meeting which was published only in Italian (and not in French - yet another mystery of the IBRP!) you say: "the revolutionary vanguard, even where it is reduced in number, hampered in its emergence by the stink produced by an organisation in the process of disintegration, such as the ICC in Paris. This is why the IBRP will continue its work in Paris as well, taking all necessary measures to prevent and avoid sabotage, no matter where it may come from" (“le avanguardie rivoluzionarie anche laddove scarseggiano, ostacolate nel loro emergere dai miasmi prodotti da una organizzazione in via di disfacimento, come la CCI a Parigi. E' per questo che il BIPR continuerà il suo lavoro anche su Parigi, prendendo tutte le misure necessarie a prevenire ed evitare sabotaggi, da qualunque parte essi vengano”). In the end, you withdrew the final part of this passage (which shows that you weren't very sure of yourselves) and in particular the reference to our "sabotage". Nevertheless, a number of visitors to your site and the contacts to whom you send your communications by e-mail, have been informed of these accusations. Likewise, the IFICC and the "Circulo" continue to publish them on their own site and you make no attempt to deny them.

Comrades, if you think that we tried to sabotage your public meeting in Paris, say so frankly and explain why. This would make it possible to discuss the point in an argued way instead of being confronted with an underhand rumour.

To conclude. This letter is focused on one question alone, the publication on your web site of an infamous "Declaration" slandering the ICC. However, the use of lies and slander (in an active or passive way) as a way of combating the ICC doesn't end there. We remind you that we've written you two letters, in which, among other things, we asked you to take a position on a question of the greatest importance (if ever there was one) "Do you believe that, as the IFICC goes on repeating, the ICC is under the control of agents of the capitalist state (belonging to the police or a sect of free-masonry)?"

We also remind you that up to now, although you justify the IFICC's theft of our list of subscribers, you haven't explained how come these subscribers received an invitation to your public meeting by post although they hadn't given you their addresses. The only "explanation" that we've received was the one given at your public meeting in Paris on 2nd October by a member of the presidium, who said: "we didn't know that these invitations had been sent and we don't agree with it".

· If the IBRP didn't send these invitations, who did send them?

· Why don't you approve of this initiative if you approve of the theft of our list of subscribers?

Even if you don't want to explain to the ICC, we ask you at least to have the decency to give an explanation to our subscribers, who aren't necessarily ICC sympathisers.

We have raised here a number of questions that are still open in our view and we will place them on the table whenever necessary if you decide to use your usual policy of silence in response to our letters.

Communist greetings,

The ICC

[1] Note to the English version: as we publish this translation on our web site (31/12/2004), we notice that – although the link to the French version of the "Declaration" remains active – the document itself has disappeared : incompetence, or another example of the IBRP’s "discretion"?

[2] This question concerns not only the date of the withdrawal of the 12th October "Declaration" but also its insertion onto the IBRP's site. In fact, this declaration has never appeared in Italian although two other texts of the Circulo have appeared in this language; "Presa di posizione del Circolo di Comunisti Internazionalisti sui fatti di Caleta Olivia" ("Position statement of the Circle of International Communists on the events of Caleta Olivis" and "Prospettive della classe operaia in Argentina e nei paesi periferici" ("Perspective of the proletariat in Argentina and the peripheral countries"). Paradoxically, these haven't been published in other languages by the IBRP. A little difficult to understand. We hope at least that the militants of the IBRP know the reasons for these surprising decisions.

[3] Note to the English translation: this text appeared in Internationalist Communist n°21, which has never been published on the IBRP web site.

[4] Note to the English translation: this text has appeared in French on the web site, but not apparently in English.

[5] Note to the English translation: Various fraudulent campaigns in the bourgeois press, especially in France and Italy, have tried to identify the internationalist denunciation of the “great anti-fascist war” by the Communist Left, with the theses of those “revisionist” historians who deny or minimise the existence of the Nazi concentration camps.

The ICC adopted the “Theses on Decomposition [12]” (International Reviews nos. 62 and 107) in May 1990, some months after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc which had preceded the collapse of the Soviet Union. The trap set by the United States for Saddam Hussein, which led him to invade Kuwait at the beginning of August 1990, and the subsequent concentration of American forces in Saudi Arabia, were a first consequence of the disappearance of the Eastern bloc, with the attempt by the American power to close the ranks of the Atlantic Alliance threatened with disintegration because of the disappearance of its Eastern adversary. It was in the aftermath of these events, which prepared the military offensive against Iraq by the main western countries under the leadership of the United States, that the ICC discussed and adopted an orientation text on “Militarism and Decomposition [146]” in October 1990 (International Review no. 64) which complements the Theses on Decomposition.

At its 22nd International Congress in 2017, the ICC adopted an update of the Theses on Decomposition “Report on decomposition today [147]”, International Review no. 164, which basically confirmed the text adopted 27 years earlier. Today the war in Ukraine requires us to produce a complementary document on the question of militarism, similar to that of October 1990 of which it constitutes an update. Such a step is all the more necessary given the error that we made in not foreseeing the outbreak of this war which resulted from forgetting the framework of analysis that the ICC had given itself for several decades on the question of war in the period of decadence.

 

1) Point 1 of the text “Militarism and Decomposition” of 1990 reminds us of the living character of the marxist method and the necessity to constantly confront the analyses that we have been able to make in the past with the new realities that present themselves to us; either by criticising them, confirming them, or modifying them to make them more precise. It's not necessary to return to this in the present text. On the other hand, faced with erroneous interpretations of the present war in Ukraine made by certain bourgeois “experts”, but also by most of the groups of the proletarian political milieu, it is useful to return to the foundations of the marxist method regarding the question of war and, more generally, historical materialism.

At the base of this there is the following idea: “In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite, necessary relations, which are independent of their will, namely, relations of production corresponding to a determinate stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which there correspond definite forms of social consciousness” (Marx, “Preface to a contribution to the critique of political economy”, 1859). This pre-eminence of the material economic base over other aspects of the life of society has often been the object of a mechanical and reductionist interpretation. It’s a fact that Engels notes and criticises in a letter to Joseph Bloch in September 1890 (and in many other texts) that: “According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is, in the final instance, the production and reproduction of real life. Neither Marx nor I have ever asserted more than this. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic factor is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, absurd phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure — political forms of the class struggle and its results, such as constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc., juridical forms, and especially the reflections of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants, political, legal, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas — also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases determine their form in particular. There is an interaction of all these elements in which, amid all the endless host of accidents (…) the economic movement is finally bound to assert itself”.

Clearly, we cannot ask the “experts” of the bourgeoisie to adopt the marxist method. On the other hand, it is sad to note that many organisations that explicitly claim to be marxist and effectively defend this method with regard to the fundamental principles of the workers’ movement, in particular proletarian internationalism, do not follow Engel's vision of the causes of war, but rather the one he criticises. Thus, regarding the Gulf War of 1990-91, we were able to read the following: “The United States has brazenly defined ‘American national interest’ that led it to act as that of: guaranteeing the stable supply of oil produced in the Gulf at a reasonable price: the same interest which made it support Iraq against Iran, now leads it to support Saudi Arabia and the petro-monarchs against Iraq” (leaflet by the Parti Communiste Internationale – Le Proletaire). Or again: “In fact, the crisis in the Gulf is really a crisis of oil and its control. Without cheap petrol, profits will fall. The profits of western capital are threatened and it’s for this reason, and no other, that the United States is preparing a blood-bath in the Middle East...” (leaflet of the Communist Workers Organisation, section in Britain of the International Communist Tendency). An analysis made by Battaglia Comunista, the section of the ICT in Italy, states: “Oil, present directly or indirectly in almost all of the productive cycles, has a decisive weight in the process of the formation of monopoly rents and, consequently, the control of its price is of vital importance (...). With an economy clearly showing signs of a recession, a public debt of staggering dimensions, a productive apparatus mired in low productivity faced with European and Japanese competition, the United States cannot in the least allow itself to lose control of these fundamental variables of the whole world economy: the price of oil”. What has happened in the 30 years since in the Middle East contradicts such an analysis. The different adventures of the United States in this region (like the 2003 war initiated by the Bush Junior Administration) have had an incomparably higher economic cost for the American bourgeoisie than anything relating to the control of oil prices (if indeed it was able to exercise any control due to these wars).

Today, the war in Ukraine has no direct economic objectives; neither for Russia which unleashed hostilities on February 24, 2022, nor for the United States which, for more than two decades, has taken advantage of Russia's weakening following the collapse of its empire in 1989 in order to push the expansion of NATO right up to the borders of that country. If Russia succeeds in establishing control over new areas of Ukraine, it will be faced with huge expenditures in rebuilding the areas that it is currently destroying. Moreover, in time, the economic sanctions put into place by the West will further weaken an already weak economy. On the Western side, these same actions will come at a considerable cost as well, not to mention the military aid to Ukraine which is already in tens of billions of dollars. In fact, the current war is a further illustration of the ICC’s analysis of the question of war in the period of capitalism’s decadence and especially in the phase of decomposition, which constitutes the culminating point of decadence.

 

2) From the beginning of the 20th century, the workers' movement has highlighted imperialism and imperialist war as the most significant manifestation of the entry of the capitalist mode of production into its phase of historic decline, its decadence. This transformation of historical period brought about a fundamental change to the causes of the wars. The Communist Left of France has shed light on the specific features of this change:

“In the epoch of ascendant capitalism, wars (whether national, colonial, or of imperial conquest) represented the upward movement of ripening, strengthening and enlarging the capitalist economic system. Capitalist production used war as a continuation by other means of its political economy. Each war was justified and paid its way, by the opening up of a new field for greater expansion, assuring further capitalist development.

In the epoch of decadent capitalism, war, like peace, expresses this decadence and greatly accelerates it.

It would be wrong to see war as negative by definition, a destroyer and shackle on the development of society, as opposed to peace, which would appear as the normal and positive course of continued development of production and society. This would be to introduce a moral concept into an objective, economically determined course.

War was the indispensable means by which capital opened up areas external to itself for development, at a time when such areas existed and could only be opened up through violence. In the same way, the capitalist world, having historically exhausted all possibility of development, finds in modern imperialist war the expression of its collapse, which can only engulf the productive forces in an abyss, and accumulate ruin upon ruin in an ever-accelerating rhythm, without opening up any possibility of the outward development of production.

Under capitalism there exists no fundamental opposition between war and peace, but there is a difference between the ascendant and decadent phases of capitalist society, and thus a difference in the function of war (and in the relation of war to peace) in the respective phases. While in the first phase, war has the function of assuring an expansion of the market, and so of the production of the means of consumption, in the second phase production is essentially geared to the production of means of destruction, ie to war. The decadence of capitalist society is strikingly expressed by the fact that, whereas in the ascendant period wars served the process of economic development, in the decadent period economic activity is geared essentially to war.

This does not mean that war has become the aim of capitalist production, since this is always the production of surplus value, but that war becomes the permanent way of life in decadent capitalism.” (Report on the International Situation, July 1945 Conference of the Gauche Communiste de France taken up in “The Report on the Historic course [20]” adopted at the 3rd Congress of the ICC and published in International Review no. 18

This analysis, formulated in 1945, has been fundamentally valid since, even in the absence of a new world war. Since that time the world has known more than a hundred wars which have caused at least as many deaths as the Second World War; a situation which has continued and even intensified after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the end of the “Cold War”, which constituted the first great manifestation of the entry of capitalism into its phase of decomposition. Our 1990 text already announced this: “Society's general decomposition is the final phase of capitalism's decadence. In this sense, this phase does not call into question the specific characteristics of the decadent period: the historic crisis of the capitalist economy, state capitalism, and the fundamental phenomena of militarism and imperialism. Moreover, in as far as decomposition appears as the culmination of the contradictions into which capitalism has plunged throughout its decadence, the specific characteristics of this period are still further exacerbated in its ultimate phase. (...) Just as the end of Stalinism does not mean the end of the historical tendency towards state capitalism, of which it was one manifestation, so the present disappearance of imperialist blocs does not imply the slightest calling into question of imperialism's grip on social life. The fundamental difference lies in the fact that whereas the end of Stalinism corresponds to the elimination of a particularly aberrant form of state capitalism, the end of the blocs only opens the door to a still more barbaric, aberrant, and chaotic form of imperialism”. The war in the Gulf 1990-91, the conflicts in ex-Yugoslavia through the 1990’s, the war in Iraq from 2003 which lasted 11 years, in Afghanistan which spread over 20 years and many others even if of lesser importance, notably in Africa, have further confirmed this prediction.

Today the war in Ukraine, at the heart of Europe, is a new illustration of this reality and on a much larger scale. It is an eloquent confirmation of the theses of the ICC on the complete irrationality of war in the decadence of capitalism from the point of view of the global interests of the system (see the text, “Impact and significance of the war in Ukraine [148]”, International Review no. 168, adopted in May, 2022).

 

3) In fact, even if the distinction between the wars of the 19th century and those of the 20th, such as that made in the 1945 text of the GCF, is perfectly valid, even when it says that “The decadence of capitalist society is strikingly expressed by the fact that, whereas in the ascendant period wars served the process of economic development, in the decadent period economic activity is geared essentially to war”, one cannot attribute a directly economic cause to each of the wars of the 19th century. For example the Napoleonic Wars had a catastrophic cost for the French bourgeoisie which, in the end, weakened it considerably against the British bourgeoisie, opening the way for the latter towards its position of dominance in the middle of the nineteenth century. The same is true for the war of 1870 between Prussia and France. In the latter case, Marx (in the “First address of the General Council on the Franco-German war") took up the term “dynastic war” used by the French and German workers in order to characterise it. On the German side, the King of Prussia aimed to set up an empire by regrouping around the crown a multitude of small Germanic states which, up to then, had only managed a customs union (Zollverein). The annexation of Alsace-Lorraine was the gift to this marriage. For Napoleon III, the war was fundamentally aimed at strengthening the political structure of the Second Empire, threatened by the industrial development of France. On the Prussian side, beyond the ambitions of the monarch, this war made it possible to create a political unity of Germany which laid the basis for the full industrial development of the country whereas, on the French side, it was totally reactionary. In fact the example of this war perfectly illustrates the presentation made by Engels of historical materialism. We see the superstructures of society, notably politics and ideology (the form of government and the creation of a national sentiment) playing a very important role in the course of events. At the same time, the economic basis of society is seen to be the ultimate determinant in the realisation of the industrial development of Germany and thus of capitalism as a whole.

In fact, analyses which try to be “materialist” by looking for an economic cause for each war, forget that marxist materialism is also dialectical. And this “forgetfulness” becomes a considerable hindrance to understanding the imperialist conflicts of the current period, which is clearly defined by a considerable reinforcement of militarism in the life of society.

 

4) The text “Militarism and Decomposition” of 1990 devotes an important part to the place that American power was going to take in the imperialist conflicts in the period opening up: “In the new historical period we have entered, and which the Gulf events have confirmed, the world appears as a vast free-for-all, where the tendency of ‘every man for himself’ will operate to the full, and where the alliances between states will be far from having the stability that characterised the imperialist blocs, but will be dominated by the immediate needs of the moment. A world of bloody chaos, where the American policeman will try to maintain a minimum of order by the increasingly massive and brutal use of military force”. The United States continued to play the role of “World Cop”, in a way, after the collapse of its Cold War rival, as we saw in the former Yugoslavia in particular at the end of the 1990s and above all in the Middle East from the beginning of the 21st century (notably in Afghanistan and Iraq). It has also assumed this role in Europe by integrating new countries into NATO, the military organisation under its control, countries that were previously part of the Warsaw Pact or even of the USSR (Bulgaria, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania, Slovakia). The question that was already posed in 1990, with the sharing out of the world between the western and eastern blocs, was that of the establishment of a new division of the world like that at the end of World War 2: “Up to now, during the period of decadence, such a situation where the various imperialist antagonisms are dispersed, where the world (or at least its decisive zones) is not divided up between two blocs, has never lasted long. The disappearance of the two major imperialist constellations which emerged from World War 2 brings with it the tendency towards the recomposition of two new blocs”(“After the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, destabilisation and chaos [149]”), International Review no. 61). At the same time, the text pointed out all the obstacles to such a process and particularly the obstacles posed by the decomposition of capitalism: "the tendency to a new share-out of the planet between two military blocs is countered, and may even be definitively compromised, by the increasingly deep and generalised phenomenon of the decomposition of capitalist society as we have already highlighted" (“The decomposition of capitalist society [150]”, International Review no. 57).

This analysis was developed in the orientation text “Militarism and Decomposition” and, three decades later, the absence of such a carve-up of the world into two military blocs confirms it. The text “Impact and significance of the war in Ukraine”, International Review no.168 (Ibid) developed on this subject, largely basing itself on the 1990 text in order to show that the reconstitution of two imperialist blocs sharing the planet between them is still not on the agenda. It may be worthwhile to recall what we wrote in the 1990 text on militarism: “At the beginning of the decadent period, and even until the first years of World War 2, there could still exist a certain ‘parity’ between the different partners of an imperialist coalition, although it remained necessary for there to be a bloc leader. For example, in World War 1 there did not exist any fundamental disparity at the level of operational military capacity between the three ‘victors’: Great Britain, France and the USA. This situation had already changed considerably by World War 2, when the ‘victors’ were closely dependent on the US, which was already vastly more powerful than its ‘allies’. It was accentuated during the ‘Cold War’ (which has just ended) where each bloc leader, both USA and USSR, held an absolutely crushing superiority over the other countries in the bloc, in particular thanks to their possession of nuclear weapons.

This tendency can be explained by the fact that as capitalism plunges further into decadence:

- the scale of conflicts between the blocs, and what is at stake in them, takes on an increasingly world-wide and general character (the more gangsters there are to control, the more powerful must be the ‘godfather’);

- weapons systems demand ever more fantastic levels of investment (in particular, only the major powers could devote the necessary resources to the development of a complete nuclear arsenal, and to the research into ever more sophisticated armaments);

- and above all, the centrifugal tendencies amongst all the states as a result of the exacerbation of national antagonisms, cannot but be accentuated.

The same is true of this last factor as of state capitalism: the more the bourgeoisie's different factions tend to tear each other apart, as the crisis sharpens their mutual competition, so the more the state must be reinforced in order to exercise its authority over them. In the same way, the more the open historic crisis ravages the world economy, so the stronger must be a bloc leader in order to contain and control the tendencies towards the dislocation of its different national components. And it is clear that in the final phase of decadence, the phase of decomposition, this phenomenon cannot but be seriously aggravated.

For all these reasons, especially the last, the reconstitution of a new pair of imperialist blocs is not only impossible for a number of years to come, but may very well never take place again: either the revolution, or the destruction of humanity will come first”.

Today this analysis remains entirely valid, but we should note that in the 1990 text we completely missed seeing that China could one day become a new head of a bloc since today it is clear that it is about to become the main rival to the United States. Behind this omission there is a major error of analysis in that we didn’t foresee the possibility that China could become a leading economic power, the condition for a country to assume the role of a leader of an imperialist bloc. Moreover, the Chinese bourgeoisie had understood very well that it would be able to compete with the American bourgeoisie on the military level only if it could provide itself with an economic and technological power capable of supporting its military power, otherwise it could suffer the same fate as the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980’s. It’s for this reason, among others, that while China is increasingly asserting its growing military ambitions (especially in relation to Taiwan), it cannot as yet, or for a long time to come, have any pretensions to forming new imperialist bloc around it.

 

5) The war in Ukraine has rekindled concerns about a third world war, especially from Putin's posturing about nuclear weapons. It is important to point out that world war is similar to imperialist blocs. In fact a world war is the ultimate phase in the constitution of imperialist blocs. More precisely, it is because of the existence of constituted imperialist blocs that a war which, at the outset, concerns only a limited number of countries, degenerates, through the playing out of alliances, into a generalised conflagration. Thus, the outbreak of World War 1, whose deep historical causes stemmed from the sharpening of imperialist rivalries between European powers, took the form of a chain of situations in which the various allies gradually entered the conflict: Austria-Hungary, with the support of its ally Germany, wanted to take advantage of the assassination of the heir to the throne in Sarajevo on the 28th June 1914 to bring the Kingdom of Serbia to heel, accusing it of stirring up the nationalism of the Serbian minorities in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Serbia immediately received the support of its Russian ally, which had also formed the "Triple Entente" with Great Britain and France. At the beginning of August 1914, all these countries went to war against each other, followed by other countries such as Japan and Italy in 1915 and the United States in 1917. Similarly, in September 1939, when Germany attacked Poland, it was the existence of a treaty dating from 1920 between Poland, the United Kingdom and France that led these two countries to declare war on Germany, even though their bourgeoisies had no particular desire for such a conflict, as demonstrated a year earlier by their signing of the Munich Agreement. The conflict between the three main European powers quickly spread to the whole world. Today, Article 5 of NATO's Charter states that an attack on one of its members is considered an attack on all its allies. This is why countries that belonged to the Warsaw Pact before 1989 (and even to the Soviet Union, such as the Baltic States) enthusiastically joined NATO; it was a guarantee that neighbouring Russia would not attack them. Now, for the same reason, Finland and Sweden are joining after decades of "neutrality". This is also why Putin could not accept a situation where the Ukrainian state was threatening to join NATO, as it was written into its constitution.

Thus, the absence of a division of the world into two blocs means that a third world war is not on the agenda at present and may never be again. However, it would be irresponsible to underestimate the gravity of the global situation. As we wrote in January 1990:

“This is why in our analyses, we must clearly highlight the fact that while the proletarian solution - the communist revolution - is alone able to oppose the destruction of humanity (the only ‘answer’ that the bourgeoisie is capable of giving to the crisis), this destruction need not necessarily be the result of a third world war. It could also come about as a logical and extreme conclusion of the process of decomposition.

For most of the 20th century, the historic alternative of ‘socialism or barbarism’ highlighted by marxism has taken the form of ‘socialism or imperialist world war’, and in recent decades, thanks to the development of nuclear weapons, the still more terrifying ‘socialism or the destruction of humanity’. This perspective remains absolutely valid following the Eastern bloc's collapse. But we must be clear that this destruction may be the result either of imperialist world war, OR of society's decomposition”.

In the three decades since the adoption of this document by the ICC, events have clearly shown that even outside of a third world war, the four horsemen of the apocalypse that threaten the survival of humanity today are "ecological disasters, epidemics, famines, and local wars".

 

6) The “Orientation Text: Militarism and Decomposition” concluded with a section on "The proletariat and imperialist war". Given the importance of this question, it’s worth quoting large extracts from this part rather than paraphrasing them:

“More than ever then, the question of war remains central to the life of capitalism. Consequently, it is more than ever fundamental for the working class. Obviously, this question's importance is not new. It was already central before World War I (as the international congresses of Stuttgart (1907) and Basel (1912) highlighted). It became still more decisive during the first imperialist butchery (with the combat of Lenin, Luxemburg, and Liebknecht, and the revolutions in Germany and Russia). Its importance remained unchanged throughout the inter-war period, in particular during the Spanish Civil war, not to mention of course its importance during the greatest holocaust of the century between 1939-45. (...) In fact, since the beginning of the (20th) century, war has been the most decisive question that the proletariat and its revolutionary minorities have had to confront, much more so than the trade union or parliamentary questions for example. It could not be otherwise, in that war is the most concentrated form of decadent capitalism's barbarity, which expresses its death-agony and the threat that hangs over humanity's survival as a result.

In the present period, where the barbarity of war will, far more than in previous decades, become a permanent and omnipresent element of the world situation (whether Bush and Mitterrand with their prophecies of a ‘new order of peace’ like it or not), involving more and more the developed countries (limited only by the proletariat in these countries), the question of war is still more essential for the working class. The ICC has long insisted that, contrary to the past, the development of a new revolutionary wave will come not from a war but from the aggravation of the economic crisis. This analysis remains entirely valid: working class mobilisation, the starting point for large-scale class combats, will come from economic attacks. In the same way, at the level of consciousness, the aggravation of the crisis will be a fundamental factor in revealing the historical dead-end of the capitalist mode of production. But on this same level of consciousness, the question of war is once again destined to play a part of the first order:

- by highlighting the fundamental consequences of this historical dead-end: the destruction of humanity,

- by constituting the only objective consequence of the crisis, decadence and decomposition that the proletariat can today set a limit to (unlike any of the other manifestations of decomposition), to the extent that in the central countries it is not at present enrolled under the flags of nationalism (Point 13).

It is true that the war can be used against the working class much more easily than the crisis itself, and economic attacks:

- it can encourage the development of pacifism;

- it can give the proletariat the feeling of impotence, allowing the bourgeoisie to carry out its economic attacks” (Point 14).

Today, the war in Ukraine effectively arouses feelings of impotence inside the proletariat, when it is not, as in Ukraine and also, partly, in Russia, leading to a popular mobilisation and the triumph of chauvinism. In Western countries, it even promotes a certain strengthening of democratic ideology thanks to the torrents of propaganda broadcast by the mainstream media in which we are seeing a confrontation between "evil", the "dictator" (Putin) on the one hand and "good", the "democrat" (Zelensky and his Western supporters) on the other. Such propaganda was obviously less effective in 2003 when the "boss" of the "Great American Democracy", Bush Junior, did the same thing as Putin in launching war against Iraq (the use of the “big lie”, violation of UN "international law", the use of "forbidden" weapons, bombing of civilian populations, "war crimes", etc).

That being said, it is important to bear in mind the analysis that the ICC has developed around the question of the "weakest link" putting forward the differences between the proletariat of the central countries, and particularly those of Western Europe, and those of the countries of the periphery and of the former "socialist" bloc (see in particular our articles “The proletariat of Western Europe at the centre of the generalisation of the class struggle; critique of the theory of the ‘Weakest Link’ [151]" in International Review no. 31, and "Debate: On the critique of the theory of the 'Weakest Link' [152] " in International Review no. 37). The war between Russia and Ukraine underlines the great political weakness of the proletariat in these countries. The current war will also have a negative political impact on the proletariat of the central countries but it does not mean that the resurgence of democratic ideology from which it suffers, will paralyse it definitively. In particular, it is already feeling the consequences of this war through the economic attacks accompanying the dramatic rise in inflation (which had begun before the outbreak of the war but which the latter is accentuating). It will necessarily have to take up the path of class struggle against these attacks.

"In the present historical situation, our intervention within the class is determined, apart of course from the serious aggravation of the economic crisis and the resulting attacks against the whole class, is determined by:

- the fundamental importance of the question of war;
- the decisive role of revolutionaries in the class coming to consciousness of the gravity of what is at stake today.
It is therefore necessary that this question figure constantly at the forefront of our press. And in periods like today, where this question is at the forefront of international events, we must profit from the workers' particular sensitivity to it by giving it special emphasis and priority. (Orientation Text: Militarism and Decomposition [146], Point 15)

“In particular, the revolutionary organisations will have to ensure that they:
- denounce with the utmost virulence the repugnant hypocrisy of the leftists who, in the name of ‘internationalism’ and the ‘struggle against imperialism’,  actually call for support to one of the imperialist camps;
- denounce the pacifist campaigns which constitute a privileged means to demobilise the working class in its struggle against capitalism by dragging it on the rotten ground of interclassism;
- emphasise the full seriousness of what is at stake in the present period, including a full understanding of all the implications of the considerable upheavals that the world has just undergone, and particularly the period of chaos into which it has entered." (Ibid. point 15)

 

7) These orientations put forward more than 30 years ago remain entirely valid today. But, in our propaganda in the face of imperialist war, it is also necessary to recall our analysis of the conditions for the generalisation of revolutionary struggles, an analysis developed in particular in our 1981 text "The historical conditions for the generalisation of the working class struggle [153]" in International Review no. 26. For decades, revolutionaries, by basing themselves on the examples of the Paris Commune (which followed the Franco-Prussian war), the 1905 revolution in Russia (during the Russo-Japanese war), and of 1917 in this same country and 1918 in Germany, considered that imperialist war created the best conditions for the proletarian revolution, or even that this could only arise from a world war. This is an analysis that is still widespread among the groups of the Communist Left, which partly explains their inability to understand the question of the historical course. Only the ICC has clearly questioned this analysis and returned to the "classical" analysis that Marx and Engels developed in their lifetime (and in part by Rosa Luxemburg), which held that the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat would arise from the economic collapse of capitalism and not from the war between capitalist states.

We can summarise the arguments put forward in support of our analysis as follows:

a) If within a country the war provokes a massive response from the proletariat, the bourgeoisie of that country can find a way to undermine such a response by putting an end to its hostile actions and exiting from the war. This is what happened in November 1918 in Germany where the bourgeoisie, conscious of the revolutionary events in Russia, was quick to sign the armistice with the Entente countries a few days after the sailors' insurrection in the Baltic. By contrast, no bourgeoisie would be able to overcome and end the economic convulsions that would be the cause of massive and generalised struggles of the proletariat.

b) "...the war produced victors as well as vanquished. In the defeated countries, as well as revolutionary anger against the bourgeoisie, there was a desire for revenge produced in the general population. This backward tendency penetrated even into the ranks of revolutionaries, as is witnessed by the tendency in the KAPD which advocated national-communism, and the struggle against the Treaty of Versailles which was to become the axis of the KPD's propaganda. Worse still was the effect produced amongst the workers in the victorious countries. As the aftermath of the First World War had already shown, and still more so the Second, what prevailed was a spirit of lassitude if not of chauvinistic delirium pure and simple...” (Ibid. International Review no.26)

c) The bourgeoisie has learnt the lessons of World War 1 and the revolutionary wave it provoked. On the one hand, it learnt that it was necessary to ensure a profound political defeat of the proletariat in the central countries before engaging in World War 2. It achieved this with the establishment of Nazi terror on the German side and anti-fascist mobilisations on the Allied side. On the other hand, the ruling class took multiple measures to prevent or nip in the bud any proletarian upsurge during or at the end of the war, particularly in the defeated countries. “In Italy where the danger was greatest the bourgeoisie (...) lost no time changing its regime and after that its alliance. In autumn ’43 Italy was divided in two; the south was in the hands of the Allies, the rest was occupied by the Nazis. On the advice of Churchill (‘Italy must be left to stew in its own juice’) the Allies delayed their advance towards the north and so achieved two things: on the one hand they left the job of repressing the proletarian movement to the German army; on the other they gave the ‘anti-fascist’ forces the task of diverting the movement from the terrain of the anti-capitalist struggle to that of the anti-fascist struggle. (...) In Germany… the international bourgeoisie acted systematically to avoid a repetition of events similar to those of 1918-19. In the first place shortly before the end of the war the Allies carried out the mass extermination of the population of the workers’ quarters by means of the unprecedented bombardment of large cities such as Hamburg or Dresden. On 13th February 1945, 135,000 people (twice as many as at Hiroshima) perished in the bombing. As military objectives they were worthless (moreover the German army was already thoroughly routed): in reality their aim was to terrorise the working class and prevent it from organising itself in any way. Secondly the Allies rejected outright the possibility of an armistice on the grounds that they had not occupied the whole of German territory. They were anxious to administer this territory directly as they were aware of the danger that the defeated German bourgeoisie would be unable to control the situation on its own. Lastly once the latter had capitulated, and in close collaboration with them, the Allies hung onto their war prisoners for many months in order to avoid the explosive mix that might have resulted if they had encountered the civilian population. In Poland during the second half of 1944 the Red Army too left it to the Nazi forces to carry out the dirty work of massacring the insurgent workers in Warsaw: for months the Red Army waited a few kilometres away from the city while the German troops crushed the revolt. The same thing happened in Budapest at the beginning of 1945” (“1943: The Italian proletariat opposes the sacrifices demanded for the war [154]”, International Review no.75.

d) The revolutionary emergence of the proletariat during World War 1 was favoured by the characteristics of this war: the predominance of confrontations between foot-soldiers and trench warfare that facilitated fraternisation between soldiers of the two camps who were for long periods only a few metres apart from each other. The Second World War did not take the form of trench warfare; it was marked by the massive use of mechanical and technological means, particularly armour and aviation, a trend that has only become more pronounced since then as states increasingly call on professional armies capable of using increasingly sophisticated weapons, which greatly limits the possibilities of direct fraternisation between combatants on both sides. And last but not least, a third world war would at some stage call on nuclear weapons, which obviously radically settles the question of the possibility of a proletarian upsurge within it.

 

8) In the past we have criticised the slogan of "revolutionary defeatism". This slogan was put forward during the First World War, notably by Lenin, and was based on a fundamentally internationalist concern: the denunciation of the lies spread by the social-chauvinists who claimed that it was necessary for their country to gain a victory before allowing the proletarians of that country to engage in the struggle for socialism. In the face of these lies, the internationalists pointed out that it was not the victory of a country that favoured the struggle of the proletariat of that country against their bourgeoisie but, on the contrary, its defeat (as illustrated by the examples of the Paris Commune after the defeat by Prussia and of the 1905 Revolution following the failure of Russia’s war against Japan). Subsequently, this slogan of "revolutionary defeatism" was interpreted as the wish of the proletariat of each country to see its own bourgeoisie defeated in order to favour the fight for its overthrow, which obviously turns its back on a true internationalism. In reality, Lenin himself (who in 1905 had hailed Russia's defeat by Japan) first of all put forward the slogan "turn the imperialist war into a civil war" which constituted a concretisation of the amendment which, together with Rosa Luxemburg and Martov, he had presented and adopted at the Stuttgart Congress of the Socialist International in 1907: "In case war breaks out nevertheless [the socialist parties] have the duty to intercede to bring it to a prompt end and to use with all their strength the economic and political crisis created by the war to stir up the deepest popular strata and precipitate the fall of capitalist domination".

The revolution in Russia in 1917 was a striking concretisation of the slogan "transformation of the imperialist war into a civil war": the proletarians turned against their exploiters the weapons the latter had given them in order to massacre their class brothers in other countries. This being said, as we have seen above, even if it is not excluded that soldiers could still turn their weapons against their officers (during the Vietnam War, there were cases where American soldiers "accidentally" shot their superiors or lobbed fragmentation bombs into the officer’s tents), such facts could only be of very limited scale and could not constitute in any way the basis of a revolutionary offensive. For this reason, in our propaganda, we should not only not put forward the slogan of "revolutionary defeatism" but also that of "turning the imperialist war into a civil war".

More generally, it is the responsibility of the groups of the Communist Left to take stock of the position of revolutionaries in the face of war in the past by highlighting what remains valid (the defence of internationalist principles) and what is no longer valid (the "tactical" slogans). In this sense, if the slogan of "turning the imperialist war into a civil war" cannot henceforth constitute a realistic perspective, it is necessary on the other hand to underline the validity of the amendment adopted at the Stuttgart Congress in 1907 and particularly the idea that revolutionaries "have the duty to use with all their strength the economic and political crisis created by the war to agitate the deepest popular strata and to precipitate the fall of capitalist domination". This slogan is obviously not immediately feasible given the present weak situation of the proletariat, but it remains a beacon for communist intervention in the class.

 

ICC, May 2022 `

The outbreak of war in Ukraine, at the gates of Europe, is a dangerous part of the explosive accumulation of the contradictions of capitalism: ecological disaster, resurgence of pandemics, devastating inflation, wars that are more and more irrational even from the point of view of the bourgeoisie, more and more circumstantial alliances dominated by “every man for himself”, destabilisation of growing parts of the globe, social dislocation and fragmentation, migratory exoduses, etc. In the present situation, as in the First World War, the goal of the working class struggle can only be the overthrow of capitalism on a world scale. The very survival of humanity depends on it.

In the face of the First World War, in the face of bloodletting and enormous economic sacrifices, the working class was able to recover from the betrayal of the Social Democratic parties which had embroiled it in the world conflict. This was not possible in the Second World War, the main detachments of the proletariat having been crushed by the Stalinist counter-revolution, crushed in the defeat of the revolution in Germany and subjected to the rule of fascism, enlisted in the defence of democracy and anti-fascism.

Since the historic resumption of the class struggle in 1968, the proletariat has not suffered such a defeat that the bourgeoisie would be able to make its most concentrated and experienced battalions in the heart of capitalism accept today the attacks resulting from the worsening of the world economic crisis, the economic cost of the wars - in particular in Ukraine - and the reinforcement of militarism all over the world; but also the economic consequences of climatic disruption, the world disorganisation of production, etc.

Not all the fractions of the world proletariat are in the same relation of force against the bourgeoisie. The proletariat in Ukraine, by being mobilised behind the flag of national defence, has suffered a major political defeat, amplified and aggravated by the massacres of the war. The proletariat in Russia, whose situation is not so critical, nevertheless has no means to oppose the war in Ukraine on its class terrain, far from it.

I. The decisive importance of the Western European proletariat for the future revolution

Capitalism has developed unevenly in the different regions of the world. The same was true for the proletariat which is the product of this system. Therefore, at the beginning of the 20th century, with the constitution of the world market and the entry of capitalism into its historical crisis, there are considerable disparities between the different fractions of the world proletariat. In the historical heart of capitalism, in Western Europe, where the concentrations of the working class are the oldest, the working class has lived through irreplaceable historical experiences which give its class struggle a potential strength which does not exist in any other country in the world. Not even in the United States, which surpassed the other powers during the 20th century, and even less in China, despite its meteoric rise to rank 2nd in the world in the 21st century.[1] Western Europe, which will be the battleground of the most experienced fractions of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat in the world, will be decisive for the process of global generalisation of the class struggle.

The very history of the class struggle attests to the decisive role that the Western European proletariat will be called upon to play

What distinguishes the Western European proletariat from the other fractions of the world proletariat relates to historical experience, concentration, historical consciousness, resistance to the mystifications of the bourgeoisie and in particular the democratic mystification.

A reminder of the most "famous" experiences is instructive:

• The Paris Commune, which took place from 18 March to 28 May 1871, was the first time in history that the necessity and possibility of the working class seizing political power was made concrete[2].
• The revolutionary wave of 1917-23: it started in Europe but had repercussions throughout the world. Its peak was in Russia with the seizure of power by the proletariat in 1917, but its centre of gravity then shifted to Europe, in particular Germany. In fact, the Russian revolution is the exception that proves the rule, as illustrated by the fact that Lenin stressed a thousand times: it was by a "historical accident" that it fell to the Russians to carry the banner of the revolution for a short period, the stakes of the seizure of power in Germany being decisive for the fate of the world revolution.
• The historical resumption of class struggle in 1968, which marked the end of the counter-revolution, was initiated by the emergence of the French proletariat in May of that year, followed in 1969 by the proletariat in Italy, with this wave of class struggle gradually spreading to different parts of the world, at different levels. It is necessary here to point out the scale and importance of the class struggles waged by the proletariat in Poland in 1971, '76 and '80, which constituted a striking confirmation of the return of the class struggle on a world scale. "There is absolutely no doubt that the workers of Poland have drawn the lessons of their previous experiences of 1956, 1970 and 1976. Their praxis has revealed the collective reflection of the revolutionary class. Unlike previous struggles, particularly Gdansk, Gdynia and Szczecin in 1970 when street fighting was the most marked although not the only characteristic of the movement, in the 1980 struggle the workers consciously avoided premature confrontations and left no dead. They realized that their force resided above all in the generalisation of the struggle, in organisation and solidarity".[3]

In fact, the struggles in Poland were the culmination of the international resurgence of class struggles opened in 1968 in France. They witnessed a level of self-organisation of struggle not seen since the revolutionary wave of 1917-23, which at first sight seems to invalidate our analysis, which puts at the heart of the revolutionary perspective the decisive importance of the Western European proletariat. In reality, our analysis was confirmed by the way they were defeated by the world bourgeoisie, with, at the centre of its plan of action against the working class in Poland, the confinement of the Polish proletariat behind the mystification of "free" trade unionism and democratic demands, by means of "the left and the unions in the west giving political and material aid to the sett­ing up of the Solidarity apparatus (sending funds, printing materials, delegations to teach the new-born union the techniques of sabotaging struggles ...)"[4].

The way in which the bourgeoisie overcame this fraction of the world proletariat illustrates the existence of deep weaknesses of the working class, common to all the countries of the former Eastern bloc, expressed by the weight of democratic illusions, and even of religion. These weaknesses remained very much alive after the collapse of the Eastern bloc insofar as, very often, right-wing "authoritarian" regimes replaced the Stalinist totalitarian regimes.

So, the episode of the class struggles in Poland, far from constituting a counter-example to the importance of the Western European proletariat, on the contrary, illustrates it. This is the reason why we think more globally that, for the historical reasons advanced previously, "… the epicentre of the coming revolutionary earthquake will be in the industrial heart of western Europe, where the best conditions exist for the development of revolutionary consciousness and a revolutionary struggle. The proletariat of this zone will be in the vanguard of the world proletariat."[5]

It is also for these reasons that areas like Japan and North America, although they meet most of the material conditions necessary for revolution, are not the most favourable for the triggering of the revolutionary process, because of the lack of experience and the ideological backwardness of the proletariat in these countries. This is particularly clear in Japan, but it is also valid, to a certain extent, in North America where the workers' movement developed as an appendix of the European workers' movement and with specificities such as the myth of "the frontier"[6] or, during a whole period, the highest standard of living of the working class in the world, ... allowing the bourgeoisie to ensure an ideological hold on the workers much more solid than in Europe.

As for the proletariat in China, the most numerous in the world (China being the workshop of the planet), its numbers do not compensate in any way for its inexperience[7] and its extreme vulnerability (even more so than in the Eastern countries) to all the manoeuvres that the bourgeoisie will use against it, in particular the setting up of "free" trade unions, when the need arises.

The recognition of such differences does not mean that the class struggle, or the activity of revolutionaries, has no meaning in other parts of the world than Western Europe. Indeed, the working class is global, its class struggle exists wherever proletarians and capital face each other. The lessons of the different manifestations of this struggle are valid for the whole working class wherever they take place[8].

More than ever, and despite the very important difficulties it is currently experiencing and which affect the whole world proletariat, the Western European proletariat holds the key for a world renewal of the class struggle that can take the road to world revolution. For all these reasons, and contrary to what Lenin hastily generalised from the example of the Russian revolution, it is not in the countries where the bourgeoisie is the weakest (the "weakest link in the capitalist chain") that such a movement is first unleashed, which will then spread to the most developed countries.[9] In these countries, the proletariat would not only face its own bourgeoisie, but in one form or another the world bourgeoisie would combine to muzzle it.

II. "Local" wars since the end of the 1960s: a negative confirmation of the particular role of the Western European proletariat

In the late 1960s in the United States, the protests against the Vietnam War and the refusal of many young workers to go and fight for the flag were an indirect harbinger of the opening of a new global course of class struggle marking the end of half a century of counter-revolution.

Since the historic resumption of class struggles in 1968, and throughout the period when the world was divided into two rival imperialist blocs, the reason why the third world war did not happen was because the working class in the main industrialised countries of Europe and in the United States - unbeaten, not ideologically subjugated to the bourgeoisie - was not ready to accept the sacrifices of war, either in the centres of production or at the front.[10]

Nevertheless, if the new world dynamic towards decisive class confrontations forbade the bourgeoisie to march towards world war, "local" wars broke out everywhere where the proletariat did not represent a social force capable of obstructing it. These wars pitted professional or mercenary troops in the service of the great powers against each other in countries where the local proletariat not only lacked the strength to oppose them through its own class struggle, but where it found itself enrolled by force or by consent in one or other of the opposing camps. But it is by no means a coincidence that none of these conflicts involved the proletariat under the uniform of the countries of Western Europe.

Since the collapse of the blocs, even more than in the previous period, local wars have been omnipresent, murderous and devastating. But in none of these could the proletariat of the countries of Western Europe be mobilised by the bourgeoisie.

And when these countries directly fomented wars, as in ex-Yugoslavia in 1991, it was always professional soldiers who were mobilised, some of whom, it is true, were the sons of proletarians who could not find a way to sell their labour power. But more often than not, and precisely because of this, these troops were confined to the role of so-called "peacekeeping" forces.

It is significant in this respect that in the United States, where the proletariat does not represent the same political force as in Western Europe, the bourgeoisie was able to call on conscript troops (proletarians in uniform) for its war expeditions, albeit with caution and circumspection. Nevertheless, in this country, the trauma of the Vietnam war has not been erased and the population (especially the working class within it) remains sensitive to the sending of troops made up of proletarians in uniform to theatres of operation. The Second Iraq War (2003) was a new warning for the bourgeoisie, which tended to think that the Vietnam syndrome had vanished. After a year of occupation of Iraq by American troops, "The climate of permanent insecurity among the troops and the ‘body bags’ returning home have significantly cooled the population's patriotic ardour - which was anyway very relative - even in the heart of ‘Middle America’”[11].

Since then, for Obama (with regard to Syria) and even more so for Trump (everywhere), it is the "no boots on the ground" doctrine that set the limits to American military interventions.

For all the above reasons, it is unimaginable that, in the current situation, a Western European country or countries would go on the offensive as Russia has done in Ukraine.

III. The proletariat of the East dragooned or impotent in the face of the war in Ukraine

In the same way that we explained the reasons for the non-involvement of the Western European proletariat in military conflicts since the end of the 1960s, it is necessary to understand why the proletariat of certain countries was directly involved in the war, as in Ukraine, or did not oppose it, as in Russia.

The context of the Eastern bloc

In the 1980s, the industrial proletariat of the USSR was one of the largest in the world. The workers of the Donbas in Ukraine led struggles at that time (mid-1980s) that could make one think that the proletariat of the East was taking the initiative. The peak was reached with the struggles in Poland in 1970, 1976 and 1980 which saw the massive mobilisations we mentioned above. In this part of the world, on the other hand, the weight of the counter-revolution embodied by the existence of totalitarian political regimes - albeit rigid and fragile - made the proletariat much more vulnerable to democratic, trade union, nationalist and even religious mystifications.

In the summer of 1989, 500,000 miners from Donbas (Ukraine) and southern Siberia (the USSR still existed and Ukraine was part of it) fought for their demands on their class terrain in the biggest movement since 1917. But the movement was then marked (as it had been in the case of the struggle in Poland in 1980) by democratic illusions which eventually led to the dead ends of the struggle against totalitarianism, of the demand for "autonomy" of the enterprises so that they could sell the part of the coal not handed over to the state.[12]

Faced with the collapse of the Stalinist bloc, instead of mass class struggles of the proletariat, we saw movements marked by the weight of separatist nationalism towards the USSR and by democratic illusions. The same weaknesses marked the chaos that reigned in the Russian Federation in the 1990s.

One of the most significant elements of the weakness of the proletariat in the East was the incapacity, in the face of the strongest moments of the class struggle as in Poland in 1980, to provoke reflection on the part of minorities allowing them to orient themselves towards the positions of the communist left.

After the collapse of the Eastern bloc

The case of Ukraine

The Ukrainian proletariat is very weakly developed. Indeed, outside the mining basin and the few industrial centres in Kyiv, Kharkov or Dniepropetrovsk, small-scale agriculture predominates. This situation became even more pronounced during the 1990s, as we pointed out in an article published in 2006:

"According to the census of 1989, when the Ukraine’s level of urbanisation peaked, 33.1% of the republic’s population lived in the countryside. Out of 16 areas of future Orange support (not counting Kiev) only in three was this proportion below 41%. In five oblasts it was between 43-47%, but in eight it exceeded 50%, and in some cases noticeably so (Ternopol oblast 59.2%, Zakarpate 58.9% etc.) In the 1990s the position only worsened: industry was destroyed, the population began to regress on the cultural level, workers had to rely on their vegetable gardens to survive and began to go back to the land, to restore their own social relationships with the villages, where they also have a mass of kinsfolk. So the influence of the rural petty bourgeois atmosphere on them increased immensely."[13]

In 1993, after the independence of Ukraine, the workers of the industrial region of Pridneprovie, however, managed to mobilise on their class terrain, forcing the resignation of president Kuchma and the holding of general elections. But, already in 2004, the proletariat was dragged into the employers' strikes and the struggle between factions of the bourgeoisie in the so-called "Orange Revolution" where the confrontation between the pro-Russian and pro-US option was imposed. Since the Russian occupation of Crimea in 2014, this situation has already led to ­armed clashes which proletarians have been drawn into.

Faced with the current war in Ukraine, there is a mobilisation of the population, including the proletariat. The "defence of the fatherland" has taken precedence over all other considerations.

The case of Russia

The importance of the proletariat in Russia for the world proletariat is greater than that of the proletariat in Ukraine. And if everything we said about the weaknesses of the proletariat in the Eastern countries can be applied to it, it has not however been directly mobilised in the confrontations between factions of the bourgeoisie; even if there is certainly an important weight of democratic illusions, which the arrival of Putin and the imposition of a new totalitarianism have considerably reinforced.

Despite such weaknesses, this proletariat was nevertheless not ready to be mobilised. This is both the cause and the consequence of the disintegration of the Red Army in Afghanistan: "Moreover, the authorities cannot even count on the loyalty of the ‘Red’ Army. Soldiers from the various national minorities that today are clamoring for independence are less and less inclined to go and get killed to defend continued Russian domination over these same minorities. The Russians themselves are increasingly reluctant to take on this kind of job. This can be seen in demonstrations such as those of 19th January in Krasnodar (southern Russia), whose slogans have shown clearly that the population is not ready to accept a new Afghanistan; as a result of these demonstrations, the authorities were obliged to demobilise the reservists who had been called up only a few days previously."[14]

In Russia, war does not yet involve the mobilisation of the entire population, and if 'replacement' soldiers are recruited from within Russia, it is under the guise of participation in 'military manoeuvres'. The very mention of war is censored in the Russian media, which only talks about a "special operation" in Ukraine. And contrary to the atmosphere of patriotism in Ukraine, there are no known manifestations of public support for the war in Russia (apart, of course, from official ceremonies orchestrated by the Putin clique).

Nevertheless, for the reasons outlined above, there is currently no possibility of the proletariat in Russia having the strength to end the war on its own, and its future response to the situation remains as yet difficult to predict precisely.

IV. The situation of the Western proletariat facing the economic attacks of the bourgeoisie before the outbreak of the war in Ukraine

During the period from 1968/80 until the collapse of the Eastern bloc and the dislocation of its Western counterpart, the development of the combativity and the reflection of the world proletariat, in the central countries in particular, took place within a dynamic arising from the succession of three waves of struggles, the first two momentarily stopped by the manoeuvres and strategies of the bourgeoisie to face them. The third, for its part, came up against the consequences of the collapse of the Eastern bloc, provoking a deep retreat of the class struggle because of the bourgeoisie's campaigns on "the death of communism" and also because of the more difficult conditions of the class struggle in the phase of the decomposition[15] of capitalism which had now opened up. Indeed, as we have already highlighted, the decomposition of capitalism profoundly affects the essential dimensions of the class struggle: collective action, solidarity; the need for organisation; the relationships which underpin all life in society which are breaking down more and more; confidence in the future and in one's own strength; consciousness, lucidity, coherence and unity of thought, the taste for theory.[16]

Despite these difficulties, the working class had not disappeared, as illustrated by a number of attempts of the class struggle to break through: 2003 (public sector in Europe, in France in particular); 2006 (fight against the CPE in France: mobilisation of the young generations of the working class against precariousness); 2011 (mobilisation of the "Indignados" which testifies to the beginnings of a global reflection on the bankruptcy of capitalism); 2019 (France, mobilisation against the pension reform)[17]; end of 2021/beginning of 2022 (rise of anger and development of combativity in the United States, in Iran, in Italy, in Korea in spite of the stifling effects of the pandemic)[18].

Whatever the difficulties faced by the proletariat throughout this period, especially since 1990, it has not suffered a defeat in the main industrialised countries, which implies that it will be able to take its class struggle to a higher level in the face of the unprecedented wave of attacks that will affect all its fractions more and more severely in all countries of the world, in all sectors.

V. What path and perspective for the development of the class struggle?

The eruption of war at the gates of Europe once again alerts the world proletariat to what revolutionaries had already pointed out in the face of the First World War: as long as capitalism is not overthrown, humanity is threatened with the worst catastrophes and, ultimately, with extinction. "Friedrich Engels once said: ‘Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.’ What does ‘regression into barbarism’ mean to our lofty European civilization? (...) A look around us at this moment shows what the regression of bourgeois society into barbarism means. This world war is a regression into barbarism. The triumph of imperialism leads to the annihilation of civilization. At first, this happens sporadically for the duration of a modern war, but then when the period of unlimited wars begins it progresses toward its inevitable consequences" (The Crisis of Social Democracy - 1915; Rosa Luxemburg). In the present period, the dilemma facing society is more precisely "socialism or the disappearance of humanity".

This is why the attitude of the revolutionary vanguard towards the First World War must absolutely be a source of inspiration today for the defence of consistent internationalism, which only makes sense in putting forward the need to overthrow capitalism.

Proletarian internationalism is not, as the experience of the collapse of the IInd International in the face of world war has shown, a declaration of intent or a pacifist slogan. Proletarian internationalism is the defence of class war against imperialist war and the defence of the historical tradition of the principles of the workers' movement, embodied by the Communist Left. The Zimmerwald conference[19] -particularly the debates and confrontations of the different positions during this conference and the political clarification that resulted from it - must constitute today a source of inspiration for consistent revolutionaries to assume their responsibilities as much in the regroupment of the authentically proletarian forces as in the open, fraternal and uncompromising confrontation of the divergences that exist between them.

In this sense it is necessary to clarify that the conditions confronted by the proletariat today are different from those of the first world conflict, in order to draw the consequences for the intervention of revolutionaries:

• If the proletariat in Ukraine has suffered a deep defeat and that of Russia is in great difficulty, it is not the case for the proletariat of other countries and in particular the proletariat of Western Europe.
• Nevertheless, all the fractions of the world proletariat were affected by this event, inducing a deep feeling of powerlessness in its ranks. No sooner had the proletariat begun to recover from the staggering effect of the pandemic, than it took a second blow, harder than the first, which inevitably has had and will have consequences for its ability to mobilise in the face of the considerable economic attacks that are coming down on it. Even if strikes are already multiplying, we don't know how much longer it will take the proletariat to set itself in motion in the face of the deluge of attacks.
• The proletariat will have no choice but to take up the historical path of its class struggle against the consequences of exploitation. It is through these struggles that it will be able to recover the consciousness (lost with the campaigns on the death of communism) of being a distinct class antagonistic to capitalism, being able to count only on the solidarity of its different parts, on its unity ... that it will find the path of coming to consciousness - opened with May 68 in France and the mobilisations which followed in the world - of the means, the goals and the stakes of its struggle.
• The First World War was a factor in raising awareness of the need to overthrow capitalism, and at the same time it was also a factor in mobilisation. Nevertheless, such a mobilisation was only really expressed (in particular the fraternisations, the mobilisations of working women, etc.) when it could be backed up by a powerful movement of the proletariat from the rear, from the workplaces, in defence of its living conditions.
• It would be seriously misleading for the proletariat to believe that its fractions in Ukraine or in Russia can today mobilise against the war. This could only lead to an irresponsible overestimation of the possibilities open to the proletariat in these two countries. Moreover, such a slogan in the present world situation would contribute to diverting the world proletariat from its task of overthrowing capitalism by developing its class struggle against the attacks of capitalism in crisis. The latter represents much more favourable conditions for revolution than war, since the bourgeoisie cannot stop the development of its economic crisis while it can put an end to war by concluding a peace deal, and thus disarm the revolutionary dynamic, dividing the proletariat of the victorious and defeated countries, as was the case in the world revolutionary wave of the first post-war period[20].
• The slogan of "revolutionary defeatism" has the same defect of diverting the world proletariat from the world revolution against capitalism in crisis. Added to this is the defect of advocating different tactics for different national fractions of the proletariat in the face of war. If some of them must wish for the defeat of their own bourgeoisie, in order to hasten the revolutionary process, it cannot be the same for the proletarians of the opposite camp. It is therefore no coincidence that this slogan is so popular with leftists and other imperialist war mongers who exploit an error of Lenin's which was then quite secondary in the context of his unfailing internationalism.[21]

In 1981, the ability of the world bourgeoisie to inflict a defeat on the Polish proletariat by exploiting the democratic and trade union illusions of this fraction of the world proletariat led the ICC to critique Lenin's theory of the weakest link in the imperialist chain, in which a country with a less developed bourgeoisie has the best possibilities for a victorious revolution. The opposite is true. It will be up to the proletariat of Western Europe to confront the most experienced world fractions of the bourgeoisie. It is on the result of this confrontation that the world revolutionary conflagration will depend.

Silvio, 02-07-2022

The organisations of the communist left must mount a united defence of their common heritage of adherence to the principles of proletarian internationalism, especially at a time of great danger for the world's working class. The return of imperialist carnage to Europe in the war in Ukraine is such a time. That's why we publish below, with other signatories from the communist left tradition (and a group with a different trajectory fully supporting the statement), a common statement on the fundamental perspectives for the working class in the face of imperialist war.

*********************************************

Workers have no country!

Down with all the imperialist powers!

In place of capitalist barbarism: socialism!

 

 

The war in Ukraine is being fought according to the conflicting interests of all the different imperialist powers, large and small – not in the interests of the working class, which is a class of international unity. It’s a war over strategic territories, for military and economic domination fought overtly and covertly by the warmongers in charge of the US, Russia, the Western European state machines, with the Ukrainian ruling class acting as a by no means innocent pawn on the world imperialist chess board.

The working class, not the Ukrainian state, is the real victim of this war, whether as slaughtered defenceless women and children, starving refugees or conscripted cannon fodder in either army, or in the increasing destitution the effects of the war will bring to workers in all countries. 

The capitalist class and their bourgeois mode of production cannot overcome its competitive national divisions that lead to imperialist war. The capitalist system cannot avoid sinking into greater barbarism.

For its part the world’s working class cannot avoid developing its struggle against deteriorating wages and living standards. The latest war, the biggest in Europe since 1945, warns of capitalism’s future for the world if the working class struggle doesn’t lead to the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and its replacement by the political power of the working class, the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The war aims and lies of the different imperialist powers

Russian imperialism wants to reverse the enormous setback it received in 1989 and become a world power again. The US wants to preserve its super power status and world leadership. The European powers fear Russian expansion but also the crushing domination of the US. Ukraine is looking to ally itself to the most powerful imperialist strong man.

Let’s face it, the US and the Western powers have the most convincing lies, and the biggest media lie machine, to justify their real aims in this war - they are supposedly reacting to Russian aggression against small sovereign states, defending democracy against the Kremlin autocracy, upholding human rights in the face of the brutality of Putin.

The stronger imperialist gangsters usually have the better war propaganda, the bigger lie, because they can provoke and manoeuvre their enemies into firing first. But remember the oh-so peaceful performance of these powers recently in the Middle East, in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, how US air power recently flattened the city of Mosul, how the Coalition forces put the Iraqi population to the sword with the false excuse that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Remember further back the countless crimes of these democracies against civilians over the past century whether it be during the 1960s in Vietnam, during the 1950s in Korea, during the Second World War in Hiroshima, Dresden or Hamburg. The Russian outrages against the Ukrainian population are essentially drawn from the same imperialist playbook.

Capitalism has catapulted humanity into the era of permanent imperialist war. It is an illusion to ask it to ‘stop’ war. ‘Peace’ can only be an interlude in warlike capitalism.

The more it sinks into irresolvable crisis the greater the military destruction capitalism will bring, alongside its growing catastrophes of pollution and plagues. Capitalism is rotten ripe for revolutionary change.

The working class is a sleeping giant

The capitalist system, more and more a system of war and all its horrors, does not currently find any significant class opposition to its rule, so much so that the proletariat suffers the worsening exploitation of its labour power, and the ultimate sacrifices imperialism calls on it to make on the battlefield.

The development of the defence of its class interests, as well as its class consciousness stimulated by the indispensable role of the revolutionary vanguard, conceals an even bigger potential of the working class, the ability to unite as a class to overthrow the political apparatus of the bourgeoisie entirely as it did in Russia in 1917 and threatened to do in Germany and elsewhere at the time. That is, overthrow the system that leads to war. Indeed, the October Revolution, and the insurrections it gave rise to in the other imperialist powers, are a shining example not only of opposition to the war but also of an attack on the power of the bourgeoisie.

Today we are still far from such a revolutionary period. Similarly, the conditions of the proletariat’s struggle are different from those that existed at the time of the first imperialist slaughter. On the other hand, what remains the same, in the face of imperialist war, are the fundamental principles of proletarian internationalism and the duty of revolutionary organisations to defend these principles tooth and nail, against the stream when necessary, within the proletariat.

The political tradition that has fought for, and continues to fight for, internationalism against imperialist war

The villages of Zimmerwald and Kienthal in Switzerland became famous as the meeting places of the socialists from both sides in the First World War to begin an international struggle to bring the butchery to an end and denounce the patriotic leaders of the Social Democratic Parties. It was at these meetings that the Bolsheviks, supported by the Bremen Left and the Dutch Left, brought forward the essential principles of internationalism against imperialist war that are still valid today:

No support of either imperialist camp; the rejection of all pacifist illusions; and the recognition that only the working class and its revolutionary struggle could put an end to the system that is based on the exploitation of labour power and permanently generates imperialist war.

In the 1930s and 1940s it was only the political current now called the Communist Left which held fast to the internationalist principles developed by the Bolsheviks in the First World War. The Italian Left and the Dutch Left actively opposed both sides in the second imperialist world war, rejecting both the fascist and anti-fascist justifications for the slaughter - unlike the other currents which claimed the proletarian revolution, including Trotskyism. In so doing these Communist Lefts refused any support to the imperialism of Stalinist Russia in the conflict.

Today, in the face of the acceleration of imperialist conflict in Europe, the political organisations based on the heritage of the Communist Left continue to hold up the banner of consistent proletarian internationalism, and provide a reference point for those defending working class principles.

That’s why organisations and groups of the Communist Left today, small in number and not well known, have decided to issue this common statement, and broadcast as widely as possible the internationalist principles that were forged against the barbarism of two world wars.

 

No support for any side in the imperialist carnage in Ukraine.

No illusions in pacifism: capitalism can only live through endless wars.

Only the working class can put an end to imperialist war through its class struggle against exploitation leading to the overthrow of the capitalist system.

Workers of the World, Unite!

--------------------------------------------

International Communist Current (www.en.internationalism.org [167])

Istituto Onorato Damen http://www.istitutoonoratodamen.it [168]

Internationalist Voice (en.internationalistvoice.org) [169]

Internationalist Communist Perspective (Korea) fully supports the joint statement (국제코뮤니스트전망 - International Communist Perspective (jinbo.net) [170]

 

 

 

 

Militants of the GCF, Paris 1945: left to right, Chirik, Bricanier, Mousso and Evrard

The last time this series looked specifically at the problem of the state in the period of transition was in our introduction to the theses on the state produced by the Gauche Communiste de France in 1946[1]. We presented this text as an important continuation of the work of the Italian left which, during the 1930s, had produced a number of articles examining the lessons of the defeat of the Russian revolution, in which the problem of the state was seen as central. Building on the warnings by Marx and Engels against the tendency of the state to alienate itself from society, the characterisation of the state as a temporary scourge which the proletariat will have to use while limiting to the maximum its most harmful aspects, the articles of Vercesi and in particular Mitchell (a member of the Belgian Fraction) had already drawn a distinction between the necessary function of the “proletarian state” and the real, effective power of the proletariat[2]. The GCF text took a step further by arguing that the state, by its very nature, is foreign to the proletariat as the bearer of communism and thus of a stateless society.

In our introduction to the Theses we noted certain weaknesses or ambiguities in the 46 text (on the unions, the role of the party, the economic programme of the revolution), most of which would be substantially overcome through the process of discussion and clarification which was at the heart of the GCF’s activities. But these advances – particularly on the unions and the party - were corrected in other texts[3] since to our knowledge the group didn’t produce any further documents on the question of the transition period itself.

The 1946 theses were a product of the collective work of the GCF and drafted by Marc Chirik, who had played a key role in the formation and theoretical development of the group. When the group broke up after 1952 (despite Marc’s efforts to maintain it), Marc was “exiled” to Venezuela where he was not engaged in any organised political activity for over a decade. However, this was not a period of disengagement from political reflection on his part and as soon as the times began a-changing, in the early to mid-60s, Marc had formed a discussion circle with some young elements, the result of which was the formation of the Internacialismo group in 1964. This group in turn eventually became the section in Venezuela of the ICC.  

Marc himself returned to Europe in order to take part in the historic events of May-June 1968 and stayed to help form the group Révolution Internationale, which would become the French section of the ICC.

To the generation of revolutionaries who emerged from the international wave of struggles sparked off by May 68, revolution didn’t seem such a distant prospect. A number of new groups and militants, having rediscovered the tradition of the communist left, not only set about demarcating themselves from the left wing of capital by re-appropriating the fundamental class positions elaborated during the period of the counter-revolution, but also plunged into debating the character of the anticipated revolution and the road towards a communist society. The approach towards the transitional period and its semi-state which had been put forward by the GCF and further elaborated by Marc soon became a focal point for many passionate discussions among the new groups. A majority of RI and the groups aligned to it were convinced by Marc’s arguments but it was made clear from the start that this particular analysis could not be considered as a class line because history had not yet definitively established its veracity. The discussion thus continued within the newly-formed ICC and with other groups involved in the discussions about the international regroupment of the newly emerging revolutionary forces which marked this phase. The first issue of the International Review contained contributions on the transition period from Marc (on behalf of Révolution Internationale) and a long article developing ideas along the same lines written a young CD Ward on behalf of World Revolution in the UK, as well as a text from Rivoluzione Internazionale in Italy arguing in favour of the proletarian character of the transitional state, and a further contribution by Revolutionary Perspectives, which was the nucleus of the future Communist Workers’ Organisation. These texts were written for the 1975 conference which saw the formal constitution of the ICC; although there was no time to hold the discussion during the meeting they were published as a contribution to an ongoing debate.

It is no exaggeration to say that these debates were heated. The Workers Voice group in Liverpool soon broke off from the regroupment discussions, citing the future ICC’s majority position on the transitional period as proof of its counter-revolutionary character, since it allegedly meant, in a future revolutionary process, advocating a state that would dominate the workers’ councils. As we argued at the time (“Sectarianism unlimited” in World Revolution 3), this was not only a false accusation but also to a large extent a pretext aimed at preserving WV’s local autonomy from the threat of being swallowed up in a larger international organisation; but other reactions of the time revealed the extent to which the acquisitions of the Italian communist left had been lost in the fog of the counter-revolution. At the Second  ICC Congress in 1977, for example, where a resolution (and counter-resolution) on the state in the period of transition were on the agenda, a delegate from Battaglia Comunista, which then and still today claims to be the most consistent continuator of the tradition of the Italian left, seemed dumbfounded by the very notion of questioning the proletarian character of the transitional state, even if this view was merely a logical conclusion drawn from Bilan’s contributions in the 1930s.

As it happened, although the resolution expressing the majority position was eventually adopted at the ICC’s Third Congress in 1979, at the 1977 congress it was judged that the debate had not matured sufficiently and should continue. A number of the contributions to this debate were later published as a pamphlet which shows the richness of the debate[4]. Within the ICC, the minority was not homogeneous but tended towards the idea that the position of Bilan on the state in the transition period had been the correct one, whereas the GCF had departed from the marxist conception. Some of the comrades of the minority later rallied to the majority position whereas others began putting in question other key developments made by the GCF and taken forward by the ICC, notably on the question of the party. Most of these dispersed in different directions – one towards a more orthodox Bordigist position, another embarking on a brief attempt to form a new version of Bilan (Fraction Communiste Internationaliste), while others imbibed the dangerous concoction of anarchism, Bordigism and the defence of so-called ‘workers’ terrorism’ which marked the trajectory of the Groupe Communiste Internationaliste[5].

In this article, we are going to focus on three contributions to the discussion within the ICC from that period written by Marc Chirik. This approach continues and concludes the three preceding articles in this series which have considered the contribution to communist theory made by particular individuals within the proletarian political movement during the period of counter-revolution (i.e. Damen, Bordiga, Munis and Castoriadis). This is not because we approach these individual communists in the manner of academic journals where theory is always seen as the intellectual property of this or that specialist; on the contrary, as class militants, these comrades could only make their contributions with the aim of developing something which, far from being the copyright of individuals, only exists to become the universal property of the proletariat – the communist programme. But for us the communist programme is a work of association where individual comrades are able to make their particular contribution within a wider collectivity. And precisely the outstanding quality of Marc Chirik was his capacity to “universalise” what he had acquired, through living experience, on the organisational and programmatic level - to transmit it to other comrades. Thus, within the history of the ICC, there have been a number of important contributions to this general effort to illuminate the road towards communism by other comrades of the organisation – some of which we will refer to in this article. But there is no doubt that the texts written by Marc are examples of his profound grasp of the marxist method and deserve to be re-examined in some detail.  We apologise in advance for the length of some of the quotations from these articles, but we think it’s best to let Marc’s words speak for themselves as much as possible.

Periods of transition in history

The article published in IR 1 is notable for posing the question of “transition periods” in a broad historical framework.

“Human history is made up of different stable societies linked to a given mode of production and therefore to stable social relations. These societies are based on the dominant economic laws inherent in them. They are made up of fixed social classes and are based on appropriate superstructures. The basic stable societies in written history have been: slave society, Asiatic society, feudal society and capitalist society.

What distinguishes periods of transition from periods when society is stable is the decomposition of the old social structures and the formation of new structures. Both are linked to a development of the productive forces and are accompanied by the appearance and development of new classes as well as the development of ideas and institutions corresponding to these classes.

The period of transition is not a distinct mode of production, but a link between two modes of production - the old and the new. It is the period during which the germs of the new mode of production slowly develop to the detriment of the old, until they supplant the old mode of production and constitute a new, dominant mode of production.

Between two stable societies (and this will be true for the period between capitalism and communism as it has been in the past), the period of transition is an absolute necessity. This is due to the fact that the sapping of the basis of the existence of the old society does not automatically imply the maturation and ripening of the conditions of the new. In other words, the decline of the old society does not automatically mean the maturation of the new, but is only the condition for it to take place.

Decadence and the period of transition are two very distinct phenomena. Every period of transition presupposes the decomposition of the old society whose mode and relations of production have attained the extreme limit of their possible development. However, every period of decadence does not necessarily signify a period of transition, in as much as the period of transition represents a step towards a new mode of production. Similarly ancient Greece did not enjoy the historical conditions necessary for a transcendence of slavery; neither did ancient Egypt.

Decadence means the exhaustion of the old social mode of production; transition means the surging up of the new forces and conditions which will permit a resolution and transcendence of the old contradictions”.

At the time this text was written, the emerging revolutionary movement was already faced with the influence of the precursors of today’s “communisation” current, particularly in the writing of Jacques Camatte and Jean Barrot (Dauvé). Indeed the ICC had already been through a split by a group of members who had come from the Trotskyist organization Lutte Ouvrière but had quickly fallen for the pseudo-radical notions which marked what we at the time called “modernism”: that the working class had become, in essence, a class for capital, that its struggle for immediate demands were a dead-end, and that the communist revolution meant the immediate self-negation of the working class rather than its political affirmation through the dictatorship of the proletariat. In this vision, the idea of a transition period directed by the proletariat was denounced as no more than the perpetuation of capital: the process of communisation obviated any need for a phase of transition between capitalism and communism[6]. That such ideas were gaining currency in the revolutionary movement was also shown by the evolution of one of the groups that attended the conference – the Revolutionary Workers’ Group, based in Chicago, which had also come out of Trotskyism but which was now discovering the uselessness of the fight for economic demands (see the Preface to IR 1). Meanwhile the Revolutionary Perspectives group insisted that an isolated proletarian bastion should consciously seal itself off from the world market while implementing all kinds of communist measures inside its borders: this was less a modernist aberration than a belated apology for the “War Communism” of the 1918-21 period in Russia, but it shares with the communisers the idea that it is possible to introduce authentic communist measures in a single country or region[7]

Marc’s text provides us with a solid starting point for criticising all these approaches. On the one hand it insists that every new mode of production has been the product of a more or less long period of transition, which is “not a distinct mode of production, but a link between two modes of production - the old and the new”. This certainly applies to the period of transition to communism, which is anything but a stable mode of production (sometimes misleadingly described as “socialism”). On the contrary, it will be the theatre of a sustained combat to push forward the communist transformation of social relations against the immense economic and ideological weight of the old society and indeed of the thousands of years of class society which preceded capitalism. This will be true even after the point at which the proletariat has conquered power on a world scale and is even more applicable to situations where the first proletarian outposts confront a hostile capitalist environment.

At the same time, the text goes on to explain that the period of transition to communism differs profoundly from all previous such transitions:

• its aim is not the institution of a new form of class exploitation, but the abolition of all forms of exploitation;
• whereas previous transitions had been the product of blind economic laws, communism is a society in which all production and distribution are subject to conscious human activity;
• unlike previous modes of production, communism cannot exist in one part of the globe but must be planetary in scale;
• unlike previous transitions, where the old ruling classes and their state forms could to a considerable extent adapt to the rising mode of production, communism demands the complete destruction of the economic and political structures of capitalism.

The consequence of all this is that the period of transition to communism cannot begin inside capitalism, through an accretion of economic changes which serve as the basis of the power of the new ruling class, but only after an essentially political act – the violent dismantling of the existing state machine. This is the starting point for the rejection of any idea that a real process of communisation[8] can begin before the destruction of the world-wide power of the bourgeoisie. Any economic and social changes undertaken before that point has been reached are essentially stop-gaps, contingent and emergency measures that should not be painted as a kind of “really existing communism”, and their main aim would be to reinforce the political domination of the working class in a given area.

The proletariat’s economic policy

Indeed, even after the beginning of the period of transition proper, the text warns against the idealisation of the immediate measures taken by the working class:

“On the economic plane, the period of transition consists of an economic policy (and no longer a political economy) of the proletariat with a view to accelerating the process of universal socialisation of production and distribution. But the realisation of this programme of integral communism at all levels, while being the goal affirmed and followed by the working class, will still be subject to immediate, conjunctural and contingent conditions in the period of transition which only pure utopian voluntarism would ignore. The proletariat will immediately attempt to advance as far as possible towards its goal while recognising the inevitable concessions it will be obliged to tolerate. Two dangers threaten such a policy:

• the idealisation of this policy, presenting it as communist when it is nothing of the sort
• the denial of the necessity of such a policy in the name of idealistic voluntarism”.

The whole spirit running through the text is one of revolutionary realism. We are talking about the most radical social transformation since the advent of the human species and it is absurd to think that this process – which for the vast majority of humanity today is seen as impossible, contrary to human nature, at best “a nice idea that would never work” – could in fact take place all in one go: in historical terms, overnight. 

The text goes on to outline some more specific aspects of this “economic policy”, which in fact remain quite general: 

• Immediate socialisation of the great capitalist concentrations and of the principal centres of productive activity.
• Planning of production and distribution--the criteria of production must be the maximum satisfaction of needs and no longer of accumulation.
• Massive reduction of the working day.
• Substantial rise in the standard of living.
• The attempt to abolish remuneration based on wages and on its money form.
• Socialisation of consumption and of the satisfaction of needs (transportation, leisure, meals, etc).
• The relationship between the collectivised sectors and sectors of production which are still individual - particularly in the countryside - must tend towards an organised collective exchange through co-operatives, thus suppressing the market and individual exchange.

Marc’s text begins by the following warning - “it is always with the greatest caution that revolutionaries have raised the question of the period of transition. The number, the complexity, and above all, the newness of the problems the proletariat must solve prevent any elaboration of detailed plans of the future society; any attempt to do so risks being turned into a straitjacket which will stifle the revolutionary activity of the class”. It is quite understandable that Marc only provides us with a very general outline of a possible “economic policy” of the proletariat. One of the points is rather too general  - “substantial rise in the standard of living” - to do much with, but the others do indeed indicate the general direction; and one clearly marks an advance over the 1946 text, i.e. when it says that “the criteria of production must be the maximum satisfaction of needs and no longer of accumulation”, since the 1946 text still tended to see the proletariat’s “development of the productive forces” as a process of accumulation which can only mean the expansion of value. In fact, we are only too aware today that both the economic and ecological crises of the system are the result of  an “over-accumulation” and that real development will necessarily have to take the form of a profound transformation and reorganisation of the productive forces accumulated under capitalism (involving, for example, the conversion from highly polluting forms of production, energy and transport, the reduction of capitalist mega-cities to a far more human scale, massive reforestation, etc).

Regarding the distribution of the social product in the transitional period, the text does not pronounce on the debate on “labour time vouchers” based on Marx’s proposals in the Critique of the Gotha Programme and strongly advocated, for example by the Dutch council communists of the GIC in the Grundprinzipien[9] and by the CWO in their most recent article on the transition period[10], but Marc’s text sets the tone by insisting both on the attempt to get rid of wage and monetary forms and on the widespread socialisation of consumption: free provision of transport, communal meals etc. In the WR text in IR 1 the position is more explicit in its rejection of the labour time vouchers. Although Marx did not consider these vouchers to be a form of money since they could not be accumulated, the WR article argues that the labour time system

“does not really go beyond the capitalist notion of labour as an 'exchange' between the individual, atomised worker and 'society'. The system of labour-time vouchers would tend to divide those proletarians who are able to work from those who are not (a situation which may well be intensified in a period of international revolutionary crisis), and would furthermore drive a wedge between proletarians and other strata, inhibiting the process of social integration. Such a system would demand an immense bureaucratic supervision of each workers' labour, and would most easily degenerate into a form of money-wages at a downturn of the revolution (these drawbacks apply both to the period of the civil war and to the transition period itself).

A system of rationing under the control of the workers' councils would more easily lend itself to democratic regulation of the total resources of a proletarian bastion and to the encouragement of feelings of solidarity among all members of the class. But we have no illusions that this or any other system will represent a 'guarantee' against the return of wage slavery in its most naked form”

However, we don’t think that we can say any more definitely than in 1975 that this debate on the immediate economic measures of the proletariat in power has been settled once and for all. On the contrary, while it can and should continue today (we aim to return to the question in a future article in this series), it can only be settled by a future revolutionary praxis.

The state as a scourge

Having defined the general character of the transition period, the text goes on to reaffirm the position on the state which had already been outlined by the text of the GCF in 1946:

“The transitional society is still a society divided into classes and so there will necessarily arise within it that institution peculiar to all societies divided into classes: the STATE. With all the limitations and precautionary measures with which we will surround this institution (functionaries will be elected and revocable, their consumption will be equal to that of a worker, a unification will exist between the legislative and executive functions, etc.), and which make this state into a 'semi-state', we must never lose sight of the state's historic anti-socialist, and therefore anti-proletarian and essentially conservative, nature. The state remains the guardian of the status quo.

We recognise the inevitability of this institution which the proletariat will have to utilise as a necessary evil in order to: break the resistance of the waning capitalist class and preserve a united administrative, and political framework in this period when society is still rent by antagonistic interests.

But we categorically reject the idea of making this state the standard-bearer of communism. By its own nature (‘bourgeois nature in its essence’ - Marx), it is essentially an organ for the conservation of the status quo and a restraint on communism. Thus, the state can neither be identified with communism nor with the proletariat which is the bearer of communism. The proletariat is by definition the most dynamic class in history since it carries out the suppression of all classes including. itself. This is why, while utilising the state, the proletariat expresses its dictatorship not through the state, but over the state. This is also why the proletariat can under no circumstances allow this institution (the state) to intervene by violence within the class, nor to be the arbiter of the discussions and activities of the class organs - the councils and the revolutionary party”.

It was this position in particular - the conservative nature and non-proletarian nature of the state – which was the subject of divergent arguments within the ICC, not only with regard to the transitional state, but the state in general.

Origins of the state and all that

The 1981 pamphlet included a text by Marc called ‘The origins of the state and all that’, which was a response to a text[11] written by two comrades of the minority, M and S, defending the notion of the proletarian state on the basis of an examination of the historical origins of the state. M and S argued that, since the state is in essence the creation and instrument of a ruling class, it can play a revolutionary role in periods when that class is itself a revolutionary or at least actively progressive force, while it is only doomed to play a reactionary role when that class itself becomes decadent or obsolete. Their text thus rejects the definition of the state as being “conservative” in its essential nature. As for its essential function, it is as an instrument of repression of one class by another. Accordingly, during the transition period the state can and indeed must have a proletarian character, since it is nothing but the creation of the working class with the aim of exercising its dictatorship.

In his response, Marc provides a short but insightful history of the way that the proletarian movement has, through its own debates and above all its own experiences in the class struggle, developed its understanding of the question of the state: from the first ideas of Babeuf and the Equals about the conquest of the state by armed revolution to the intuitions of the utopians about communism being a society without the state; from the critique of Hegel’s state-worship by the young Marx to the lessons drawn by the Communist League from the revolutions of 1848 and above all by Marx and Engels from the Paris Commune of 1871, when it first became clear that the existing state was to be dismantled not conquered. The survey goes on to mention the studies of primitive communism by Morgan which made it possible for Engels to analyse the historical origins of the state, passing by the strengths, weaknesses, and incomplete insights of Lenin in relation to the experience of the Russian revolution, and finally to the efforts of the communist left to synthesise and develop all the advances made by the preceding expressions of the movement. The aim here is to show that our understanding of the problem of the state and the period of transition is not the product of an invariant marxist orthodoxy but has evolved and will indeed continue to evolve in the light of real experience and reflection on that experience.

The central core of the text is the reference to Engels’ famous passage about how the state first appears in the long transitional period when primitive communist society is giving way to the emergence of definite class divisions – not as the conscious creation ex nihilo of a ruling class but as an emanation of society at a certain stage of its development: “The state is therefore by no means a power imposed on society from without; just as little is it ‘the reality of the moral idea’, ‘the image and the reality of reason,’ as Hegel maintains. Rather, it is a product of society at a particular stage of development; it is the admission that this society has involved itself in insoluble self-contradiction and is cleft into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to exorcise. But in order that these antagonisms, classes with conflicting economic interests, shall not consume themselves and society in fruitless struggle, a power, apparently standing above society, has become necessary to moderate the conflict and keep it within the bounds of ‘order’; and this power, arisen out of society, but placing itself above it and increasingly alienating itself from it, is the state”.[12]

Marc explains that this does not mean that the state has a neutral or mediating role in society, but it does show that simply defining the state as ‘bodies of armed men’ whose function is to exert repression against the exploited or oppressed classes is inadequate, because the state’s primary role is to hold society together and for this repression alone can never be sufficient. Hence the need to use ideological institutions, forms of political representation, etc. As Marx put in The King of Prussia and Social Reform (1844), “from a political point of view, the state and the organization of society are not two different things. The state is the organisation of society” – with the qualification of course that we are still talking about a society divided into classes.

Marc then returns to Engels to emphasise that this function of organising society, holding it together, means preserving the existing relations of production and thus “As the state arose from the need to keep class antagonisms in check, but also arose in the thick of the fight between the classes, it is normally the state of the most powerful, economically ruling class, which by its means becomes also the politically ruling class, and so acquires new means of holding down and exploiting the oppressed class”[13].

However, this necessary identification with the state by exploiting classes of the past doesn’t apply to the proletariat because, as an exploited class, it doesn’t have its own economy. And we can add: faced with a situation where the old state has been dismantled and the old bourgeois society is in a condition of dissolution, the proletariat will still need an instrument for preventing the conflicts between itself and the other non-exploiting classes from tearing society apart. And since this situation is, in a sense, a return to the original conditions which led to the formation of the state, state forms will appear, emerge, manifest themselves whether the working class likes it or not.  And precisely because of this, the transitional state, however much the proletariat is able to dominate it, will not be a purely proletarian organ but will – as the Workers Opposition was already able to discern in relation to the Soviet state in 1921 – have a “heterogenous” nature[14], based on territorial communes or soviet type bodies in which the entire non-exploiting population is necessarily represented.

Regarding the “conservative” role of the state, a clarification of the original 1946 text is in order, where the text says that “in the course of history, the state has appeared as a conservative and reactionary factor”. But conservative and reactionary are not exactly the same. The function of the state is always conservative in the sense of protecting, codifying, and stabilising developments that take place in economy and society. Depending on the epoch, this role can globally serve the progressive development of the productive forces; in periods of decadence, the same role becomes overtly reactionary in the sense of backward looking, preserving all that is past and obsolete. The key difference with the minority was not here, but with their idea that the dynamic movement - the movement towards the future - came from the state and not from society. An article published in IR 11[15] and signed RV argues forcefully that, even in the bourgeois revolution, which comrades of the minority were most keen to reference as an example of the state being a revolutionary instrument, the really radical movement pushing for the overthrow of the old regime came from “below”, from the “plebian” movement in the streets, the general meetings in the “sections”, or the first Paris Commune of 1793 - which were constantly coming up against the economic and political boundaries imposed by the bourgeoisie’s central state power in its quest for order and stability. This is even more the case for the proletarian revolution where the communist transformation led by the working class will constantly have to go beyond the legally defined limits laid down by the official organisation of the transitional society, the state.

The state as incarnation of alienation

In the third text, published in 1978 in IR 15[16], Marc elaborates on a number of the issues posed in the previous two articles, but in particular it picks up and develops on a key insight in the quote from Engels used in the previous article: “this power, arisen out of society, but placing itself above it and increasingly alienating itself from it, is the state”.[17]

As Marc notes, recognising the state as one of the most primordial manifestations of man’s alienation from himself, or from what he can be, is one of Marx’s earliest political insights and was key to his critique of the Hegelian philosophy:

“In his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of the State[18], with which he began his life as a revolutionary thinker and militant, Marx not only fought against Hegel’s idealism which held that the idea was the point of departure for all movement (making the ‘idea the subject, the real subject, or properly speaking, the predicate’ in all cases, as he wrote in Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of the State), he also vehemently denounced the conclusions of this philosophy, which made the state the mediator between social man and universal political man, the reconciliator of the split between private man and universal man. Hegel, noting the growing conflict between civil society and the state, wanted the solution to this contradiction to be found in the self-limitation of civil society and its voluntary integration into the state, for as he said, ‘it is only in the state that man has an existence which conforms with reason” and ‘everything that man is, he owes to the state and it is there that his being resides. All his value and spiritual reality, man only has them through the state’ (Hegel, Reason in History). Against this delirious apology for the state Marx said ‘human emancipation is only completed when man has recognized and organized his own forces as social forces, so that social force is no longer separated from himself in the form of political force’, ie the state (from The Jewish Question)”.

Right from the start, therefore, Marx’s theoretical work took up a position against the state as such, which was a product, an expression of, and an active factor in, the alienation of humanity. Against Hegel’s demand for the strengthening of the state, and its absorption of civil society, Marx resolutely insisted that the withering away of the state was synonymous with the emancipation of humanity, and this fundamental notion would be enriched and developed throughout his life and work.

This is argued most explicitly in the section of the Critique dealing with the question of the vote, which for Hegel strictly maintained the separation between the legislative assembly and civil society, since the electors did not in any sense exercise a mandate over the elected. Marx saw a different potential, if the vote was to become universal and if “the electors had the choice either to deliberate and decide on public affairs for themselves or to delegate specific individuals to perform these tasks on their behalf.” The result of such a “direct democracy” would be this:

“In unrestricted suffrage, both active and passive, civil society has actually raised itself for the first time to an abstraction of itself, to political existence as its true universal and essential existence. But the full achievement of this abstraction is at once also the transcendence [Aufhebung] of the abstraction. In actually establishing its political existence as its true existence civil society has simultaneously established its civil existence, in distinction from its political existence, as inessential. And with the one separated, the other, its opposite, falls. Within the abstract political state the reform of voting advances the dissolution [Auflösung] of this political state, but also the dissolution of civil society”

These words might still be couched in the language of democracy but they also tend to transcend it, since they anticipate not only the dissolution of the state but also of civil – i.e. bourgeois - society. And in the year that followed Marx was to write the “Introduction” to the Critique, which unlike the latter was actually published (in the Deutsch [172]-Französische [172] Jahrbücher [172] of 1844) and to compose the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. In the first, Marx identifies the proletariat as the agent for revolutionary change, and in the second, he definitively declares for communism as the only possible future for human society.  

The Negation of the Negation

Returning to Marc’s text, it is significant that he again frames his whole line of inquiry in a very broad historical arc. As in the previous text on the origins of the state, where he talks at some length about “gentile” society and its demise, he begins with the dissolution of primitive communist society and the first emergence of the state. This he defines as the initial Antithesis or Negation which ensures that all subsequent class societies, despite all the changes that have taken place from one mode of production to another, maintain an essential unity and continuity – all the way to the future abolition of classes and thus the withering away of the state, which is the synthesis, the “Negation of the Negation, the restoration of the human community on a higher level”. 

In the whole long epoch of the first Negation, of class society, the state increasingly tends to perpetuate itself and its own private interests, to alienate itself more and more from society. Thus the increasingly totalitarian power of the state reaches its high point in the phenomenon of state capitalism that belongs to the epoch of capitalism’s decline. “With capitalism, exploitation and oppression have reached a paroxysm, because capitalism is the condensed product of all previous societies of exploitation of man by man. The state in capitalism has achieved its destiny, becoming the hideous and bloody monster we know today. With state capitalism it has realized the absorption of civil society, it has become the manager of the economy, the boss of production, the absolute and undisputed master of all members of society, of their lives and activities; it has unleashed terror and death and presided over a generalised barbarism”.

This whole process is thus a key to measuring the distance between humanity as it could be and humanity as it now stands: in short the spiralling alienation of humanity, which has reached its most extreme point in bourgeois society. In opposition to this runs the “real movement”, the unfolding of communism, which as a precondition to its future flowering, must ensure the withering away of the state, fulfilling Marx’s promise of a time “when man has recognised and organised his own forces as social forces”. 

This panoramic view of history allows us to better understand the essentially conservative nature of the state, its necessary antagonism to the dynamic that emerges from the social, the human sphere:

“We must be extremely careful not to fall into the confusion and eclecticism which holds that the state is both conservative and revolutionary. This would turn reality on its head and open the door to Hegel’s error which makes the state the subject of the movement of society.

The thesis of the conservative nature of the state, which is above all concerned with its own conservation, is closely and dialectically linked to the notion that the emancipation of humanity can be identified with the withering away of the state”. 

In Marc’s article, in the paragraph that opens this section, it is pointed out that Hegel’s cardinal error about history, in which he sees the true, forward-moving force as the state, is also committed at the logical level, in his confusion between subject and predicate, idea and reality, which Marx also criticises at length in the Critique: “Family and civil society are the presuppositions of the state; they are the really active things; but in speculative philosophy it is reversed. But if the Idea is made subject, then the real subjects - civil society, family, circumstances, caprice, etc. - become unreal, and take on the different meaning of objective moments of the Idea”[19].

The form of the transitional state

The IR 15 article also goes into greater detail about the form of the transitional state:

“We can put forward the following principles for the structure of the transitional society:

1. The whole non-exploiting population is organised on the basis of territorial soviets or communes, centralized from the bottom up, and giving rise to the Commune-state.

2. The workers participate in this soviet organisation, individually like all members of society, and collectively through their autonomous class organs, at all levels of the soviet organisation.

3. The proletariat ensures that it has a preponderant representation at all levels, but especially the higher levels.

4. The proletariat retains and maintains complete freedom in relation to the state. On no pretext will the proletariat subordinate the decision-making power of its own organs, the workers’ councils, to that of the state; it must see that the opposite is the case.

5. In particular it won’t tolerate the interference of the state in the life and activity of the organised class; it will deprive the state of any right or possibility of repressing the working class.

6. The proletariat retains its arms outside of any control by the state”.

These perspectives are not recipes for the cookbooks of the future; they “are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer” (Communist Manifesto). On the contrary, they are the conclusions that need to be drawn from the real experience of the Russian revolution. Here, in its first heroic period, the specific organs of the working class – factory committees, Red Guards, soviets elected by workplace assemblies – were part of a broader network of soviets embracing the whole non-exploiting population. But Marc’s outline of the structure of the transitional state does make more explicit the necessity for the working class to exert its control over this general state apparatus, an idea that was as yet only implicit in the Russian revolution, for example in the notion that votes from workers’ assemblies and delegates should count higher than the votes of the delegates of the peasants and other non-exploiting classes. At the same time, the outline overcomes certain key errors made in the Russia of 1917, notably the fact that, once the Civil War began in 1918, the factory-based militias, the Red Guards, were dissolved into the territorial Red Army. This meant that the workers were deprived of a crucial instrument for defending their specific interests, even against the transitional state and its army, if need be. The paragraph that follows in Marc’s text also insists on another essential lesson of the Russian experience: 

“It only remains for us to affirm that the political party of the class is not a state organ. For a long time revolutionaries did not hold this view, but this was a sign of the immaturity of the objective situation and their own lack of experience. The experience of the Russian Revolution has shown that this view is obsolete. The structure of a state based on political parties is typical of bourgeois democracy, of the bourgeois state. Society in the transition period cannot delegate its power to political parties, i.e. specialised bodies. The semi-state will be based on the soviet system, on the direct and constant participation of the masses in the life and functioning of society. This implies that the masses can at any time recall their representatives, replace them, exert a constant and direct control over them. The delegation of power to parties, of whatever kind, reintroduces the division between power and society, and is thus a major barrier to its emancipation.

Moreover, the assumption of or participation in state power by the proletarian party will, as the Russian experience shows, profoundly alter its functions. Without entering into a discussion on the function of the party and its relation to the class - which raises another debate - it is enough here to say that the contingent demands of the state would end up prevailing over the party, making it identify with the state and separate  itself from the class, to the point of opposing the class”.

The workers’ councils of the future

A question needs to be asked regarding this sketch of a possible transitional state of the future. It is based on the fundamental principle that the proletariat, as the only communist class, must at all times maintain its autonomy from all other classes. The direct translation of this concept is the call for the workers’ councils to exert their dictatorship over the state, and the social composition of these councils is clear: they are city-wide councils made up of delegates elected by all the workplaces in that city. The problem for us is that this notion was put forward at a time – in the 1970s – when the working class still had a definite sense of class identity and, in the central countries of capital, was concentrated in large workplaces like factories, mines, shipyards, etc. But over the last few decades these concentrations have largely been broken up by the process of “globalisation” and the working class has not only been materially atomised by these changes but has also subjected to a relentless ideological offensive, above all the since the collapse of so-called ‘Communism’ after 1989: an offensive based on the idea that the working class no longer exists, that it is now at best a kind of underclass, even a racial underclass, as in the disgusting notion that the working class is by definition “white”. In the same way our class has been further fragmented by the process of “Uberisation” that seeks to present each worker as an individual entrepreneur. But above all it has been assailed by the propaganda which states that the class struggle is a total anachronism and can only lead not to the formation of a more human society, but to the worst forms of state terror, as in Stalin’s USSR[20].

These changes and campaigns have brought great difficulties for the working class and pose real problems about the formation of the workers’ councils of the future. It’s not that the council idea has totally disappeared or turned into a mere appendix of bourgeois democracy. The underlying notion appeared, for example, in the mass assemblies in the movement of the Indignados in Spain in 2011 - and against those groups like Democracy Now who wanted to use the assemblies to give a kind of vampiric life to the parliamentary system, there were those in the movement who argued that these assemblies were a higher form of self-government than the old parliamentary system. The majority of the protagonists of these assemblies were indeed proletarians, but they were in the main students, unemployed, precarious workers, and they overcame their atomisation by coming together in the town squares or in more local neighbourhood assemblies. At the same time, there was little or no corresponding tendency to hold assemblies in the larger workplaces.

In a sense, this form of assembly organisation was a return to the form of the Commune in 1871, which was made up of delegates from the neighbourhoods (but above all the working class neighbourhoods) of Paris. The workers’ councils or soviets of 1905 or 1917 had been a step forward from the Commune because they were a definite means for enabling the class to organise as a class. The “territorial” form, by contrast, is much more vulnerable to the idea that it is the citizens who are coming together, not a class with its own programme, and we saw this weakness very clearly in the Indignados movement. And more recently, the social revolts that have been sweeping he globe from the Middle East to South America have shown even more clearly the danger of interclassism, of the proletariat being drowned in the protests of the population in general, which are dominated by democratic ideology on the one hand and, on the other, by the despairing, disorganized violence that characterizes the lumpen-proletariat[21].  

We can’t be sure how this problem will be approached in a future mass movement, which may well see the proletariat organising itself through a combination of workplace and street-based mass assemblies. It may also be the case that the autonomy of the working class will have to take on a more directly political character in the future: in other words, that the class organs of the next revolution will define themselves far more than in the past on the basis of their capacity to take up and defend proletarian political positions (such as opposition to parliament and trade unions, the unmasking of the capitalist left and so on). This by no means implies that the workplaces, and the councils that emanate from them, will cease to be a crucial focus for the coming together of the working class as a class. This will certainly be the case in countries like China whose frenzied industrialisation has been the counter-point to the de-industrialisation of parts of capitalism in the West. But even in the latter, there are still considerable concentrations of workers in sectors like health, transport, communication, administration and education (and in the manufacturing sector as well…). And we have seen some examples of how workers can overcome the disadvantages of being dispersed into small enterprises, for example in the struggle of the steel workers in Vigo in Spain in 2006, where assemblies of strikers in the town centre grouped together workers from a number of small steel factories. We will return to these questions in a future article. But what is certain is that, in any future revolutionary upheaval, the class autonomy of the proletariat of the proletariat will involve a real assimilation of the experience of previous revolutions, and above all, of the experience of the post-revolutionary state. We can say with some confidence that the critique of the state elaborated by a line of revolutionaries that links Marx, Engels and Lenin to Bilan and Marc Chirik both in the GCF and the ICC, will be indispensable to the reacquisition, by the working class, of its own history, and thus to the implementation of its communist future.

C D Ward, August 2019

At the beginning of 2020, the global Covid crisis represented the product, but above all constituted a powerful accelerant, of the decomposition of the capitalist system on different levels: important economic destabilisation, loss of credibility in the apparatus of the state, accentuation of imperialist tensions.

Today the war in Ukraine represents a further step in this intensification through a major characteristic of capitalism’s descent into its period of decadence and, in particular, into its phase of decomposition: the exacerbation of militarism.

The brutality of this acceleration was not anticipated in previous reports (cf. The Resolution on the International Situation from the 24th ICC Congress) and, even if the Report on Imperialist Tensions of November 2021 in its last point underlined the expansion of militarism and the war economy (point 4.3) and the extension of chaos, instability and bloody warfare (point 4.1), their brutal acceleration in Europe through the massive invasion of Ukraine still caught the ICC by surprise.

The war in Ukraine marks the brutal acceleration of militarism

We should recall, from a general point of view, that the development of militarism does not solely belong to the present stage of decomposition but is intrinsically linked to the decadence of capitalism: “In fact militarism and imperialist war constitute the central manifestation of the entry of capitalism into its period of decadence (...) to such an extent that for revolutionar­ies at the time, imperialism and decadent capi­talism became synonymous.

As Rosa Luxemburg pointed out, since imperi­alism is not a specific manifestation of capitalism but its mode of existence throughout the new historical period, it is not particular states that are imperialist, but all states. In reality, if militarism, imperialism, and war are identified to such an extent with the period of decadence, it is because the latter corre­sponds to the fact that capitalist relations of production have become a barrier to the devel­opment of the productive forces”. (“Militarism and Decomposition”, International Review no. 64, 1991, point 3). During the 75 years which separates August 1914 from November 1989, capitalism has plunged humanity into more than ten years of world war and then, for nearly 45 years, the Cold War and “armed coexistence” between the American and Russian blocs, which were concretised by bloody confrontations between the two alliances (Vietnam, Middle East, Angola, Afghanistan) and by the crazy armaments race which turned out to be fatal for the Eastern Bloc.

In a situation where the bourgeoisie, like the proletariat, became incapable of imposing a solution to the historic crisis of capitalism, the collapse of the Russian Bloc opened up the phase of decomposition, a phase characterised by an all-round explosion of chaos and every man for himself, a product of the break-up of the blocs and the disappearance of the discipline imposed by them. Militarism thus expressed itself through a myriad of barbaric conflicts, often under the form of civil wars, through the explosion of imperialist ambitions and the disintegration of state structures: Somalia, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Donbass and Crimea, the Islamic State, Libya, Sudan (North and South), Yemen, Mali... These also tended to come closer to Europe (Yugoslavia, Crimea and Donbass) and impact on it strongly through floods of refugees.

However, the present war in Ukraine doesn’t only constitute the continuation of the development of militarism in decomposition as described above but, without doubt, represents an extremely important qualitative deepening of its barbaric manifestations, and this for several reasons:

- it’s the first military confrontation of this depth between states unfolding on the doorstep of Europe since 1945, and this is engendering an exodus of millions of refugees towards European countries, to the point where Europe today has become the central theatre of imperialist confrontations;

- this war directly involves the two largest countries in Europe, one of them nuclear-armed and holding other massively destructive weaponry, and the other supported financially and militarily by NATO. This opposition between Russia and NATO tends to remind us of the bloc conflicts of the 1950’s to the 1980’s and the nuclear terror that it engendered, but it occurs today in a much more unpredictable context given the absence of established blocs and the bloc discipline that comes along with them (we will return to this below);

- the breadth of the fighting: tens of thousands killed, the systematic destruction of entire towns, the murder of civilians, the hare-brained bombardment of nuclear facilities, the considerable economic consequences for the whole of the planet, underlining both the growing barbarity and irrationality of conflicts which can end up in a catastrophe for humanity.

The basis of the Ukrainian conflict

The development of the war in Ukraine can only be understood by seeing it as the direct product of the two dominant tendencies marking imperialist relations in the present period of decomposition, tendencies which the ICC has highlighted in its preceding reports: on the one hand the struggle of the United States against the irreversible decline of its global hegemony, which has resulted in it stimulating chaos across the globe; and on the other hand, the sharpening of imperialist ambitions all over the place, which has particularly re-animated Russian aggression, fuelled by ambitions to again take up an important place on the imperialist scene, and by a persistent spirit of revenge.

1. The struggle of the United States against the decline of its hegemony

Since Obama’s presidency, the American bourgeoisie has been more and more focused, both from the economic and military point of view, on its principal challenger, China. On this point there is absolute continuity between the Trump and Biden administrations. However, on the means and context of “neutralising” Russia, some divergences have appeared: Trump aimed rather to use the services of Russia against China, but this option came up against a resistance and opposition of large parts of the American bourgeoisie and its state structures (secret services, army, diplomatic corps... ),  given the shady links tying Trump to a leading Russian faction, but above all because of the distrust towards an alliance with a country that had been the absolute enemy for 50 years. The strategy of the dominant part of the American bourgeoisie represented today by the Biden administration rather aims to deal a decisive blow to Russia, on a scale that would mean it would no longer be a potential threat to the United States: “We want Russia so weakened that it will not be able to do things like invade Ukraine” declared US Minister for Defence, Lloyd Austin on a visit to Kyiv on April 25[1]. The policy of weakening Russia also allows the United States to launch an indirect warning to China (“this is what will happen if you decide to invade Taiwan”) and to impose a strategic reverse on Russia, since the conflict greatly reduces the military potential of Putin and thus transforms his “alliance” with Xi Jinping into a burden for the latter.

The Ukrainian crisis has offered the Biden administration a prime opportunity to implement, in a Machiavellian manner, such a strategy of the progressive weakening of Russia while catching China in a trap.

1. Out and out imperialist demands and Russian ambitions

For its part, the dominant faction of the Russian bourgeoisie has made a major error by mixing-up the tactical debacle of the United States in Kabul with a strategic defeat, whereas it was really a question of a fundamental re-positioning of US forces faced with its central adversary, China. Russian imperialism, in trying to accentuate its return to the foreground since the collapse of the USSR, thought the moment opportune to strike a heavy blow by re-conquering Ukraine (or at least large, strategic regions of it). While for Putin this was part of “Historic Russia”, Ukraine was not only increasingly escaping the Russian zone of influence but risked becoming a spearhead of NATO five hundred kilometres from Moscow.

The decision taken, Putin fell into the trap laid by the United States with the latter demonstrating its capacity for Machiavellian deception very similar to the strategy used against Saddam at the time of the first Gulf war and his invasion of Kuwait: shouting from the rooftops that Russia was about to launch a massive invasion of Ukraine while specifying that they would not intervene, “Ukraine not being part of NATO”. Putin could only interpret this as a retreat from the hard line of Biden and much more so given that initially the American response seemed to be globally limited to the type of retaliatory measures applied after the occupation of Crimea in 2014.

Russia’s invasion profits the United States in the short term

In succeeding to draw Russia into a major war in Ukraine, the Machiavellian manoeuvre of the United States has undeniably allowed it to make important short-term gains on three crucial fronts:

1. The restoration of NATO

The war has obliged the countries that were showing a certain independence to return to the ranks (whereas this didn’t happen at the time of the invasion of Iraq in 2003). In fact, NATO has been restored in all its glory under American control whereas Trump even thought of withdrawing from it – against the advice of his military. Contesting European “allies” have been called to order: thus, Germany and France have broken or are breaking their commercial links with Russia and in the rush have made military investments that the United States has been demanding from them for 20 years. New countries, such as Sweden and Finland have posed their candidatures to NATO and the EU has even become partially dependent on the Unites States for energy. In brief, things have gone quite to the contrary of the illusory hopes of Putin in seeing the European states divided on the question of Ukraine.

2. The weakening of Russia

The war implies a considerable weakening of Russia at the military level but there’s also an economic weakening which will gradually intensify as the war continues. After three months of the “special operation” the results are already dramatic for Russia:

• Russian forces have suffered crushing defeats on the ground, with the failures of the lightning offensive on Kyiv which was also aiming at the elimination of the Zelensky regime, at control of air space over Ukraine, at the taking of Kyiv and Kharkov, at the offensive towards Odessa cutting off Ukraine from its maritime outlets, operating in conjunction with the Transnistria Republic. The retreat of Russian troops from the north of Ukraine and a return to more limited objectives over the Donbass and a less ambitious but just as bloody military strategy of wearing down the enemy, kilometre by kilometre, town by town, with intensive artillery bombardments (Mariupol, like Aleppo in Syria) are admissions that the initial objects were too ambitious for the military capacities of Russian imperialism.
• The Russian army is now without thousands of tanks and armoured vehicles which are out of action; dozens of helicopters and planes shot down, the flagship of the Black Sea fleet (the Moskva) sunk, more and more frequent attacks on fuel and armaments depots and logistic centres in Russia itself. Beyond the figures, it’s above all the modernisation of the Russian army which displays its limits with sophisticated armaments malfunctioning, stocks exhausted and organisational chaos in the army, raising problems of provision of food and fuel, which are moreover growing as a result of widespread corruption, and even through sabotage within the army itself.
• Russian troops have suffered very heavy losses (according to military analysts): more than 15,000 deaths and 40,000 out of action (deaths, wounded, taken prisoner and... desertions), or about 20% of the forces initially engaged, which is equivalent to Russian losses suffered in 8 years of the 1980’s in Afghanistan. The morale of the soldiers, who don’t know why they have not been greeted as liberators, is low and the war is not popular. Also the Russian bourgeoisie has avoided calling up conscripts (for this reason they call it a “special operation” and not a war) and have massive recourse to mercenaries (Wagner Organisation, the Chechen Kadirovni) or sending out thousands of offers on specialised sites for kontracktniki  (short-term contracts for military specialists), generally coming from the poorest regions of Russia. If “war crimes” are by definition “collateral effects” of any war, the massacres of civilians and the destruction of entire towns are particularly salient in this war: on the one hand from the fact of demoralisation and of the despair existing within the Russian units and on the other hand, because of this type of “urban” war is more suited to the Ukrainians given the disparity of the military power between the protagonists.

However Putin cannot stop the hostilities at this stage because he desperately needs trophies in order to justify the operation domestically and save what’s left of the military prestige of Russia, which will mean still more military, human and economic losses. On the other hand, the more the war is prolonged, the more Russian economic and military power will crumble. The United States, cynically, also has no interest in favouring an end to hostilities, even if it means sacrificing military, civilian and urban centres in Ukraine, because it wants to bleed Russia dry. In this sense, the present campaigns around the defence of a martyred Ukraine, Russian war crimes (Bucha, Kramatorsk, Mariupol...) and the question of “Ukrainian genocide”, campaigns organised by the United States and Britain in particular, which takes aim at Putin personally (“Putin as a mad-man”; “Russia is not part of our world”), allows them to counter any possibility of negotiation in the short term (sponsored by France and Germany or by Turkey) and have pushed for the  maximum weakening of Russia, even encouraging regime change. In short, the carnage can only continue and the barbarity spread, probably for months, even years, and this under a particularly bloody and dangerous form with, for example, the potential use of tactical nuclear weapons.

3. China put under pressure

Behind Russia, the United States is basically taking aim at China, putting it under pressure because the fundamental objective of the Machiavellian manoeuvre of the United States is really to weaken the Russo-Chinese duo and deliver a warning to China. The latter has acted in a reserved manner to the Russian invasion deploring “the return to war on the European continent” and calling for the “respect of sovereignty” and for “territorial integrity in line with the principles of the UNO” (Xi Jinping, 8.3.22). In fact, China has close links with Ukraine (14.4% of its imports and 15.3% of Ukrainian exports) and it has signed a “Strategic Cooperation Agreement” with President Zelensky “concerning the pivotal role of his country in the EuroAsiatic project of new Silk Roads” (Le Monde Diplomatique (LMD), April 2022, page 9). But the Ukrainian conflict precisely blocks various branches of the “Silk Road” which, without doubt, constitutes a non-negligible objective of the American manoeuvre.

Since then, far from gaining from the situation generated by the war in Ukraine China has found itself faced with an insoluble dilemma: an already weakened Russia is obliged to ask for help from China, which has however shown itself circumspect and has up to now has openly avoided supporting the “special operation” of its ally, because to aid a weakened Russia also risks weakening China: that would lead to economic reprisals and the loss of commercial routes and markets to Europe and even the United States which are much more important than business with Russia (3% of its imports and 2% of its exports). On the other hand, the collapse of Russian military power and the immense difficulties of its economy will make Russia an ally which will no longer contribute much on its strong point (military expertise) and which on the contrary risks becoming a burden for China.

Also, Peking, while disapproving of them, applies sanctions in a symbolic manner rather than handicapping Russia: the Asiatic Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) has suspended operations with Russia and Belarus; China’s largest state refineries have stopped fuel purchases from Russia for fear of retaliatory measures from the West. Similarly, the largest state banks have refused to finance energy agreements with Russia because they are too risky. In the corridors however these same state enterprises buy back on the international markets, using front companies and long-term contracts for cheap stocks of liquefied gas and Russian petrol that nobody wants.

 The long term consequences of the war

If, in the short term, the war has been able to favour an atmosphere of bi-polarisation, particularly propagated by the image of a confrontation between an “autocratic” and a “democratic” bloc, fiercely advocated by the United States, this impression must already be reconsidered when the position of China is analysed (cf. the preceding point). And in the long term, the implications of the present hostilities, far from encouraging a stable imperialist regroupment, will accentuate oppositions and tensions between imperialist vultures everywhere.

1. Despite American opposition, the intensification of everyman for himself

In pushing the Ukrainian conflict to its limits, the USA is stirring up the development of every man for himself, despite the unity temporarily imposed on Europe. At the vote in the UN on the exclusion of Russia from the Council on Human Rights, 24 countries voted against and 52 abstained: India, Brazil, Mexico, Iran but also Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) developing their own imperialist positions without aligning with the United States or Russia and not participating in the boycott of the latter: “Contrary to the majority of western nations with the United States at their head, the countries of the south adopted a prudent position regarding the armed conflict opposing Moscow to Kyiv. The attitude of the Gulf monarchies, otherwise allied to Washington, is emblematic of this refusal to take part: they denounce both the invasion of Ukraine and sanctions against Russia. A multi-polar world is thus imposed where other than ideological divergences it’s the interests of states which come first” (LMD, May 2022, page 1). Japan, which has been gearing up its re-armament programme and which has shown itself more aggressive towards Russia and China, clearly affirmed its own imperialist ambitions in refusing to stop its gas pipeline project with Russia. Turkey, a member of NATO, nevertheless pursues its own imperialist objectives in maintaining good relations with Russia (although there are still contentious issues regarding the war in Libya and over the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict). Even European countries have not cut off all contact with Russia (France and Italy are reluctant to close their subsidiaries to Russian-Europe gas pipelines going through Ukraine that are still functioning, even if with some reductions, and providing revenues for both belligerents; Belgium has excluded the diamond business from its boycott) and Hungary looks greedily towards Ukrainian Transcarpathia with its Hungarian minorities. The brutal tendency of each for themselves will be accentuated even more by dire imperialist and economic spin-offs from the war in Ukraine.

1. Bleeding Russia dry

For the Russian Federation, the consequences of this “special operation” will be heavy and risk constituting a second profound destabilisation after the fragmentation resulting from the implosion of its bloc (1989-1992): on the military level it will probably lose its rank as the number 2 world army; its economy is already weakened and will fall into more and more trouble (a regression of 12% of the economy according to the Russian Minister of Finances, the most important retreat since 1994). The campaigns around war crimes and the setting-up of structures for investigation and judgement at the international level have the aim of judging Putin and his councillors in an international court for “war crimes”, even for “genocide”. Following this, internal tensions between factions of the Russian bourgeoisie can only intensify, while the Putin faction finds itself cornered and fights desperately in order to survive. Some members of the leading faction (cf. Medvedev) are already warning of the consequences: a possible collapse of the Russian Federation and the rise of diverse mini-Russias with unpredictable leaders holding nuclear arms.

1. China confronts an accumulation of problems

The consequences of the Ukrainian crisis are dangerously destabilising for the main challenger to the United States, China; first of all, concerning the dilemma of its attitude towards Russia faced with the fear of sanctions on its economy, but also the blocking of important arteries of its Silk Road: “For now, the great work of the Chinese president – silk roads weaving their web up to Europe via Central Asia – is threatened. As are all hopes of seeing tighter links with the European Union as a counter-weight to the United States” (LMD, April 2022, page 9). The Russo-Ukrainian conflict comes at a bad time for Xi Jinping some months before the Congress of CCP, in which he will have to have his third mandate renewed, and all the more so given that the pandemic has begun to hit hard again and economic perspectives are mediocre[2].

The Chinese economy is still suffering badly from the pandemic. In March and April 27 million inhabitants of its industrial and commercial metropole Shanghai, along with large parts of the capital Peking, were in lock-down. More and more openly the population is showing panic and discontent faced with weeks of inhuman confinement. However, it’s difficult for the government to revise its position of “Zero Covid”: (a) because of the extremely low rate of vaccination among older people and the inferior quality of Chinese vaccines faced with present variants; and (b) above all given the political impact that changing this strategy would have on the eve of the 20th Congress of the CCP on the Xi faction which has been the fierce champion of it. Thus, in Shanghai, Xi has imposed a drastic lock-down against the “sabotage” of local cadres, provoking great discontent among the population. He has sent 50,000 police-army specials from Shandong under the responsibility of the central government in order “to take control of the situation”. For Xi, “It’s essential that the ‘Zero Covid’ strategy works and that Shanghai is ‘clean’. To fail would raise serious questions, by default and in part at least, from the opposition forces trying to oppose his re-election”. “Zero Covid in Shanghai: the political fight of Xi Jinping”, A. Payette, Asialyst, 14.4.22). And this at any cost: experts from the Japanese investment bank, Nomura, calculated that at the beginning of April that 45 Chinese towns, representing 40% of Chinese GDP, were in total or partial lock-down. These drastic measures bring serious problems for transportation and the ports (at the end of April more than 300 ships at Shanghai were waiting to be unloaded/loaded, triple that of 2020 when the situation was already critical), as well as interruptions in industrial production and national and international supply chains.

Consequently, the slow-down of the economy, accentuated by repeated lock-downs over two years in the political framework of “Zero Covid” and by the war in Ukraine, becomes more manifest with a presently estimated growth of 4.5% of GDP – the Chinese government expected higher growth of 5.5% but the most pessimistic prognoses talk only of 3.5% (cf. “Zero Covid in Shanghai; the political battle of Xi Jinping” A. Payette, Asialyst, 14.4.22) – and this in the same year when People’s Congress must meet in order to elect a new president. What is particularly preoccupying for the Chinese bourgeoisie are the abysmal economic figures for March: thus, retail sales lowered by 3.5%, unemployment increased by 5.8% (in underestimated official figures) and imports have almost ground to a halt. The building sectors, radically protected by the state in order insulate certain large companies, continues to plunge: the sale of habitations has fallen by 26.7%, the most serious since 2020. “According to a report of the Institute of International Finance published at the end of March, ‘financial flows leaving China are unprecedented. The Russian invasion of Ukraine puts Chinese markets in a new light’. This flight is ‘very unusual’ adds the report. Chinese obligations held by foreign investment have fallen by 80.3 billion yuan for the month of February alone, the steepest fall registered since January 15, when statistics begun to be registered. (...) Some western sanctions against the country are resulting in a fall of foreign investment along with a flight of Chinese capital (...) These economic and financial threats are serious because they show the growing distrust of foreign investment towards China” (“War in Ukraine: the double language of China could cost it dear”, P. A. Donnet, Asialyst, 16.4.22).

Finally, the difficulties of the economy weigh heavily on the maintenance of gigantic financial projects of new routes for the Silk Road, otherwise thwarted by the blockage of several of its branches because of the Ukrainian conflict, but also by the growing chaos of decomposition like the destabilisation of Ethiopia which was to have constituted a central “hub” for its African branch, or again, the difficulties of some countries to re-pay China because of their debts (Sri Lanka, for example).

The United States won’t hesitate to accentuate and exploit these problems in its confrontation with Peking in a difficult context for the Chinese bourgeoisie, which is subject to stronger pressures on the economic, social and political fronts.

1. Affirmations of the imperialist ambitions of the European countries despite American pressure

In Europe, the decision by Germany to massively re-arm by doubling its military budget could constitute a major imperialist “fact on the ground” in the medium term. At the beginning of the period of decomposition, our analysis showed that the only pole capable of facing up to the United States was Germany (“Militarism and Decomposition”, International Review no. 64, 1991); and, even if today the growth of China, which we neglected at the time, has to be taken into account, the massive re-armament of Germany must represent a major factor for future imperialist confrontations in Europe and in the world.

In fact, this re-armament must be understood in the context of the prolongation of the Ukrainian conflict and the more and more clearly expressed dissent between the countries of Eastern Europe (fanatically anti-Russian Poland faced with a Hungary very close to Moscow), but also between European powers (France, Germany, Italy) and the United States regarding its policy of war to the end against Russia. Faced with the possibility of a return to power of the Trump faction in the United States, and the constitution of the “intransigent” pole of United States-Britain-Poland towards Russia, the military autonomy of the European powers through the development of a pole of the European Union outside of NATO is imposed more and more as an imperious necessity.

1. Intensification by the US bourgeoisie of an aggressive policy which stimulates chaos despite its internal differences

The domestic situation in the United States, in particular the tensions within the bourgeoisie, are themselves a powerful factor of unpredictability. What will be Biden’s margin of manoeuvres after the mid-term elections in November and who will be the next president of the United States - maybe Trump again? In fact, Biden’s popularity has fallen this last month as consumer prices have soared to levels never seen for four decades hitting fuel, food, housing and other expenses. “Joe Biden’s approval ratings have oscillated around 42.2% according to the poll aggregate of FiveThirtyEight. With the mid-term elections in seven months, we expect more and more elected Democrats to lose their slender control of one, even perhaps both chambers of Congress” (20 Minutes, 15.4.22). The Europeans know perfectly well that the engagements of Biden and the “return to grace” of NATO is only valid for two years at most.

But whatever faction of the bourgeoisie is in government, it is clear that since the beginning of the period of decomposition (cf. wars in Iraq of 1993 and 2003) it is the United States, in its will to defend its declining supremacy, which is the main force for the extension of chaos through its interventions and manoeuvres: it has created chaos in Afghanistan and in Iraq, and facilitated the birth of both Al Qaida and ISIS. During the autumn of 2021, it consciously stirred up tensions with China over Taiwan with the aim of regrouping other Asiatic powers behind it, but in this case with more mitigated success than in the case of Ukraine. Its policy is no different today, even if its Machiavellian manoeuvres allow it to appear as a peaceful nation opposing Russian aggression. This fomenting of chaos and war by the United States has become the most efficient barrier against the development of China as a challenger: “This crisis will certainly not be the last chapter of the long battle engaged in by Washington to ensure a dominant position in an unstable world” (LMD, March 2022, page 7). At the same time the war in Ukraine is used to issue an unambiguous warning to Peking over an eventual invasion of Taiwan.

Characteristics of the current exacerbation of militarism

The phase of decomposition strongly accentuates a whole series of characteristics of militarism and demands a closer examination of the forms that are taken in present imperialist confrontations.

1. The irrationality of war takes on hallucinatory dimensions

The absence of all economic motivations or advantages for war was patent at the outset of the decadence of capitalism:

“War was the indispensable means by which capitalism opened up areas external to itself for development, at a time when such areas existed and could only be opened up through violence. In the same way, the capitalist world, having historically exhausted all possibility of development, finds in modern imperialist war the expression of its collapse which can only engulf the productive forces in an abyss, and accumulate ruin upon ruin...”

 “Report of the July 1945 Conference of the Communist Left of France, taken up in the “Report on the Historic Course” adopted at the 3rd ICC Congress, International Review no. 18, 3rd quarter, 1979).

The war in Ukraine strikingly illustrates how war has lost not only all economic function but even its advantages on the strategic level: Russia has launched a war in the name of the defence of Russophones but it has massacred tens of thousands of civilians in Russophone areas while turning these towns and regions into a field of ruins and submitting them to considerable material and structural losses. If, in the best case at the end of the war, it has taken Donbass and the south-east of Ukraine, it will have conquered this field of ruins, a population that hates it and suffered a consequent strategic setback at the level of its ambitions as a great power. As to the United States with its policy aimed at China, it is led here (literally led) to undertake a policy of “scorched earth”, without economic or strategic gains other than an immeasurable explosion of chaos on the economic, military and political level. The irrationality of war has never been as clear.

This growing irrationality of military confrontations goes hand-in-hand with increasingly irresponsible factions coming to power, as was shown by the adventure of Bush Junior and the “Neo-Cons” in Iraq in 2003, the Trump presidency from 2016 to 2020 or again the Putin faction in Russia. They are the emanation of the exacerbation of militarism and the loss of control of the bourgeoisie over its political apparatus, giving rise to catastrophic adventurism by these factions which are extremely perilous for humanity.

1. The economy at the service of war

More than ever, an economy at the service of war and the absurd scale of military spending in the midst of an economic crisis and a pandemic is revealed in the clear light of day:

“Today, armaments crystallize the nec plus ultra of technological perfection. The fabrication of sophisticated systems of destruction has become the symbol of a modem high-performance economy. However, these technological 'marvels', which have just shown their murderous efficiency in the Middle East, are, from the standpoint of production, of the economy, a gigantic waste.

Weapons, unlike most other commodities, have the particular feature that once produced they are ejected from the productive cycle of capital. They serve neither to enlarge or replace constant capital (unlike machines, for example) nor to renew the labour power of the workers who set this constant capital in motion. Not only do weapons do nothing but destroy - they are already a destruction of capital in themselves, a sterilisation of wealth.” (“Where are we in the crisis: economic crisis and militarism”, International Review no. 65, 1991

Since 1996, military expenses in all countries have doubled, showing the tendency towards the rise of militarism. According to the Stockholm Institute for Peace Studies (SIPRI) $2 trillion dollars have been spent on armaments, a new record. Of this total, the United States has spent 34%, China 14% and Russia 3%. The war in Ukraine will result in an explosion of military budgets in Europe, while the Covid pandemic and the ecological and economic crises demand massive investments.

Moreover, the economic arm is massively utilised in the service of militarism: already China has threatened Australia with retaliatory economic measures because the country criticised its policy in Hong Kong or over Sin-Kiang (the “Uygur Autonomous Region”) and Algeria, which is in conflict with Morocco, has  cut gas deliveries, but the war in Ukraine takes this type of policy onto another level: the United States and the European countries have used it to take Russia by the throat and the United States threatens retaliatory measures against China if it supports Russia; they are  also used to put pressure on Europe (American gas replacing Russian gas). The cancer of militarism weighs more and more on commercial exchanges and the political economy of states.

1. Local wars, global consequences

The consequences of the war for the economic situation of numerous countries have been dramatic: Russia is a large producer of fertiliser and energy, Brazil depends on this fertiliser for its crops. Ukraine is a major exporter of agricultural products and the price of commodities such as wheat could well explode; some states such as Egypt, Turkey, Tanzania or Mauritania are one hundred per-cent dependent on Russian or Ukrainian wheat and are on the brink of a food crisis; Sri Lanka or Madagascar, already super-indebted, are bankrupt. According the General Secretary of the United Nations, the Ukrainian crisis risks: “tipping up to 1.7 billion people – more than a fifth of humanity – into poverty, destitution and hunger” (ONU info, April 13, 2022); the economic and social consequences will be global and incalculable: pauperisation, misery, hunger, revolts...

The present expansion of military confrontations increases unpredictability

The serious acceleration of militarism demands that revolutionaries closely examine the dynamic of current military confrontations and are precise about the challenges and dangers of the present period. This is not a dissertation on the “sex of angels”, but of understanding all the consequences of this dynamic in order to determine the relations of force, the links between war and class struggle and the dynamic of workers’ struggles today as well as our intervention towards them.

1. What is the significance of polarisation at the level of imperialist confrontations?

For a dozen years now, a polarisation has effectively developed between the United States and China. Above all, this polarisation is the result of a change of policy of the United States affirmed during the term of the Obama administration:

“In 2011, the American leadership came to the conclusion that their obsessional war against terrorism – although still popular in Congress and general opinion – had weakened America’s status as a superpower. During a secret meeting in the summer, the administration of Barak Obama decided to take a step back and accord a higher strategic importance to competition with China rather than the war on terror. This new approach dubbed the Asiatic ‘Pivot’ was announced by the American president during the course of a speech given to the Australian parliament in Canberra on November 17 2011”(LMD, March 22, page 7). This growing understanding of the dangerous challenge to the maintenance of the declining leadership of the United States drove it to re-position its economic and military means in order to confront the main danger, China. The resistance of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the emergence of the Islamic State held back and slowed down the implementation of this policy by the Obama administration, so that it would only be fully deployed with the Trump administration and would be formulated in the “National Defence Strategy” elaborated by the then Defence Minister, James Mattis.

Thus, this tendency towards polarisation essentially comes from the United States and constitutes the present strategy of the declining superpower that has the aim of maintaining its hegemony. After the failure of its position as the “world’s gendarme” it is now concentrating on a policy aiming to counter its most dangerous challenger. For China on the contrary, such a polarisation is highly unsettling for the moment[3]: despite its massive investment in its army, it is well behind in the development of its military equipment and its technological and economic development (the Silk Road) which at the moment requires the maintenance of globalisation and multi-polarity. As is the case since 1989 with American imperialist policy, the present policy of polarisation can only exacerbate chaos and every man for himself. That is clearly concretised today through the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the massive re-armament of Germany, the growing aggression of Japanese imperialism, the specific position of India, manoeuvres by Turkey, etc.

1. Does this polarisation bring about a dynamic of stable alliances, even the reconstitution of blocs?

Let’s remind ourselves first of all of the position of the ICC concerning the formation of blocs after 1989: “Although the formation of blocs appears his­torically as the consequence of the development of militarism and imperialism, the exacerbation of the latter in the present phase of capitalism's life paradoxically constitutes a major barrier to the re-formation of a new system of blocs tak­ing the place of the one which has just disappeared”. (“Militarism and Decomposition”, 1991, International Review no. 64, point 9). To what extent do the current conflicts favour the factors leading to a dynamic towards the constitution of blocs?

(a) The force of arms having become a preponderant factor in order to limit world chaos and to impose itself as the head of the bloc, and with the United States having a military power equivalent to all the other major powers put together, no country today has at its disposal: “the military potential of the USA to a point where it could set itself up as a rival bloc leader” (“Militarism and Decomposition”, point 10), which is again illustrated by the war in Ukraine. As “the scale of conflicts between the blocs, and what is at stake in them takes on an in­creasingly world-wide and general character (the more gangsters there are to control, the more powerful must be the ‘godfather’ (...) the more the bourgeoisie's different fractions tend to tear each other apart, as the crisis sharpens their mutual competition, so the state must be reinforced in order to exercise its authority over them. In the same way, the more the open historic crisis ravages the world economy, so the stronger must be a bloc leader in order to contain and control the tendencies towards the dislocation of its differ­ent national components” (“Militarism and Decomposition”, point 11).

(b) Given that “the formation of imperialist blocs corresponds to the need to impose a similar discipline amongst different national bourgeoisies, in order to limit their mutual antagonisms and to draw them to­gether for the supreme confrontation between two military camps” (“Militarism and Decomposition”, point 4), are we seeing a tendency to strengthen this discipline today?

The imposition of discipline by the United States on the European states within NATO in the framework of the war in Ukraine is temporary and is already resulting in fissures:  Turkey plays “The Lone Ranger”, Hungary has maintained bridges with Russia, Germany drags its feet and France pushes for the constitution of a European pole. For its part, China’s alliance with Russia is of limited scale and the former is very careful not to engage too much alongside Russia, while other countries in the world have demonstrated their reservations about taking a side between the conflicting powers.

In sum, even if there is a push towards polarisation, particularly on the part of the American superpower; even if, in this framework, temporary alliances can be made (United States, Japan, Korea; Turkey-Russia in Syria; China-Russia) or through old alliances being temporarily reactivated (NATO), the tendency in present imperialist confrontations does not indicate a dynamic towards the constitution of two antagonistic blocs, such as we saw before the first and second world wars or at the time of the “Cold War”: “(...) in the time after the Cold War, states have had neither friends nor permanent Godfathers but fluctuating, vacillating allies of limited duration” (LMD, May 2022, page 8).

The constitution of blocs was a dominant tendency up to the phase of decomposition. In this latter period, the tendency rather, given the aggravated characteristics of this stage, is to the intensification of the dynamic towards war without the constitution of blocs: “In the new historical period we have entered, and which the Gulf events have confirmed, the world appears as a vast free-for-all, where the tendency of "every man for himself" will operate to the full, and where the alliances between states will be far from having the stability that characterized the imperialist blocs, but will be dominated by the immediate needs of the mo­ment. A world of bloody chaos, where the American policeman will try to maintain a mini­mum of order by the increasingly massive and brutal use of military force” (Militarism and Decomposition”, point 11).

Is the present dynamic oriented towards a world war, that’s to say a generalised confrontation between all of the countries regrouped around their respective leaders?

The world wars that we have known in capitalist decadence were all linked to a coalition behind a “boss”, whose architecture was determined well before the explosion of conflict which, in the logic of blocs, unfolded into global confrontations: two great alliances confronted each other in 1914: the Entente (the Triple Alliance between Britain, France and Russia, from 1907 and later the Quadruple Alliance after Italy rallied in 1915) faced with the Triple Alliance (between Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy founded in 1882, going into 1887 and confirmed in 1891/1896); two axes of alliances confronting each other in 1939: Rome-Berlin-Tokyo (concluded in 1936 and completed by the German-Soviet Pact in August ’39) and the alliance between France and Britain combined with two tripartite alliances (France-Britain-Poland and France-Britain-Turkey) as well as a “political entente” between Britain and the United States; finally, the two blocs of the West and the East (NATO and the Warsaw Pact) facing each other between 1945-1989). Moreover, such wars imply a massive mobilisation of enormous armies which the bourgeoisie is avoiding today, the massive mobilisations of populations (partially happening in Ukraine) whereas that the armies of the major imperialisms have been reconfigured since the 1990’s (reduction of size, priority to specialised, professional forces and development of technologies linked to military robotics and cybernautics in the case of the American, Chinese, Russian and European armies) and the widespread use of mercenaries and private “contractors” 

1. Doesn’t such an analysis underestimate the dangers of wars today?

The analysis laid out above must in no way be of re-assurance regarding war in the period of decomposition despite the absence of a bloc dynamic. In fact, it is vital to be conscious that such a context doesn’t at all exclude an important military conflict, and that the danger of a direct military confrontation between the major powers is negligible; quite the contrary: “The constitution of imperialist blocs is not the origin of militarism and imperialism. The oppo­site is true: the formation of these blocs is only the extreme consequence (which at certain mo­ments can aggravate the causes), an expression (and not the only one), of decadent capitalism's plunge into militarism and war” (“Militarism and Decomposition”, International Review no. 64, 1991, part 5).

Paradoxically, the absence of blocs makes the situation more dangerous inasmuch as conflicts are characterised by a greater unpredictability: “In announcing that he was placing his forces of dissuasion on alert, the Russian leader, President Vladimir Putin has constrained the major states to update their doctrines, most often inherited from the Cold War. The certainty of mutual annihilation – the acronym ‘MAD’ (Mutually Assured Destruction) meaning crazy – is not enough to exclude the hypothesis of so-called ‘limited’ nuclear strikes with the risk of an uncontrolled free-for-all” (LMD, April 2022, page 1). And again paradoxically, the regroupment around blocs limited the possibilities of them sliding out of control:

- because of the bloc discipline;

- also because of the necessity to inflict a decisive defeat beforehand on the proletariat in the centres of capitalism (cf. the analysis of the historic course in the 1980’s).

Thus, even if there is presently no perspective of the constitution of blocs or of a third world war, at the same time, the situation is characterised by greater underlying peril linked to the intensification of each for themselves and the growth of irrationality: the unpredictability of the development of confrontations, the possibility of them getting out of control, which is stronger than in the decades from the ‘50’s to the 1980’s , marks the stage of decomposition and constitutes one of the particularly preoccupying dimensions of this qualitative acceleration of militarism.

What is the impact on the working class?

In conclusion, we must understand that the conditions for war between on the one hand the first and second world wars, and on the other hand those of today, are fundamentally different and, consequently, so are the perspectives for the proletariat. If the slide into barbarity in Ukraine is destructive and brutal, the significance of such conflicts is also more difficult for the working class to understand. Whereas fraternisations were technically and politically possible during the First World War – workers were still capable of communicating through the trenches – that potential doesn’t exist today. There are no longer hundreds of thousands of people massed together on the military fronts with possibilities of discussion, massive reactions against their officers and revolt.

For now, we can thus not expect any class reaction on the war front, even if Russian soldiers could desert or refuse to be enlisted for the war in Ukraine. Today the working class hasn’t the capacity to offer a class resistance against imperialist war – neither in Ukraine, nor Russia – nor at this time in the West. As to the more general perspectives for the development of class struggle today, they are examined in the Report on the Situation of the Class Struggle.

ICC, 9.5.22

 

The attitude of communists in the face of war has always been a clear class frontier between the camp of the proletariat and the camp of the bourgeoisie. Confronted with an unparalleled descent into the barbarism of war, with the ceaseless torrent of nationalist propaganda and the shameful lies of bourgeois pacifism, genuine revolutionaries have not bargained with the political principles of the workers’ movement, they have not hesitated to mount an unfailing defence of proletarian internationalism. When the proletariat was betrayed on the eve of the First World War and led into the trenches by Social Democracy, the revolutionaries who had remained loyal to internationalism, though small in number, made no concessions to the calls for a “Sacred Union” against “German militarism” on one side or “Tsarist autocracy” on the other.

On the contrary! When the chauvinist hysteria was at its height, including in the ranks of the proletariat, they came together, in spite of many confusions among them, at Zimmerwald in 1915, then at Kienthal the following year. The revolutionaries who were clearest about the new situation opened up by the war, the Zimmerwald left, and the Bolsheviks in particular, waged a bitter struggle in these conferences to clarify the road ahead and to hold high the banner of internationalism and autonomous proletarian struggle: the working class has no camp to choose and must not align itself with any other class. The only possible way to stop the war was the independent struggle of the proletariat on the basis of its specific interests!

During the Second World War, the atrocious height of several decades of counter-revolution, the revolutionary forces, those of the communist left, although scarce and dispersed, never stopped denouncing the war and intervening within their class to affirm, in an extremely difficult context, that it had to develop its struggle against all the imperialisms. There again, revolutionary organisations did not wait with folded arms until the proletariat mobilised en masse against the war. Rather they tried to act as a determined spearhead in the defence of internationalism, putting forward the necessity to overthrow the capitalist system, even though, in the context of the Second World War, the proletariat was absolutely unable to carry out this titanic task.

Following in the footsteps of our predecessors, several revolutionary organisations, including the ICC, distributed a “Joint Statement” in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, beginning with the words “The workers have no country! Down with all the imperialist powers! In place of capitalist barbarism: socialism!”

Those who see no further than the end of their noses will not fail (and have not failed) to pour derision on this appeal by a handful of small, inaudible organisations unknown in the working class. We have no illusions about this; we know perfectly well that only a tiny part of the class has had access to this statement, that its influence in the proletariat is restricted to a very small minority.

But we also know where we come from, we remember the lessons of Zimmerwald, of Kienthal, and of the combat of the communist left during the Second World War: the “handfuls of small, inaudible and unknown” organisations were able to take up their responsibilities, conscious of the need to regroup revolutionary forces on the basis of serious political clarification, in order to carry out a determined intervention in the proletariat on the clearest possible basis. As the “Joint Statement puts it: “Today, in the face of the acceleration of imperialist conflict in Europe, the political organisations based on the heritage of the Communist Left continue to hold up the banner of consistent proletarian internationalism, and provide a reference point for those defending working class principles.

That’s why organisations and groups of the Communist Left today, small in number and not well known, have decided to issue this common statement, and broadcast as widely as possible the internationalist principles that were forged against the barbarism of two world wars”.[1]

This is the task that consistent revolutionary organisations must take on today! It’s not a question of looking at past history from a balcony and commenting sagely on the state of the world: revolutionaries are fighters not academics! Neither is it a question of rushing into an artificial political agitation, of inventing an influence in the working class and sweeping away its immense difficulties with the power of our words and the correctness of our positions. Such an immediatist approach can only lead to demoralisation or, even worse, to the most shameful opportunism, making concessions on our principles in order to gain an influence which we don’t have and can’t have in the present situation.

But, right now, even if it is not yet in a position where it can fight directly against imperialist war, the proletariat has shown its ability to raise its head in response to the consequences of the war and the economic crisis. For several months now, the proletariat in the United Kingdom has been in struggle. Of course, the bourgeoisie, its left parties and its trade unions, are doing all they can to channel the workers’ anger and lead it into the dead-ends of sectionalism or electoralism, identity-based protests or inter-classist movements. Nevertheless, hundreds of thousands of workers have come out onto the streets to express their anger, to discuss, and refuse to keep their heads down. And this in a country which has not seen significant struggles for 40 years! In many other countries, anger is growing, there are more and more struggles against inflation, lay-offs and the “reforms” of the bourgeoisie. These struggles are a ferment for the development of class consciousness. It is thus up to revolutionaries not only to defend the autonomy of the class struggle against the traps laid by the bourgeoisie, but also to show the link between the attacks hitting the proletariat in all countries and the historic crisis of capitalism, of which war is a caricatural expression as well as a powerful accelerator[2]. The more revolutionaries are armed politically to defend this orientation, the more their influence will be really decisive, in the first instance among workers searching for class positions.

Because the other lesson from the experience of the Zimmerwald and Kienthal conferences is the necessity to construct the revolutionary organisation. Without the world party of the proletariat, without this most conscious and determined part of the working class, there can’t be a victorious revolutionary struggle against the crisis and the wars of capitalism. At Zimmerwald and Kienthal, as within the communist left, revolutionaries, despite their difficulties, their confusions, sometimes their errors, have always tried to confront their points of view, to defend the necessity to debate the divergencies within the proletarian camp.  At the conferences of 1915 and 1916, in spite of profound disagreements, they did not hesitate to come together and publish a Manifesto to put forward what they had in common: proletarian internationalism!

The war in Ukraine is not a thunderbolt out of a clear blue sky. Its devastation comes at the same time as a number of other catastrophic phenomena: climate change, environmental degradation, an accelerating economic crisis, political convulsions that are afflicting even the oldest country in capitalism (the United Kingdom), the return of terrible large-scale famines with mass migrations of populations fleeing war zones, slaughter, persecution, destitution... This combination of phenomena, and their interdependence and interaction, has led the International Communist Current to adopt and publish the document which appears below, which aims to integrate these aspects into a broader historical framework and which also takes account of the very important situation of the large-scale strike movement that has shaken the United Kingdom, an expression of deep discontent branded by the media "the summer of discontent".

 

1. The 20s of the 21st century are shaping up to be one of the most turbulent periods in history, and indescribable disasters and suffering are already mounting up. It began with the Covid-19 pandemic (which is still out there) and a war in the heart of Europe which has lasted for more than nine months and whose outcome no one can foresee. Capitalism has entered into a phase of serious difficulties on all fronts. Behind this accumulation and entanglement of convulsions lies the threat of the destruction of humanity. And, as we already pointed out in our "Theses on Decomposition [191]"[1], capitalism "is the first [society] to threaten the very survival of humanity, the first that can destroy the human species" (Thesis 1).

 

2. The decadence of capitalism is not a homogeneous and uniform process: on the contrary, it has a history which is expressed in several phases. The phase of decomposition has been identified in our Theses as "a specific phase, the ultimate phase of its history, the one in which decomposition becomes a factor, if not the decisive factor, of the evolution of society" (Thesis 2). It is clear that if the proletariat is not able to overthrow capitalism, there will be an agonising descent into barbarism, leading to the destruction of humanity.

 

3. Following the sudden outbreak of the Covid pandemic, we identified four characteristics of the phase of decomposition:

- The increased severity of its effects. The pandemic caused between 15 and 20 million deaths, the general paralysis of the economy for more than a year, the collapse of national health systems, the inability of states to coordinate internationally to combat the virus and produce vaccines, each state sinking instead into a policy of every man for himself. Such a situation not only indicates the impossibility of the system to escape its laws dictated by competition, but also that with the exacerbation of these rivalries comes the negligence, aberration and chaos of bourgeois management and this at the heart of the most powerful and developed countries of the planet.

- the irruption of the effects of decomposition at the economic level. This tendency, already noted at the 23rd Congress of the ICC, has been fully confirmed and is quite "novel" because since the 1980s the bourgeoisie of the central countries had managed to protect the economy from the main effects of decomposition. [2]

- The growing interaction of its effects, which aggravates the contradictions of capitalism to a level never reached before. Indeed, in the previous thirty years, the bourgeoisie had more or less succeeded (especially in the central countries) in isolating or limiting the effects of decomposition, generally preventing them from interacting. What has become clear over the last two years is the interaction and interweaving of a warlike barbarism, a phenomenal ecological crisis, the chaos in the political apparatus of a good number of important bourgeoisies, the continuing pandemic and the growing risk of new health crises, famines, the gigantic exodus of millions of people, the spread of the most retrograde and irrational ideologies, etc. All this develops in the midst of a virulent worsening of the economic crisis which further threatens entire sections of the population, in particular those proletarians exposed to growing impoverishment and an accelerated deterioration of their living conditions (unemployment, precariousness, difficulty finding food and housing...)

- The growing presence of its effects in the central countries. If, for the last thirty years, the central countries were relatively protected from the effects of decomposition, today they are being hit hard and, worse still, they tend to become its greatest propagators, as in the United States, where in early 2021 we witnessed the attempted storming of the Capitol by the supporters of the populist Trump as if it were a regular banana republic.

 

4. 2022 provided a striking illustration of these four characteristics, with:

- The outbreak of war in Ukraine.

- The appearance of unprecedented waves of refugees.

- The continuation of the pandemic with health systems on the verge of collapse.[3]

- A growing loss of control by the bourgeoisie over its political apparatus; the crisis in the UK was a spectacular manifestation of this.

- An agricultural crisis with a shortage of many food products in a context of widespread overproduction, which is a relatively new phenomenon in more than a century of decadence: "In the short term, climate change is attacking the foundations of food security. Rising temperatures and extreme climate variations threaten to jeopardise the harvests; in fact, in 2020, crop growing times have been shortened by 9.3 days for maize, 1.7 days for rice and 6 days for wheat in winter and spring, compared to the period between 1981 and 2004”.[4]

- The terrifying famines that are affecting more and more countries.[5]

The aggregation and interaction of these destructive phenomena produces a 'vortex effect' that concentrates, catalyses and multiplies each of its partial effects, causing even more destructive devastation. Some scientists, like Marine Romanello of University College London, have formed a clear view on this: "Our report for this year reveals that we are at a critical juncture. We see how climate change is severely affecting health worldwide, while the continued global dependence on fossil fuels is exacerbating this health damage amidst a multiplicity of global crises”. This "vortex effect" expresses a qualitative change, the consequences of which will become increasingly evident in the coming period.

In this context, it is important to stress the driving force of war, as an action deliberately pursued and planned for by capitalist states, having become the most powerful and aggravating factor of chaos and destruction. In fact, the war in Ukraine has had a multiplier effect on the escalation of barbarism and destruction, involving the following elements:

- The risk of bombing nuclear power plants is always present, as can be seen particularly around the Zaporizhzhia site.

- The threat from the use of chemical and nuclear weapons.

- The violent ramping up of militarism with its consequences for the environment and the climate.

- The direct impact of the war on the energy crisis and the food crisis.

In this context, we can see the calamity of the growing environmental crisis, which is reaching levels never seen before:

- A summer heat wave, the worst since 1961, with the prospect of such heatwaves becoming a permanent feature.

- A drought unlike any before, the worst in 500 years according to experts, even affecting rivers such as the Thames, the Rhine and the Po, which are usually fast flowing.

- Devastating fires, that were also the worst in decades.

- Uncontrollable floods like those in Pakistan, which affected a third of the country's land area (and large-scale flooding in Thailand).

- A risk of collapse of the ice caps after the melting of glaciers comparable in size to the surface of the United Kingdom, with catastrophic consequences.

Other data linked to the environmental crisis, which at the same time aggravates it, relates to the dilapidated state of nuclear power plants[6] in the context of the energy crisis (resulting from the economic crisis) but also as a consequence of the war in Ukraine. There is clearly a risk of unprecedented disasters in addition to the risk of Ukrainian nuclear power plants being hit by bombs.

The seriousness of the situation is becoming even more clear. One person who can in no way be suspected of being an enemy of capitalism has declared that "the climate crisis is killing us. It would not only end any question about the health of our planet, but also that of its entire population through the contamination in the atmosphere." (says Antonio Guterres, UN Secretary General in a message to his General Assembly in September 2022).

 

5. Underlying this catastrophic development is the dramatically worsening economic crisis that has been developing since 2019 and has been exacerbated first by the pandemic and then by the war. This crisis is shaping up to be a longer and deeper crisis than that of 1929. This is because the irruption of the effects of decomposition on the economy tends to cause havoc with the functioning of production, creating constant bottlenecks and blockages in a situation of growing unemployment - combined, paradoxically, with labour shortages in some areas. Above all, it is expressed in the outbreak of inflation, following various successive rescue plans hastily deployed by states in the face of the pandemic and the war, and thus caused and fuelled by a headlong rush into debt. The increase in interest rates by central banks in an attempt to curb inflation risks precipitating a very violent recession by shackling both states and companies. The proletariat in the central countries now faces a tsunami of misery and brutal impoverishment.

 

6. Some important countries are now in an increasingly dangerous situation, which may have serious repercussions for the world as a whole:

- Russia will not be able to avoid a massive upheaval. It is unlikely that a simple removal of Putin from office would be without bloody clashes between rival factions. The possible fragmentation of parts of Russia, the world's largest and most heavily armed state, would have unforeseeable consequences for the whole world.

- China is still suffering from repeated blows of the pandemic (with more likely to come), the weakening of the economy, repeated environmental disasters and the enormous imperialist pressure from the US. The economic and strategic initiative of the "New Silk Roads" can only further worsen the predicament of Chinese capitalism.

- As the Resolution on the International Situation of the 24e ICC Congress points out: "China is a ticking time bomb [...]. The totalitarian control over the whole social body, the repressive hardening of the Stalinist faction of Xi Jinping is not an expression of strength but a manifestation of the weakness of the state, whose cohesion is endangered by the existence of centrifugal forces within society and important struggles of the cliques within the ruling class".

- The US itself is in the grip of the most serious conflict inside the bourgeoisie since World War II, "the extent of the divisions within the US ruling class was laid bare by the contested November 2020 elections, and especially by the storming of the Capitol by Trump supporters on 6 January 2021, driven by Trump and his entourage. The latter event demonstrates that the internal divisions shaking the United States run through society as a whole. Although Trump has been ousted from office, Trumpism remains a powerful, heavily armed force, expressed both on the streets and at the ballot box."[7] This was just confirmed recently with the Biden mid-term elections, where the divisions between the rival parties (Democrats and Republicans) have never been so deep and exacerbated, as have the rifts within each of the two camps. The weight of populism and of the most retrograde ideologies, marked by the rejection of rational, coherent thought, far from being curbed by attempts to block a new Trump candidacy, has only become more and more deeply and durably entrenched in American society, as in the rest of the world. This is an indication of how rotten the social relations are.

 

7. The degeneration of the world situation to an unprecedented level is further aggravated by two very important factors linked to the inadequate control of the social relations as a whole by the capitalist states, especially the most powerful ones:

- As we noticed with the Covid-19 crisis and even before (at our 23rd congress), the capacity for the big states to cooperate to delay and lessen the impact of the economic crisis and to limit or postpone the effects of decomposition on the weaker countries, has considerably weakened and the tendency is not for a "return" of "international cooperation", but rather the opposite. Such problems can only aggravate the global chaos.

- On the other hand, within the world's major bourgeoisies, one cannot reasonably detect an emergence of policies that could stem, even partially or temporarily, such a destructive and rapid erosion. Without underestimating the capacity of the bourgeoisie to respond, it is difficult to see, at least for the time being, the implementation of policies similar to those of the 1980s and 1990s that mitigated and delayed the worst effects of the crisis and decomposition.

 

8. This development, although it may have surprised us by its speed and scale, was largely foreseen in the update of our analysis on decomposition made by the 22nd congress (Report on Decomposition Today)[8]. On the one hand, the report clearly recognised the rise of populism in the central countries as an important manifestation of the bourgeoisie's loss of control over its political apparatus. Likewise, we identified the irruption of waves of refugees and the exodus of people to the centres of capitalism as another manifestation and placed particular emphasis on the environmental disaster and its scale.

At the same time, the report had identified problems that do not feature prominently in the media currently but which have continued to worsen: terrorism, the housing problem in the central countries, famine and in particular, “the destruction of human relationships, family ties, and human empathy has only worsened as evidenced by the use of anti-depressants, the explosion of psychological pressure and stress at work and the appearance of new occupations intended to "support" such people. There are also expressions of real carnage like that of summer 2003 in France where 15,000 elderly people died during the heat wave”. It is clear that the pandemic has had a considerable influence on the situation, pushing things to the limits, and that suicides and mental health problems during this period have been called "a second pandemic".

 

9. This current perspective follows coherently from the analytical framework developed by the "Theses on Decomposition" thirty years ago:

- “In this situation, where society’s two decisive - and antagonistic - classes confront each other without either being able to impose its own definitive response, history nonetheless does not just come to a stop. Still less for capitalism than for preceding social forms, is a ‘freeze’ or a ‘stagnation’ of social life possible." (Thesis 4). For thirty years, the decay has only deepened and is now leading to a qualitative worsening, showing its destructive consequences in a way never seen before.

- "No mode of production can live, develop, maintain itself on a viable basis and ensure social cohesion, if it is unable to present a perspective for the whole of the society which it dominates. And this is especially true of capitalism, which is the most dynamic mode of production in history." (Thesis 5). The current situation is the continuation of more than fifty years of unabated aggravation of the capitalist crisis without the bourgeoisie having been able to offer a perspective, while the proletariat has not yet been able to advance its own: the communist revolution. It is dragging the world into a spiral of barbarism and destruction in which the central countries, having played a role as a relative brake on decomposition for a whole period, are now becoming an aggravating factor.

Decomposition "does not lead back to a previous form of capitalism’s life. [...] Human civilisation today is losing some of its gains [...] The course of history cannot be turned back: as its name suggests, decomposition leads to social dislocation and putrefaction, to the void." (Thesis 11).

 

10. Faced with this situation, the "Theses on Decomposition", while warning that, "unlike the situation in the 1970s, time is no longer on the side of the working class" (thesis 16) and that there is the danger of a slow but ultimately irreversible erosion of the very foundations of communism, nevertheless make it clear that "the historical perspective remains completely open" (thesis 17).

Indeed, "Despite the blow that the Eastern bloc’s collapse has dealt to proletarian consciousness, the class has not suffered any major defeats on the terrain of its struggle. In this sense, its combativity remains virtually intact. Moreover, and this is the element which in the final analysis will determine the outcome of the world situation, the inexorable aggravation of the capitalist crisis constitutes the essential stimulant for the class’s struggle and development of consciousness, the precondition for its ability to resist the poison distilled by the social rot. […] Its struggle against the direct effects of the crisis constitutes the basis for the development of its class strength and unity." (Thesis 17).

"The economic crisis directly attacks the foundations on which this superstructure rests; in this sense, it lays bare all the barbarity that is battening on society, thus allowing the proletariat to become aware of the need for a radical change to the system, rather than trying to improve certain aspects of it." (Thesis 17).

This perspective is in fact beginning to emerge: "In the face of the bourgeoisie's attacks [...] the working class in Britain is showing that it is once again prepared to fight for its dignity, to reject the sacrifices that are constantly demanded by capital. It is indicative of an international dynamic: last winter, strikes started to appear in Spain and the US; this summer, Germany and Belgium also experienced walkouts; and now, commentators are predicting "an explosive social situation" in France and Italy in the coming months. It is not possible to predict where and when the workers' combativity will re-emerge on a massive scale in the near future, but one thing is certain: the scale of the current workers' mobilisation in Britain is a significant historical event. The days of passivity and submission are past. The new generations of workers are raising their heads".[9]

We have identified the struggles in the UK as a break from the passivity and disorientation that had existed previously. The return of workers' combativity in response to the crisis can become a source of consciousness, as can our intervention, which is an essential factor in this situation. It is clear that each acceleration of decomposition succeeds in bringing a halt to the workers' developing combativity: the movement in France 2019 came to a halt when the pandemic broke out. This shows an additional and not insignificant difficulty in the face of the development of struggles and the recovery of the proletariat's confidence in itself and in its own forces. However, there is no other way than the struggle. The resumption of the struggle is in itself a first victory. The world proletariat in very turbulent conditions, with many bitter defeats, can finally recover its identity as a class and eventually launch an international offensive against this moribund system.

 

11. Hence, in this context, the 20s of the 21st century will have a considerable impact on historical development. They will show with even greater clarity than in the past that the perspective of the destruction of humanity is an integral part of capitalist decomposition. At the other pole, the proletariat will begin to take its first steps, like those expressed in the combativity of the struggles in the UK, to defend its living conditions in the face of the multiplication of the attacks of the different bourgeoisies and the blows of the world economic crisis with all its consequences. These first steps will often be hesitant and full of weaknesses, but they are essential if the working class is to be able to reaffirm its historical capacity to impose its communist perspective. Thus, the two alternative poles of the perspective will confront each other globally: the destruction of humanity or the communist revolution, even if this latter alternative is still very far off and faces enormous obstacles. To deepen the understanding of the historical framework is an immense but absolutely necessary and vital task for the revolutionary organisations of the proletariat, which need to be the best defenders and propagators of a general perspective. It is also a crucial test of their ability to analyse and provide answers to the challenges posed by the different aspects of the current situation: war, crisis, class struggle, environmental crisis, political crisis, etc.

 

ICC, 28 October 2022

Some events have a significance that is not limited to the local or immediate level, but is international in scope. Because of the number of sectors affected, the combativity of the workers involved in the struggle and the widespread support for action among the working population, the wave of strikes which has spread throughout Britain this summer is an event of undeniable importance on the domestic level. But we also need to understand that the historical significance of these struggles goes far beyond their local dimension or even their one-off occurrence.

For decades, the working class in the European states has been under the suffocating pressure of capitalism’s decomposition. More concretely, since 2020, it has suffered a number of waves of Covid and then the horror of barbaric war in Europe with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Although these events affected workers' combativity, they did not make it disappear, as struggles in the United States, Spain, Italy, France, Korea and Iran at the end of 2021 and the beginning of 2022 still underlined.

However, the wave of strikes in Britain in response to the attacks on their living standards caused by the deepening economic crisis, accentuated by the consequences of the health crisis and, above all, by the war in Ukraine, is on a different scale. In difficult circumstances, the British workers are sending a clear signal to workers all over the world: we must fight, even if we have suffered attacks and accepted sacrifices without being able to react; but today "enough is enough": we are no longer accepting this, we must fight. This is the message sent to workers in other countries.

In this context, the entry into struggle of the British proletariat constitutes an event of historical significance on a number of levels

 1. The proletariat in Britain regains its combativity

This wave of struggle is led by a fraction of the European proletariat which has suffered more than most from the general retreat of the class struggle since 1990. Indeed, if in the 1970s, although with a certain delay compared to other countries like France, Italy or Poland, British workers developed very important struggles, culminating in the wave of strikes of 1979 ("the Winter of Discontent"), the UK was the European country where the decline of combativity has been the most marked over the last 40 years.

During the 1980s, the British working class suffered an effective counter-offensive from the bourgeoisie which culminated in the defeat of the 1985 miners' strike by Thatcher, the "Iron Lady" of the British bourgeoisie. Moreover, Britain has been particularly affected by de-industrialisation and the transfer of industries to China, India or Eastern Europe. So when the working class suffered a generalised worldwide decline in 1989, it was particularly marked in Great Britain.

In addition, in recent years, British workers have suffered the onslaught of populist movements and above all the deafening Brexit campaign, stimulating the division in their midst between "remainers" and "leavers", and then the Covid crisis which has weighed heavily on the working class, especially in Britain. Finally, and most recently, it has been confronted with intense pro-Ukrainian democratic hype and particularly abject war-mongering around the war in Ukraine.

The "Thatcher generation" suffered a major defeat, but today, a new generation of proletarians is appearing on the social scene, which is no longer affected as much as their elders by the weight of these defeats and are raising their heads, showing that the working class is capable of responding through struggle to these major attacks. While keeping a sense of proportion, we are witnessing a phenomenon quite comparable (but not identical) to the one that saw the French working class emerge in 1968: the arrival of a young generation less affected than their elders by the weight of the counter-revolution.

2. The international importance of the British working class

The "summer of anger" can only be an encouragement for all the workers of the planet and this for several reasons: it is the working class of the fifth world economic power, and an English-speaking proletariat, whose struggles can have an important impact in countries like the United States, Canada or in other regions of the world, like India or South Africa. English being the language of world communication, the influence of these movements necessarily surpasses that of struggles in France or Germany for example. In this sense, the English proletariat shows the way not only to the European workers, who will have to be in the vanguard of the rise of the class struggle, but also to the world proletariat, and in particular to the American proletariat. In the perspective of future struggles, the British working class can thus serve as a link between the proletariat of Western Europe and the American proletariat.

This importance can also be measured by the concerned reaction of the bourgeoisie, especially in Western Europe, to the danger of the extension of the "deterioration of the social situation". This is particularly the case in France, Belgium or Germany where the bourgeoisie, in contrast to the attitude of the British bourgeoisie, has taken firmer measures to put a ceiling on oil, gas and electricity increases or to compensate for the impact of inflation and price rises by means of subsidies or tax cuts, while loudly proclaiming that it wants to protect the purchasing power of workers. On the other hand, the extensive media coverage of the death of Queen Elizabeth and the funeral ceremonies was intended to counteract the images of class struggle and instead show a picture of a united British population enveloped in a nationalist fervour and respectful of bourgeois constitutional order. Since then, the bourgeois media has applied a wide blackout on the continuation of the strike movements.

The bourgeoisie knows perfectly well that the deepening of the crisis and the consequences of the war will go on and on. However, the fact that a massive movement is already developing in the face of the first attacks, which are similar for all the detachments of the proletariat, not only in England but in Europe and even in the world, attacks which the bourgeoisie is obliged to impose in the present context, can only deeply worry the bourgeoisie.

3. A break in the dynamics of the international class struggle

Even though the West European proletariat has not been defeated during the last forty years, unlike before the two world wars, the decline in its class consciousness after 1989 (underlined by the campaign on the "death of communism") has nevertheless been extremely important. Secondly, the deepening of decomposition from the 1990s onwards had increasingly affected its class identity, and this trend could not be reversed by certain movements of struggle or expressions of reflection among minorities of the class in the first two decades of the 21st century, such as the struggle against the Contrat Premier Emploi (CPE) in France in 2006, the 'Indignados' movement in Spain in 2011, the struggles at SNCF and Air France in 2014 and the movement against pension reform in 2019 in France or the 'Striketober' in the US in 2021.

Moreover, throughout the first two decades of the 21st century, the global working class has been confronted in its struggles with the danger of interclassist movements, as in France with the actions of the "Gilet Jaunes", the weight of populist mobilisations, such as the MAGA ("Make America Great Again") movement in the United States, or bourgeois campaigns such as the "marches for the climate " or the "Black Lives Matter" movement and mobilisations in favour of abortion rights in the US and elsewhere. More recently, in the face of the first consequences of the crisis, numerous popular revolts have erupted in various Latin American countries against the rise in the price of fuel and other basic commodities. All these movements constitute a danger for workers insofar as they drag them onto an interclassist terrain, where they are drowned out by the mass of "citizens" or dragged onto a terrain which is completely bourgeois.

But only the proletariat offers an alternative to the disasters that mark our society. And precisely, unlike these movements which lead the workers onto false grounds, the fundamental contribution of the wave of strikes of the British workers is the affirmation that the struggle against capitalist exploitation must be situated on a clear class ground and put forward clear workers' demands against the attacks on the workers' standard of living: “Moreover, and this is the element which in the final analysis will determine the outcome of the world situation, the inexorable aggravation of the capitalist crisis constitutes the essential stimulant for the class’ struggle and development of consciousness, the precondition for its ability to resist the poison distilled by the social rot. For while there is no basis for the unification of the class in the partial struggles against the effects of decomposition, nonetheless its struggle against the direct effects of the crisis constitutes the basis for the development of its class strength and unity.” (Theses on Decomposition [12], (1991) International Review No.107, 2001). The development of this massive combativity in struggles for the defence of purchasing power is, for the world proletariat, an inescapable condition for overcoming the deep setback it has undergone since the collapse of the Eastern bloc and the Stalinist regimes and for recovering its class identity and its revolutionary perspective.

In short, both from the historical point of view and from the current context facing the working class, this wave of strikes in Britain therefore constitutes a break in the dynamics of the class struggle, capable of setting in motion a "change in the social atmosphere".

4. Similarities and differences with May 68 in France

This change in the social atmosphere that has taken place with the struggles in Britain has a certain resemblance, keeping a sense of proportion, with the situation initiated by May 68 in France, which was symbolic of a break with a long period of counter-revolution, cutting through the Stalinist prison for containing the proletariat and bringing a new dynamism, an impetuous world wide development of workers’ struggles, opening a period of class confrontations which was confirmed in the next two decades with the “Hot Autumn” in Italy, the struggles in Poland in 1970 and 1976 before reaching their culminating point in August 1980, in Belgium between 1970 and 1972, then in 1983 (public sector) and in 1986, in the USA (General Motors in Lordstown, Ohio) in 1972 then a new wave of strikes in the summer of 1986, in France again with the steelworkers in Longwy and Denain in 1979, the railway workers  (winter 86) and nurses (October 88), in Sweden in 1984, the Rotterdam dockers in the Netherlands in 1984, in Germany, Greece, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa…

The entry into struggle of the proletarians in Britain has an importance comparable to that of May 68 in France, since it is located at the heart of one of the oldest and most developed capitalisms, in western Europe, among the battalions of the proletariat who are most experienced in the class war. In this sense it is destined to play a key role as a spur to the recovery of struggles on a world level. Also in Britain we see the same fire-brakes lit by the bourgeoisie as in May 68, which the working class will encounter in the shape of the same enemies: the unions, the left parties and the leftist organisations whose role is to control and sabotage the struggle, to drag it away from its class terrain.

Similarly, the reawakening of the combativity of the proletariat in Britain in response to the dramatic deterioration of the world crisis of capitalism and to the attacks of the bourgeoisie can, again with all proportions kept in mind, evoke May 68 with the important number of workers involved in a struggle which is hitting the main sectors of economic activity in the country. An analysis of the development of proletarian struggles at the heart of Europe must take account of this historical dimension, recognising that the development of the workers’ combativity on its own terrain faced with the crisis and the attacks of the bourgeoisie is being confirmed and expresses a dynamic towards the deepening of the class struggle.

There are however considerable differences between the two situations. The context is not at all the same: the working class today has been considerably weakened. The very strong illusions and confusions which the proletariat carries with it on the road towards revolution was one of the major weaknesses of the struggles of May 68 and the twenty years of workers’ struggles that followed. This left the proletariat disarmed and disoriented when the eastern bloc collapsed in 1989, enabling the bourgeoisie to develop a gigantic, world-wide ideological campaign against marxism and communism, falsely identified with Stalinism, and presenting the collapse of the latter as a victory for democracy against the totalitarian “Communist” regimes. This ideological campaign, aimed at sapping the self-confidence of the working class and provoking a general reflux in the class struggle, deeply affected the capacity of the proletariat to fight on its class terrain, opening up a new phase of decadent capitalist society, the phase of decomposition. This is phase, characterised by the tendency for society to rot on its feet, is the product of a blockage between the classes in which nether the proletariat nor the bourgeoisie has been able to impose its “way out” of capitalism in crisis: world revolution or world war.

One of the consequences of this difference in context is the following: in the period of developing struggles between 1968 and 1989, the proletariat was able to play a fully active role as a barrier to war in the confrontation between the two blocs: its mobilisation on a class terrain prevented it from being enrolled by the bourgeoisie for war. This was a decisive obstacle to the outbreak of a third world war. But this is no longer the case today, when the working class is not in a position to prevent the descent into military barbarism, as we can see with the war in Ukraine.

This situation demonstrates the accumulation and inter-action of the mortal dangers contained in the final phase of capitalist decadence, which can lead to planet-wide destruction even without the outbreak of world war.

On the other hand, the struggles in Britain show that the proletariat has not suffered a decisive defeat, that it is not already beaten, that it can still raise its head, in spite of all the difficulties and the new challenges that will inevitably rise up before it, making it clearer than ever that the alternative for the future is communism or barbarism.

Today, if a good number of the illusions and weaknesses which marked the struggles between 1968 and 1989 have fallen away, other major difficulties have arrived on the scene of the class struggle. It has become evident that the road towards the communist revolution is still a long one, littered with increasingly dangerous traps and obstacles. To progress along this road is a huge challenge, but the proletariat has no choice but to engage resolutely in this struggle, which still has the perspective of the class regaining confidence in itself, of developing its struggles to the point where it can affirm itself as the only social force capable of overthrowing and destroying capitalism before it destroys humanity.

5. A struggle against economic attacks worsened by imperialist war

The importance of this movement is not limited to the fact that it puts an end to a long period of relative passivity. These struggles are developing at a time when the world is confronted with a large-scale imperialist war, a war which opposes Russia and Ukraine on European soil but which has a global scope with, in particular, a mobilisation of NATO member countries which is a mobilisation not only in arms but also on the economic, diplomatic and ideological levels: in Western countries, governments are calling for sacrifices to "defend freedom and democracy". In concrete terms, this means that the proletarians of these countries must tighten their belts even more to "show their solidarity with Ukraine", in fact with the Ukrainian ruling class and the rulers of the Western countries.

Faced with the conflict in Ukraine, calling for a direct mobilisation of workers against the war is illusory in Western Europe or in the United States; however, since February 2022, the ICC has highlighted that the workers' reaction will appear on the basis of the attack on their wages, products of the accumulation and interconnection of the crises and disasters of the past period, and against the campaign calling for the acceptance of sacrifices in support of the "heroic resistance of the Ukrainian people".

Further, the mobilisation against capitalist austerity also ultimately contains an opposition against war. This is also what the strikes of the working class in the UK bear in embryo, even if the workers are not always fully conscious of it: the refusal to make more and more sacrifices for the interests of the ruling class, the refusal of sacrifices for the national economy and for the war effort, and the refusal to accept the logic of this system which leads humanity towards catastrophe and, finally, to its destruction.

In short, even if the struggles are limited to one country at the moment, even if they run out of steam, and even if we should probably not expect a series of similar major developments in different countries in the near future, a milestone has been reached. The essential achievement of the struggle of the workers in Britain is to stand up and fight because the worst defeat is to suffer impoverishment without a fight. It is on this basis that lessons can be learned and the struggle can move forward. In this perspective, the strikes represent a qualitative change and herald a change in the situation of the working class vis-à-vis the bourgeoisie: they mark a development of combativity on a class terrain which can be the beginning of a new episode of the struggle, because it is through its massive economic struggles that the working class will be able to progressively recover its class identity, eroded by the pressure of 40 years of decomposition, by the ebb of struggles and consciousness, by the sirens of interclassist movements, populism and environmental campaigns. It is on this basis that the working class will be able to open up a perspective for the whole of society. From this point of view, there is a "before" and an "after" to the summer of 2022.

 

R. Havanais / 22.09.2022

130 years ago, when tensions between capitalist powers were growing in Europe, Frederick Engels posed the dilemma for humanity: Communism or Barbarism.

This alternative was concretised in the First World War which broke out in 1914 and caused 20 million deaths, another 20 million invalids, and in the chaos of war there was the Spanish flu pandemic with more than 50 million deaths.

The revolution in Russia in 1917 and the revolutionary attempts in other countries put an end to the carnage and showed the other side of the historical dilemma posed by Engels: the overthrow of capitalism on a world scale by the revolutionary class, the proletariat, opening up the possibility of a communist society.

However, there followed:

- the crushing of this world revolutionary attempt, the brutal counter-revolution in Russia perpetrated by Stalinism under the banner of "communism",

- the massacre of the proletariat in Germany, initiated by Social Democracy[1] and completed by Nazism,

- the enlistment of the proletariat in the Soviet Union, the massacre of the proletariat in that country, and

- the enlistment of the proletariat behind the flags of anti-fascism and the defence of the "socialist" fatherland which led in 1939-45 to another new milestone of barbarism, the Second World War, with 60 million dead and an infinite sequel of suffering: the Nazi and Stalinist concentration camps; the Allied bombings of Dresden, Hamburg and Tokyo (January 1945); the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the USA.

Since then, war has not stopped claiming lives on every continent.

First came the confrontation between the US and Russian blocs, the so-called Cold War (1945-89), with an endless chain of localised wars and the threat of a deluge of nuclear bombs hanging over the entire planet.

After the collapse of the USSR in 1989-91, chaotic wars have bloodied the planet: Iraq, Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, Ethiopia, Sudan... The war in Ukraine is the most serious war crisis since 1945.

The barbarity of war is accompanied by a proliferation of mutually reinforcing destructive forces: the COVID pandemic which is still far from being overcome and which heralds new pandemics; the ecological and environmental disaster that is accelerating and amplifying, combined with climate change, causing increasingly uncontrollable and deadly disasters: drought, floods, hurricanes, tsunamis, etc., and an unprecedented degree of pollution of land, water, air and space; the severe food crisis bringing famines of biblical proportions. Forty years ago, humanity was in danger of perishing in a Third World War, today it can be annihilated by the simple aggregation and lethal combination of the forces of destruction currently at work: "In the end, it is all the same whether we are wiped out in a rain of thermonuclear bombs, or by pollution, radio-activity from nuclear power stations, famine, epidemics, and the massacres of innumerable small wars (where nuclear weapons might also be used). The only difference between these two forms of annihilation lies in that one is quick, while the other would be slower, and would consequently cause still more suffering"[2] (Theses on Decomposition).

The dilemma posed by Engels takes a much more pressing form: COMMUNISM or THE DESTRUCTION OF HUMANITY. The historical moment is serious, and internationalist revolutionaries need to affirm it unequivocally to our class, because only our class can open up the communist perspective through a permanent and relentless struggle.

Imperialist war is capitalism’s way of life

The mass media falsify and underplay the reality of the war. In the early stages the media was devoted to the war in Ukraine 24 hours a day. But as time has gone by, the war has been trivialised, not even producing headlines, its echoes not going beyond threatening statements, calls for sacrifices to "send weapons to Ukraine", hammering out propaganda campaigns against the enemy, fake news, all served with vain hopes of "negotiations" ...

To trivialise war, to become accustomed to the repellent smell of corpses and smoking ruins, is the worst of treachery, it is concealing the serious dangers that menace humanity, it is to be blind to all the threats that are permanently hanging over our heads.

Millions of people, in Africa, Asia or Central America, know no other reality than WAR; from cradle to grave they live in an ocean of barbarism where atrocities of all kinds proliferate: child soldiers, punitive military operations, hostage-taking, terrorist attacks, mass displacement of entire populations, indiscriminate bombings.

While the wars of the past were limited to the front lines and the combatants, the wars of the 20th and 21st century are TOTAL WARS that encompass all spheres of social life and their effects spread throughout the world, dragging down all countries, including those that are not direct belligerents. In the wars of the 20th and 21st century, no inhabitant or place on the planet can escape their lethal effects.

On the front line, which can span thousands of kilometres and extend over land, sea and air... and through space! ... Life is cut short by bombs, shooting, mines, and even, in many cases, by "friendly fire" ... Seized by a murderous insanity, forced through the terror imposed by higher ranks, or trapped in extreme situations, all the participants are forced to carry out the most suicidal, criminal and destructive actions.

On one part of the military front there is "remote warfare" with the relentless deployment of ultra-modern machines of destruction: planes dropping thousands of bombs without pause; drones remotely controlled to attack enemy targets; mobile or fixed artillery relentlessly pounding the enemy; missiles covering hundreds or thousands of kilometres.

The so-called home front becomes itself a permanent theatre of war in which the population is taken hostage. Anyone can die in the periodic bombardment of entire cities... In the centres of production, people work at gunpoint, under the control of the police, parties, trade unions and all the other institutions in the service of the "defence of the homeland", while at the same time they run the risk of being ripped apart by enemy bombs. Work becomes an even greater hell than the daily hell of capitalist exploitation.

The dramatically rationed food is a filthy, stinking soup... There is no water, no electricity, no heating... Millions of human beings see their existence reduced to surviving like animals. Shells fall from the sky, killing thousands of people or causing terrible suffering, on the ground, endless police or military checkpoints, the danger of being arrested by armed thugs, state mercenaries referred to as "defenders of the homeland" ... You have to run to take refuge in filthy, rat-infested cellars ... Respect, the most elementary solidarity, trust, rational thought ... are swept away by the atmosphere of terror imposed not only by the government, but also by the National Union in which parties and trade unions participate with merciless zeal. The most absurd rumours, the most implausible news circulate incessantly, causing an hysterical atmosphere of denunciation, indiscriminate suspicion, massive stress and pogrom.

War is a barbarism willed and planned by governments that aggravate it by consciously propagating hatred, fear of the “other”, rifts and divisions between human beings, death for death's sake, the institutionalisation of torture, submission, power relations, as the only logic of social evolution. The violent fighting around the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine shows how the two sides have no scruples about the risk of provoking a radioactive catastrophe a lot worse than Chernobyl and with tremendous consequences for the population of Europe. The threat of the use of nuclear weapons looms ominously.

The ideology of war

Capitalism is the most hypocritical and cynical system in history. Its whole ideological art consists in passing off its interests as the "interest of the people" adorned with the loftiest ideals: justice, peace, progress, human rights...!

All states fabricate an IDEOLOGY OF WAR designed to justify it and to turn their "citizens" into hyenas ready to kill. “War is methodical, organised, gigantic murder. But in normal human beings this systematic murder is possible only when a state of intoxication has been previously created. This has always been the tried and proven method of those who make war. Bestiality of action must find a commensurate bestiality of thought and senses; the latter must prepare and accompany the former” (Rosa Luxemburg, The Junius Pamphlet).

The great democracies have PEACE as a cornerstone of their war ideology. Demonstrations "for peace" have always prepared imperialist wars. In the summer of 1914 and in 1938-39 millions of people demonstrated "for peace" in an impotent cry of "people of goodwill", exploiters and exploited holding hands, which the "democratic" side never stop using to justify the acceleration of war preparations.

In the First World War, Germany had mobilised its troops in "defence of peace", "shattered by the Sarajevo attack on its Austrian ally". But on the opposing side, France and Britain went to the slaughter in the name of peace "shattered by Germany". In World War II, France and Britain feigned a "peace" effort at Munich in the face of Hitler's ambitions, while frenetically preparing for war, and the invasion of Poland by the combined action of Hitler and Stalin gave them the perfect excuse to go to war... In Ukraine, Putin said until hours before the invasion on 24 February that he wanted "peace", while the United States relentlessly denounced Putin's warmongering ...

The nation, national defence and all the ideological weapons that gyrate around it (racism, religion etc.) is the hook to mobilise the proletariat and the whole population in imperialist slaughter. The bourgeoisie proclaims in times of "peace" the "coexistence between peoples", but everything vanishes with imperialist war, then the masks fall off and everyone spreads hatred of the foreigner and the staunch defence of the nation!

They all present their wars as "defensive". A hundred years ago, the ministries in charge of military barbarism were called "ministries of war"; today, with the worst hypocrisy, they are called "ministries of defence". Defence is the fig leaf of warfare. There are no attacked nations and aggressor nations, they are all active participants in the deadly machinery of war. Russia in the current war appears as the "aggressor" as it is the one that has taken the initiative to invade Ukraine, but before that the United States, in a Machiavellian manner, expanded NATO to several countries of the old Warsaw Pact. It is not possible to take each link in isolation, it is necessary to look at the bloody chain of imperialist confrontation that has been gripping the whole of humanity for more than a century.

They always talk of a "clean war", which follows (or should follow) "humanitarian rules" "in accordance with international law". This is a despicable fraud, served with unbridled cynicism and hypocrisy! The wars of decadent capitalism live by no other rule than the absolute destruction of the enemy, and that includes terrorising the subjects of the enemy with merciless bombing ... In war a relationship of force is established where ANYTHING GOES, from the most brutal rape and punishment of the enemy’s population, to the most indiscriminate terror against their own "citizens". Russia's bombing of Ukraine follows in the footsteps of the US bombing of Iraq, the American like the Russian governments in Afghanistan or in Syria and before that of Vietnam; France's bombing of its former colonies, such as Madagascar and Algeria; the bombing of Dresden and Hamburg by the "democratic allies"; and the nuclear barbarity of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The wars of the 20th and 21st centuries have been accompanied by methods of mass extermination employed by all sides, although the democratic side usually takes care to subcontract it to shady individuals who get the blame.

They dare to talk of "just wars"!!! The NATO side supporting Ukraine says it is a battle for democracy against despotism and the dictatorial regime of Putin. Putin says he will "denazify" Ukraine. Both are blatant lies. The side of the "democracies" has just as much blood on its hands: blood from the countless wars they have provoked directly (Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan) or indirectly (Libya, Syria, Yemen...); blood from the thousands of migrants killed at sea or at the frontier hotspots of the USA or in Europe... The Ukrainian state uses terror to impose the Ukrainian language and culture; it kills workers for the sole crime of speaking Russian; it forcibly enlists any young person caught in the streets or on the roads; it uses the population, including those in hospitals, as human shields; it deploys neo-fascist gangs to terrorise the population... For his part, Putin, in addition to bombings, rapes and summary executions, displaces thousands of families to concentration camps in remote places; imposes terror in the "liberated" territories and enlists Ukrainians for the army by sending them to the slaughterhouse on the front line.

The real causes of war

Ten thousand years ago one of the means that broke up primitive communism was tribal warfare. Since then, under the aegis of modes of production based on exploitation, war has been one of the worst calamities. But certain wars have been able to play a progressive role in history, for example, in the development of capitalism, forming new nations, extending the world market, stimulating the development of the productive forces.

However, since the First World War, the world has been totally divided up among the capitalist powers, so that the only way out for each national capital is to wrest markets, zones of influence, strategic areas from its rivals. This makes war and all that goes with it (militarism, gigantic accumulation of armaments, diplomatic alliances) the PERMANENT WAY OF LIFE of capitalism. A constant imperialist pressure grips the world and drags down all nations, big or small, whatever their ideological mask and alibi, the orientation of the ruling parties, their racial composition or their cultural and religious heritage. ALL NATIONS ARE IMPERIALIST. The myth of "peaceful and neutral" nations is a pure fraud. If certain nations adopt a "neutral" policy, it is to try to take advantage of the conflict between the most resolutely opposing camps, to carve out their own zone of imperialist influence. In June 2022, Sweden, a country that has been officially neutral for more than 70 years, has joined NATO but it has not "betrayed any ideals", it has continued its own imperialist policy "by other means".

War is certainly good business for corporations engaged in arms manufacture, and it may even temporarily benefit particular countries but, for capitalism as a whole, it is an economic catastrophe, an irrational waste, a MINUS that weighs on world production that inevitably and negatively causes indebtedness, inflation and ecological destruction, never a PLUS that could increase capitalist accumulation.

An unavoidable necessity for the survival of every nation, war is a deadly economic weight. The USSR collapsed because it could not withstand the crazy arms race that the confrontation with the USA entailed and which the latter took to the ultimate with the deployment of the Star Wars program in the 1980s. The United States, which was the great victor of World War II and enjoyed a spectacular economic boom until the late 1960s, has encountered many obstacles to preserving its imperialist hegemony, of course since the dissolution of the blocs, which has favoured the emergence of a dynamic of reawakened new imperialist appetites - especially among its former 'allies' - of contestation and every one for themselves, but also because of the gigantic military effort that American forces have had to make for more than 80 years and the costly military operations it has had to undertake to maintain its status as the world’s leading power.

Capitalism carries in its genes, in its DNA, the most exacerbated competition, the EACH AGAINST ALL and the EVERYONE FOR THEMSELVES, for every capitalist, as well as for every nation. This "organic" tendency of capitalism did not appear clearly in its ascendant period because each national capital still enjoyed sufficient areas for its expansion without the need to enter into conflict with its rivals. Between 1914-89 it was attenuated by the formation of large imperialist blocs. With the brutal end of this brutal discipline, centrifugal tendencies are shaping a world of murderous disorder, where any imperialisms with global ambitions for world domination, as well as imperialisms with regional pretensions, and more local imperialisms are all compelled to follow their expansive appetites and their own interests. In this scenario, the United States tries to prevent anyone from overshadowing it by relentlessly deploying its overwhelming military power, relentlessly building it up, and by launching constant, strongly destabilising military operations. The promise in 1990, after the end of the USSR, of a "New World Order" of peace and prosperity was immediately belied by the Gulf War and then by the wars in the Middle East, Iraq and Afghanistan, which fuelled the warlike tendencies in such a way that the "most democratic imperialism in the world", the USA, is now the main agent for spreading warlike chaos and destabilising the world situation.

China has emerged as a contender of the first order to challenge America's leadership. Its army, despite its modernisation, is still a long way from acquiring the strength and experience of its American rival; its war technology, the basis of its armaments and effective military deployments, is still limited and fragile, a far cry from the US; China is surrounded in the Pacific by a chain of hostile powers (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia, etc.), which block its imperialist maritime expansion. Faced with this unfavourable situation, it has embarked on a gigantic economic-imperialist enterprise, the Silk Road, which aims to establish a global presence and a land expansion through Central Asia in one of the most unstable areas of the world. This is an effort with a very uncertain outcome that requires a total and immeasurable economic and military investment and political-social mobilisation beyond its means of control, which is essentially based on the political rigidity of its state apparatus, a heavy legacy of Stalinist Maoism: the systematic and brutal use of its repressive forces, coercion and submission to a gigantic, ultra-bureaucratised state apparatus, as was seen in the growing number of protests against the government's "zero Covid" policy. This aberrant orientation and the accumulation of contradictions that deeply undermine its development could eventually undermine the clay-footed colossus that is China. This, and the brutal and threatening response of the US, illustrates the degree of murderous insanity, of blind flight into barbarism and militarism (including the growing militarisation of social life), that capitalism has reached as symptoms of a generalised cancer that is eating away at the world and now directly threatens the future of the earth and the life of humanity.

The whirlwind of destruction that threatens the world

The war in Ukraine is not a storm out of a blue sky; it follows the worst pandemic (so far) of the 21st century, COVID, with more than 15 million dead, and whose ravages continued with draconian lockdowns in China. However, both should be seen in the context of, as well as stimulating, a chain of catastrophes striking humanity: environmental destruction; climate change and its multiple consequences; famine returning with great force to Africa, Asia and Central America; the incredible wave of refugees, which in 2021 reached the unprecedented figure of 100 million people displaced or migrating; the political disorder taking hold of the central countries as we have seen with the governments in Britain or the weight of populism in the United States; the rise of the most obscurantist ideologies...

The pandemic has laid bare the contradictions that undermine capitalism. A social system that boasts impressive scientific advances has no other recourse than the medieval method of quarantine, while its health systems collapse and its economy has been paralysed for almost two years, aggravating a skyrocketing economic crisis. A social order that claims to have progress as its banner produces the most backward and irrational ideologies that have exploded around the pandemic with ridiculous conspiracy theories, many of them from the mouths of "great world leaders".

The pandemic has a direct cause in the worst ecological disaster that has been threatening humanity for years. Driven by profit and not by the satisfaction of human needs, capitalism is a predator of natural resources, as it is of human labour, but, at the same time, it tends to destroy natural balances and processes, modifying them in a chaotic way, like a sorcerer's apprentice, provoking all kinds of catastrophes with increasingly destructive consequences: global warming, triggering droughts, floods, fires, collapse of glaciers and icebergs, massive disappearance of plant and animal species with unforeseeable consequences and heralding the very disappearance of the human species to which capitalism is leading. The ecological disaster is exacerbated by the necessities of war, by war operations themselves (the use of nuclear weapons is an obvious expression) and by the worsening of a world economic crisis that forces every national capital to further devastate numerous areas in a desperate search for raw materials. The summer of 2022 is a glaring illustration of the serious threats facing humanity at the ecological level: rising average and maximum temperatures - the hottest summer since records began internationally - widespread drought affecting rivers such as the Rhine, the Po and the Thames, devastating forest fires, floods such as the one in Pakistan affecting a third of the country's surface area, landslides... and, in the midst of this devastating panorama of disaster, governments withdraw their ridiculous ‘environmental protection’ measures in the name of the war effort!

"The final outcome of the capitalist mode of production is chaos", said the Platform adopted by the first Congress of the Communist International in 1919. It is suicidal and irrational, contrary to all scientific criteria, to think that all these ravages would be no more than a sum of passing phenomena, each resulting from distinct causes. There is a continuity, an accumulation of contradictions, which make a common bloody thread, which binds them together, converging in a lethal whirlwind which threatens humanity:

• We are witnessing an acceleration of all the contradictions of capitalism combining with each other and provoking a multiplying effect on the factors of destruction and chaos;
• The economy is plunged not only into crisis but also into increasing disorder (constant supply bottlenecks, a convergence of situations of overproduction and shortages of goods and labour);

- The most industrialised countries, which are supposed to be oases of prosperity and peace, are being destabilised and are themselves becoming major factors in the dizzying increase in international instability.

As we said in the Manifesto of our 9th Congress (1991): "Never has human society seen slaughter on such a scale as during the last two World Wars. Never has scientific progress been used on such a scale in the service or destruction, death, and human misery. Never has such an accumulation of wealth gone side by side with, indeed created, such famine and suffering as that of the Third World countries during the last decades. But it seems that humanity has not yet plumbed the depths. The decadence of capitalism means the system's death-agony, but this agony itself has a history: today, we have reached its ultimate phase, the phase of general decomposition. Human society is rotting where it stands.".[3]

The response of the proletariat

Of all the classes in society, the most affected and hardest hit by war is the proletariat. “Modern” war is waged by a gigantic industrial machine which demands a great intensification of the exploitation of the proletariat. The proletariat is an international class that HAS NO HOMELAND, but war is the killing of workers for the homeland that exploits and oppresses them. The proletariat is the class of consciousness; war is irrational confrontation, the renunciation of all conscious thought and reflection. The proletariat has an interest in seeking the clearest truth; in wars the first casualty is truth, chained, gagged, suffocated by the lies of imperialist propaganda. The proletariat is the class of unity across barriers of language, religion, race or nationality; the deadly confrontation of war compels the tearing apart, the division, the confrontation between nations and populations. The proletariat is the class of internationalism, of trust and mutual solidarity; war demands suspicion, fear of the "foreigner", the most abhorrent hatred of “the enemy”.

Because war strikes at and mutilates the very core of the proletarian being, generalised war necessitates the prior defeat of the proletariat. The First World War was possible because the then parties of the working class, the socialist parties, together with the trade unions, betrayed our class and joined their bourgeoisies in the framework of NATIONAL UNION against the enemy. But this betrayal was not enough. In 1915, the Left of social democracy grouped together in Zimmerwald and raised the banner of struggle for world revolution. This contributed to the emergence of mass struggles that paved the way for the Revolution in Russia in 1917 and the worldwide wave of proletarian onslaught in 1917-23, not only against the war in defence of the principles of proletarian internationalism, but against capitalism by asserting its capacity as a united class to overthrow a barbaric and inhuman system of exploitation

An indestructible lesson of 1917-18! The First World War was not ended by diplomatic negotiations or by the conquests of this or that imperialism, IT WAS ENDED BY THE INTERNATIONAL REVOLUTIONARY UPRISING OF THE PROLETARIAT. ONLY THE PROLETARIAT CAN PUT AN END TO MILITARY BARBARISM BY TURNING ITS CLASS STRUGGLE TO THE DESTRUCTION OF CAPITALISM.

In order to open the way to the Second World War, the bourgeoisie ensured not only the physical but also the ideological defeat of the proletariat. The proletariat was subjected to merciless terror wherever its revolutionary attempts had gone furthest: in Germany under Nazism, in Russia under Stalinism. But, at the same time, it had been recruited ideologically, behind the banners of anti-fascism and the defence of the "Socialist Fatherland", the USSR. “Unable to launch its own offensive the working class was led, bound hand and foot, into the second imperialist war. Unlike World War I, the Second World War did not provide the working class with the means to rise up in a revolutionary way. Instead it was mobilised behind the great 'victories' of the 'Resistance', 'anti-fascism', and colonial and national 'liberation' movement.” (Manifesto of the First International Congress of the ICC, 1975 [198]).

Since the historic resumption of the class struggle in 1968, and throughout the period when the world was divided into two imperialist blocs, the working class in the major countries refused to make the sacrifices demanded by war, let alone go to the front to die for the Fatherland, thus closing the door to a Third World War. This situation has not changed since 1989.

The fight against inflation and the fight against the war

However, the "non-mobilisation" of the proletariat of the central countries for war IS NOT ENOUGH. A second lesson emerges from historical developments since 1989: MERE PASSIVITY TO WAR OPERATIONS, AND SIMPLE RESISTANCE TO CAPITALIST BARBARISM IS NOT ENOUGH. STAYING AT THIS STAGE WILL NOT STOP THE COURSE TOWARDS THE DESTRUCTION OF HUMANITY.

The proletariat needs to move to the political terrain of the general international offensive against capitalism. “The working class will only be able to answer capital’s attacks blow for blow, and finally go onto the offensive and overthrow this barbaric system thanks to: (-) an awareness of what is at stake in the present historical situation, and in particular of the mortal danger that social decomposition holds over humanity; (-) its determination to continue, develop and unite its class combat; (-) its ability to spring the many traps that the bourgeoisie, however decomposed itself, will not fail to set in its path.” (Theses on Decomposition, thesis 17 [12]).

The backdrop to the accumulation of destruction, barbarism and catastrophes that we are denouncing is the irreversible economic crisis of capitalism that is at the root of its functioning. From 1967 capitalism entered into an economic crisis from which, fifty years later, it is unable to escape, on the contrary, as shown by the economic upheavals that have been taking place since 2018 and the growing escalation of inflation, it is worsening considerably, with its consequences of poverty, unemployment, insecurity and famine.

The capitalist crisis affects the very foundations of this society. Inflation, insecurity, unemployment, hellish pace and working conditions that destroy workers' health, unaffordable housing… all testify to an unstoppable degradation of working class life and, although the bourgeoisie tries to create all imaginable divisions, granting "more privileged" conditions to certain categories of workers, what we see in its entirety is, on the one hand, what is possibly going to be the WORST CRISIS in the history of capitalism, and, on the other hand, the concrete reality of the ABSOLUTE PAUPERISATION of the working class in the central countries, fully confirming the accuracy of the prediction which Marx made concerning the historical perspective of capitalism and which the economists and other ideologues of the bourgeoisie have so much mocked.

The inexorable worsening of the crisis of capitalism is an essential stimulus for the class struggle and class consciousness. The struggle against the effects of the crisis is the basis for the development of the strength and unity of the working class. The economic crisis directly affects the infrastructure of society; it therefore lays bare the root causes of all the barbarism that hangs over society, enabling the proletariat to become conscious of the need to completely destroy the system and no longer try to improve some aspects of it.

In the struggle against the brutal attacks of capitalism and especially against the inflation that hits workers as a whole in a general and indiscriminate way, workers will develop their combativity, they will be able to begin to recognise themselves as a class with a strength, an autonomy and a historical role to play in society. This political development of the class struggle will give them the capacity to put an end to war by putting an end to capitalism.

This perspective is beginning to emerge: “in the face of the bourgeoisie's attacks, anger has been building up and today, the working class in Britain is showing that it is once again prepared to fight for its dignity, to reject the sacrifices that are constantly demanded by capital. Furthermore, it is indicative of an international dynamic: last winter, strikes started to appear in Spain and the US; this summer, Germany and Belgium also experienced walkouts; and now, commentators are predicting ‘an explosive social situation’ in France and Italy in the coming months. It is not possible to predict where and when the workers' combativity will re-emerge on a massive scale in the near future, but one thing is certain: the scale of the current workers' mobilisation in Britain is a significant historical event. The days of passivity and submission are past. The new generations of workers are raising their heads” (“The ruling class demands further sacrifices, the response of the working class is to fight!” [190] ICC International Leaflet August 2022)

We are seeing a break from years of passivity and disorientation. The return of workers' combativity in response to the crisis can become a focus of consciousness animated by the intervention of communist organisations. It is clear that each manifestation of the breakdown into the decomposition of society manages to slow down workers' combative efforts, or even paralyse them at first: as was the case with the movement in France 2019, which was hit by the outbreak of the pandemic. This means an additional difficulty for the development of struggles. However, there is no other way than struggle, the struggle itself is already the first victory. The world proletariat, even through a process necessarily strewn with pitfalls and traps set by the political and trade union apparatuses of its class enemy, with bitter defeats, keeps intact its capacities to be able to recover its class identity and finally launch an international offensive against this dying system.

The obstacles that the class struggle has to overcome

The twenties of the twenty-first century will therefore be of considerable importance in the historical evolution of the class struggle of the workers movement. They show - as we have already seen since 2020 - more clearly than in the past, the perspective of the destruction of humanity that capitalist decomposition holds. At the opposite pole, the proletariat will begin to take its first steps, often hesitant and full of weaknesses, towards its historical capacity to pose the communist perspective. Both poles of the alternative, Destruction of Humanity or Communist Revolution, will be posed, although the latter is still a long way off and faces enormous obstacles in asserting itself

It would be suicidal for the proletariat to try and conceal or underestimate the gigantic obstacles that come both from the activity of Capital and its states and from the putrefying atmosphere that is contaminating the social environment all over the world:

1: The bourgeoisie has drawn the lessons of the GREAT SHOCK of the initial triumph of the Revolution in Russia and the world revolutionary wave of 1917-23 which showed "in practice" what the Communist Manifesto declared in 1848: " A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism... The bourgeoisie produces… its own grave-diggers …  the proletariat".

1. It COLLABORATES INTERNATIONALLY against the proletariat as was seen in the face of the revolution in Russia 1917[4] and Germany in 1918 or against the mass strike in Poland in 1980.
2. It has developed a gigantic apparatus of control, diversion and sabotage of workers' struggles made up of trade unions and parties of all political colours, from the extreme right to the extreme left.
3. It uses and is going to use all the instruments of its state and the mass media to launch constant ideological campaigns and co-ordinate political manoeuvres aimed at counteracting and obstructing the consciousness and struggles of the proletariat.

2: The decomposition of capitalist society exacerbates the lack of confidence in the future. It also undermines the confidence of the proletariat in itself and in its strength as the only class capable of overthrowing capitalism, giving rise to "every man for himself", generalised competition, social fragmentation into opposing categories, corporatism, all are a considerable obstacle to the development of workers' struggles and above all their revolutionary politicisation.

3: In this context, the proletariat is in danger of being dragged into interclassist struggles or piecemeal mobilisations (feminism, anti-racism, climate or environmental questions...), all of which open the door to a diversion of its struggle onto a terrain of confrontation between fractions of the bourgeoisie.

4: “Time is no longer on the side of the working class. As long as society was threatened with destruction by imperialist war alone, the mere fact of the proletarian struggle was sufficient to bar the way to this destruction. But, unlike imperialist war, which depended on the proletariat’s adherence to the bourgeoisie’s “ideals”, social decomposition can destroy humanity without controlling the working class. For while the workers’ struggles can oppose the collapse of the economy, they are powerless, within this system, to hinder decomposition. Thus, while the threat posed by decomposition may seem more far-off than that of world war (were the conditions for it present, which is not the case today), it is by contrast far more insidious.” (Theses on Decomposition, Thesis 16 [12])

This immensity of dangers should not push us into fatalism. The strength of the proletariat is the consciousness of its weaknesses, its difficulties, the obstacles which the enemy or the situation itself raise against its struggle. “Proletarian revolutions … constantly criticise themselves, constantly interrupt themselves in their own course, return to the apparently accomplished, in order to begin anew; they deride with merciless thoroughness the half-measures, weaknesses, and paltriness of their first attempts, seem to throw down their opponents only so the latter may draw new strength from the earth and rise before them again more colossal than ever, recoil constantly from the indeterminate immensity of their own goals – until a situation is created which makes all turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves call out: Hic Rhodus, hic salta!" (Marx: “18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”).

The response of the Communist Left

In serious historical situations such as far-reaching wars like the one in Ukraine, the proletariat can see who are its friends and who are its enemies. These enemies are not only the major figures such as Putin, Zelensky or Biden, but also the parties of the extreme right, right, left and extreme left, who, with a wide range of arguments, including pacifism, support and justify the war and the defence of one imperialist camp against another.

For more than a century only the Communist Left has been and is capable of denouncing imperialist war systematically and consistently, defending the alternative of the class struggle of the proletariat, of its orientation towards the destruction of capitalism by the world proletarian revolution.

The struggle of the proletariat is not limited to its defensive struggles or mass strikes. An indispensable, permanent and inseparable component of it is the struggle of its communist organisations and, concretely, for a century now, of the Communist Left. The unity of all groups of the Communist Left is indispensable in the face of the capitalist dynamic of the destruction of humanity. As we already affirmed in the Manifesto from our first congress (1975): “Turning its back on the monolithism of the sects, the International Communist Current calls upon the communists of all countries to be aware of the immense responsibilities which they have, to abandon the false quarrels which separate them, to surmount the deceptive divisions which the old world has imposed on them. The ICC calls on them to join in this effort to constitute (before the class engages in its decisive struggles) the international and unified organisation of its vanguard. The communists as the most conscious fraction of the class, must show it the way by taking as their slogan: ‘Revolutionaries of all countries, unite!’"

ICC (December 2022)

 

The Sars-Cov-2 pandemic has given rise to a great number of works trying to establish the causes of Covid and proposing a number of alternatives. One of them, La Fabrique des pandemies by Marie Monique Robin, has aroused considerable interest. This work is presented under the form of a synthesis of studies made by the author along with around sixty scientists globally: virologists, infectious disease specialists, doctors, epidemiologists, even vets, for whom, the world is currently confronted by “an ‘epidemic of pandemics’ caused by human activity which has precipitated the collapse of biodiversity”.

Presented as “salutary”, this book makes an appeal to analyse the causes of the “new diseases” and to become aware of the necessity for a “profound change in our global economy which is predatory on the planet’s resources and the cause of climatic, ecological, health, economic, energy and financial crises” and conceives itself as “an appeal to set up a social-ecology of health and of the well-being of everybody”[1]. Nothing less!

Capitalism is an impediment to the establishment of truth

Research for scientific truth is a value shared by the proletariat. As a revolutionary class deprived of all material support within capitalist society and possessing only its consciousness and organisation as arms of combat, it is imperative for it to develop a de-mystified vision of reality. It is the condition sine qua non of its political action. For their part, the task of revolutionaries with regard to science, “is to theoretically assimilate its results, while understanding that its practical applications can only really serve human needs in a society evolving towards socialism.

The development of knowledge in the workers' movement thus involves seeing the theoretical development of the sciences as its own acquisition. But it must integrate this development into a more overall understanding which is centered round the practical realisation of the social revolution, the basis for all real progress in society”. [2]

Regarding research into the causes and scientific origins of the pandemic, the least that one can say is that it’s had a hard time making progress. It met a number of obstacles in the toxic atmosphere generated by the decomposition of capitalist society, marked by the development of irrationality and hostility regarding scientific thought, notably in a whole number of conspiracy theories. According to many of these “theories”, often networked by various populists, the pandemic is an artificial creation planned by “elites” in the service of hidden interests in order to maximise the profits of the big pharmaceutical groups or to impose extra controls by the state on individuals’ private lives. Even the supposedly more “responsible” representatives of the system have used the media to disparage the scientific conclusions which underline the role of the destruction of the environment in the emergence of Covid: “To see a link between air pollution, biodiversity and Covid-19 reveals surrealism and not science” declared the ex-Minister of National Education, Luc Ferry, on the pages of L’Express. The search for scientific truth sometimes exposes researchers to reprisals from the authorities, not only in China where this pressure is clearly evident, but also in the democratic states under more subtle forms via financing or their work being put on the shelf.

Even on the terrain of scientific knowledge powerful filters and important ideological limitations exist, acting against the analysis of reality. The “strongly anchored belief within the scientific world, the eco-modernism of man (who) is above all other species populating the Earth and is not part of nature (and who) measures nature by the yardstick of what it provides us with and what it inflicts upon us, good or ill (and which) reduces nature to a service provider for humanity” reflects a completely bourgeois ideological conception of nature which can only prevent an understanding of the significance of the Covid-19 pandemic for humanity.

Added to this is the background of imperialism and increasing war-like tension between China and the United States these last months, who both accuse each other of being at the origins of the pandemic by allowing the virus to escape from a laboratory in Wuhan which was receiving American funding. The brainwashing, disinformation, and lies at the service of one part of the state or the other with the aim of discrediting the adversary can only feed the conspiracy fantasies and bring a supplementary discredit to science.

Manipulation of viruses for bacteriological warfare is part of the modern, barbaric world today and the hypothesis of an escape from a laboratory can’t be a priori excluded.[3]  If such was the case in China or elsewhere, given the dramatic consequences, it would be overwhelming proof of the irresponsibility of the bourgeoisie and a loss of control over its own system! “But even if the virus escaped the lab accidently, does that change anything of our understanding of the emergence of successive zoonotic epidemics these last decades? Assuredly not!”

Decadent capitalism is responsible for the multiplication of pandemics

Since the 1950’s the planet has faced a real “epidemic of epidemics”, ancient as well as new: from around twenty in the 1940’s to more than a hundred in the 1990’s. Since 2000, humanity has confronted a new infectious illness every year (SARS, Ebola, Lassa fever, Covid-19). Seventy per-cent of emerging sicknesses are zoonotic, transferred from animals to humans.

This “epidemic of epidemics” is caused by deforestation, the extension of industrial agriculture, monoculture and industrial animal breeding (as well as an increasingly unbalanced climate) which, by weakening ecosystems and precipitating the collapse of biodiversity, creates and favours conditions for the propagation of new, infectious pathogens. The mechanisms for these emerging and successive problems since the Second World War have been clearly identified and focus around “several factors which contribute to the emergence of new diseases (...): the first, the one through which everything happens, is deforestation for the purposes of monoculture, mineral exploitation, etc. (...); the second, are domestic animals which serve as an epidemiological bridge between fauna and humans, but also amplifies them when they are industrially raised: (...) the third, is a country’s integration into the global market”. Thus, for example, we now know that “the real emergence (of AIDS) is linked to the colonial expansion of the nineteenth century. Demands for ivory, wood, then rubber resulting in massive deforestation along with the local labour force working on plantations and the construction of railways transformed both ecosystems and traditional societies”. Thus, the ancestor of the AIDS virus arose around 1910; it circulated in Africa for some years from the 1960’s and arrived in the United States before being identified in the 1980’s.

Finally, scientists have identified the natural mechanism of “the ‘dilution effect’ thanks to which a rich, local biodiversity has a regulating effect on the prevalence and virulence of pathogenic agents, whose activity is maintained at a low level in the ecosystem’s equilibriums”. The destruction of biodiversity represents a mortal danger for the human species and its preservation is a stake for its survival: “The majority of the scientists who expressed themselves in this book are convinced not only that the collapse (of human life on Earth) is possible, but that it’s already underway.”

An “implacable” accusation... but against whom? And to do what?

Of course, these scientists denounce the negligence of the public authorities. While they’ve known “for some time the health risks linked to industrial breeding as a major source of selection and amplification of pathogenic agents to potential pandemics (...) It’s clear that there’s been a failure to prepare for such an eventuality by the authorities, regarding the risks of pandemics as well as strategies for predicting their emergence”. They also point out the incapacity of states to bring any sort of solution to the health question, faced with which “successive health crises” have above all increased “measures of bio-surveillance and biodiversity”. But “every time the imperative to respond to the health crisis leads in the end to ignoring the causes of the emergency. They cannot answer the question of knowing how and why a virus circulating in some part of Asia can, in the space of a few months, find itself in the whole of the planet’s human population”. A negligence and an impotence of the dominant class that is confirmed by an institution that can hardly be called “anti-state”: the CIA, which in 2017, in a report on the world situation written for the new governmental administration, says: “The planet and its ecosystems are in peril of being strongly affected in the years to come by diverse human and natural mutations. These upheavals will expose populations to new vulnerabilities and needs for water, food, health services, energy and infrastructures (...) These risks will be distributed in an unequal fashion in time and space, but will hit the majority of ecosystems and populations, in a serious, even catastrophic manner in some cases (...) The change of environmental conditions and the growth of links and exchanges throughout the world will affect the frequency of rainfall, biodiversity and the reproduction of microbes. All of this will naturally affect produce and agricultural systems and will multiply the emergence, transmission and propagation of human and animal infectious diseases (...) The omissions and negligence of national and international health systems will make the detection and management of epidemics more difficult, risking aggravating their expansion over very large areas. The generalisation of contacts between populations will increase the propagation of already expanding chronic infectious illnesses (such as tuberculosis, AIDS and hepatitis) and will bring serious economic and human problems in the countries most badly affected, despite the importance of international resources granted for their prevention”.[4] The scientists interviewed in the work of Marie-Monique Robin are also legitimately scandalised and revolted by the economic aspects of healthcare, pointing to the “gap between those who profit from these activities (the economies which cause the emergencies) and those that pay the price of degraded health and health services”.

But when it’s a question of knowing precisely who or what is behind the “human activities which make up the main factor of health risks”, fog and confusion enters the discussion.

Who or what are they talking about? Neoliberalism? Finance? Some “pharmaceutical multinationals and agri-businesses or those leaders lobotomised by greed for short-term profits?” Who, in turn, are pilloried over the chapters of the book. In fact, the vague and inconsistent incrimination of “human activities” and of “the anthropomorphic impact on the environment” only leads us into a vague ambiguity.

In a society divided into classes, which capitalism is, the invocation of “Man” in general in order to explain a social phenomenon is a completely mystified formula. By obscuring the reality of the social relations of the capitalist system, it masks and prevents us grasping the terms in which health and environmental problems are really and concretely posed. In presenting as “excesses” or “deviations” something which in reality corresponds to its daily practice absolves the capitalist system as a whole from any responsibility.

When it moves on to concrete propositions for political action in order to engage with “the only issue which matters: the calling into question of the dominant economic model based on the predatory hold of humans over the ecosystems” all science completely evaporates and falls back into the nets of the dominant ideology and the bourgeois state. They propose different recipes to us which all turn around the old, tired mystification of “We are all in the same boat” and the need for “individual citizens” to mobilise in order to pressurise institutions and policies and so to “take up their responsibilities”. Thus, the book’s conclusion opens with, along with other such nonsense that this part is full of, the grandstanding promotion of a piece published in Liberation, “The time of ecological solidarity has arrived”, calling “everyone to take their part, to contribute within their possibilities to the continued exploration of two essential questions: What development do we want? What nature do we want? It is therefore necessary to encourage all levels of decision-making (citizens, collectives, associations, unions, spiritual groups, communes, businesses, departments, regions, state services, organisations of the United Nations...), to think individually and collectively then put this solidarity to work (near and far) in ecological, social and economic dimensions”. Let’s be clear: they are asking us to show confidence in a bourgeoisie and state institutions, to put our fate in their hands and make common cause with the class which embodies capitalism, which is precisely the agent of the catastrophe: in order to change everything, we must change nothing of the foundations of the capitalist world!

Unless it has discovered a magic wand allowing it to escape its own nature and the contradictions resulting from it... [5]  But for a long time the workers’ movement and marxism have shown that the capitalist system as a whole does not at all have the means to put a brake on its predation of ecosystems. In spreading the illusion of a capitalism able to limit its “excesses”, to make “reasonable choices for the good of all”, they confine us within the limits of capitalist society, in a logic of the management and reform of capitalism, all this on the terrain of citizen’s actions where the proletariat is completely absent. Believing in this possibility is a dead-end, wanting to make people believe in it clearly renders one an accomplice of the dominant class. In the context of the pandemic where the bourgeois state and the dominant class have partly lost the confidence of the exploited, La Fabrique des pandémies helps contribute to the campaigns of the bourgeoisie and is nothing other than an ideological fire-break, dug in order to block all those who are legitimately posing questions about what to do in order to prevent the barbaric cycle of environmental destruction.

Only one alternative: communism

Throughout the book, scientists sketch out the contours of what they think is a solution to the planetary environmental crisis. They put forward the necessity for a “societal revolution” on a universal scale, affecting all domains, capable of a “total, systematic re-think” particularly the relationship between humans and nature, especially on the levels of the economy and production, the need to develop new ethics and to settle “the question of poverty” without which it will be impossible to “durably preserve ecosystems”.

Can one seriously imagine for a moment that these so-called solutions correspond in any way to what a bourgeois world in full-blown decomposition can offer? Of course not! On the contrary, the main lines of this tableau point to a social project which has to become the gravedigger of the capitalist world, the only possible alternative that can open doors towards a future: “Communism… is the genuine resolution of the antagonism between man and nature and between man and man”[6] , the project which is carried by the revolutionary class of our time, the proletariat.

In the 19th century, confronted with the consequences of industrialisation on the living conditions and health of the working class, with poor hygiene, epidemics, pollution of the air and water in the urban hell of large towns, as well as the alarming exhaustion of natural resources, particularly of soil under the weight of large-scale agriculture in England, then the most developed country along the capitalist road, the workers’ movement was, from its first steps, preoccupied with environmental questions.

Thus, marxism vigorously denounced the aberration of the private appropriation of the earth and the incompatibility of capitalism with nature and its preservation. The capitalist system, which presents itself as the pinnacle of a historic process which consecrated the world of commodities, a universal system of the production of goods, where everything is for sale, did not inaugurate the pillage of nature. But with capitalism this pillage takes place on a planetary level, an unprecedented fact in relation to previous modes of production which were constrained to more local dimensions, and takes on a qualitatively new scale of predation in the history of humanity: “it is only with it that nature becomes a pure object for man, a pure affair of utility; that is ceases to be recognised as a thing in itself; and even the knowledge of its autonomous laws appear as a simple ruse in order to subject it to human needs, as much as an object of consumption as a means of production”.[7] The incompatibility of capitalism with nature (which is shown in ecological disasters at the heights of its rapacity) is rooted fully in its exploitation, in the fact that, driven by the frenetic search for maximum profits, it is not only from the exploitation of the labour power of the proletariat that it draws its riches and profits, but also from the exploitation and pillage of the resources of nature. “Labour is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much a source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labour, which is itself only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labour power. (...) And insofar as man from the beginning behaves toward nature, the primary source of all instruments and subjects of labour, as an owner, treats it as belonging to him, his labour becomes the source of use values, therefore also of wealth.”[8] Marx was already denouncing the effects of exploitation and capitalist accumulation as similarly destructive to the planet as it was to the labour power of the proletariat: “In modern agriculture, the same as in the industry of the towns, the growth of productivity and the superior performances of labour is brought at the cost of the destruction and wearing out of the labour force. Moreover, each progression of capitalist agriculture is a progress not only in the art of exploiting the worker, but more so in the art of denuding the soil; each progress in the art of the short-term growth of fertility, a progress in the ruin of the durable sources of fertility. The more a country, the United States of North America for example, develops on the basis of large-scale industry, the quicker the process of destruction is accomplished. Capitalist production, therefore, only develops the techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth—the soil and the worker.”[9]

Above all, marxism has shown that the process of development of capital, submitting to the need for endless accumulation, affects the natural base of production, dangerously unbalancing the interaction between the human race and nature, provoking an irredeemable rupture of its metabolism. “With the still-greater preponderance of the urban population, concentrated in the main centres, on one hand capitalist production accumulates its historic motor force of society, on the other hand it upsets the metabolism between man and the earth, that’s to say returning to the soil some of its components utilised by man under the form of food and clothing and thus the eternal natural state of the permanent fertility of the soil[10]. “Great landed property reduces the agricultural population to a minimum, to a constantly lowered figure faced with the industrial population concentrated in large towns which grows ceaselessly; it thus creates the conditions which provokes an irreparable hiatus in the complex equilibrium of the social metabolism made up of the natural laws of life: there follows a wastage of the soil, a wastage that commerce transfers far beyond the frontiers of the country considered. Large-scale industry and agriculture, industrially exploited, acts in the same sense”.[11] That is why, despite all its scientific and technological advances, even when they are supposed to stand up against the ecological crisis, capitalism can only feed this crisis, spread it and aggravate it still more. In its devastating nature, in its threat to “the natural eternal condition of the life of humanity” Marx could already see that capitalism compromised the future of subsequent generations and, potentially, put the future of humanity in peril.[12]

If Marx and the workers’ movement of his time could only imagine the effects of the death throes of capitalism on humanity, their foresight has been amply confirmed after more than a century of the decadence of capitalism. During the course of this time, the accumulation of capital has become even more destructive, “the relentless destruction of the environment by capital (has taken on) another dimension and another quality (...); it is the epoch within which all the capitalist nations are obliged to compete on a saturated world market; consequently an epoch of a permanent war economy, with the disproportionate growth of heavy industry; an epoch characterised by irrationality, a pointless duplication of industrial complexes in each national unit (...) the rise of the megapolis (...) the development of types of agriculture no less damaging ecologically than the majority of different types of industry”.[13]

“The Great Acceleration” (as some elements describe the breadth and speed of ecological devastation these last decades) in reality forms one of the manifestations of the historic crisis of the capitalist mode of production in its period of decadence, which is now driven to paroxysms in its ultimate phase, that of decomposition. The ecological consequence of capitalist decomposition (of which the Covid-19 pandemic is a pure product) mixes and combines with all other phenomena of the dislocation of capitalist society, plunging humanity into growing chaos and barbarity. The exhaustion of resources and the consequences of global heating seriously disrupts and disorganises agricultural and industrial production, generating population displacements from unproductive and uninhabitable zones and exacerbating military rivalries in a world where each state searches to save itself faced with the catastrophe, posing a mortal danger for the survival of humanity.

It is thus the abolition of capitalism itself, of the social relations of capitalist exploitation, that alone holds the resolution of the ecological crisis. It goes hand-in-hand with the resolution of the social question and depends on the latter in order to establish a society of freely-associated producers (communism) which will have to “systematically establish (the metabolism between man and the earth) in regulatory law of social production”[14], in order to place the satisfaction of human needs at the centre of its mode of production. This communist society can only be implemented by the proletariat, the sole force able to develop a consciousness and a practice able to “revolutionise the existing world”, to “practically transform the existing state of affairs”.[15] It alone, through its fight for communism, can assure a future for humanity!

Scott, 25th October, 2021

Since 1989 and the collapse of the falsely named “Communist” regimes of the former imperialist bloc around the USSR, authentic marxism has had to fight back against an intensified campaign of deformations and lies, claiming that marxism is an out-of-date, discredited ideology which, when put into practice, could only prepare the ground for the Stalinist totalitarian gulag. These campaigns have been aided not only by the existence of regimes which have maintained the exploitation and repression of the working under a Red Flag, but also by all the former expressions of the workers’ movement which, having passed over to the side of the bourgeoisie, continue to make use of a disfigured version of marxism as an apology for their participation in imperialist wars and their advocacy of more statified forms of capitalist rule; and this has been a feature of the last 100 years and more. Thus, the mobilisation of the working class for the battle fields of 1914-18 was spearheaded by former Socialists who used passages in Marx and Engels that had been applicable in the period when national wars were still possible to justify their support for an imperialist and reactionary world war. Later on, the Stalinists and Trotskyists demonstrated their adherence to the camp of capital by painting the Second World War with a fraudulent marxist gloss, in particular by appealing for the defence of the “socialist fatherland” or the “degenerated workers’ state” in the USSR.

But the counter-revolution which engulfed the working class after the heroic struggles of 1917-23 did not only take the overt forms of Stalinism and fascism. It also required its “democratic” side, above all in the ideology of anti-fascism which was designed to draw in workers and even former revolutionary militants who were sickened by the horrors of fascist repression and mass murder. But on the more theoretical level, this democratic counter-revolution also gave birth to a new deformation of marxism, which has been termed “Western Marxism” and which has been a key component of what we call modernism[1]. Unlike the Stalinists and the Trotskyists, this trend was more amorphous and did not put forward a definite programme for the statification of capital (although it generally accepted that there was indeed something non-capitalist in what Marcuse and others termed “Soviet Marxism”). It was mainly based around the universities or state-sanctioned “institutes for social research” – most notably in the case of the Frankfurt School, the main intellectual inspiration for “Western Marxism”.

This trend can be seen as the fountainhead of modernism because it claims to offer a critique of marxism’s “outdated dogmas”, which may have been valid once but no longer apply in “modern capitalism”. Of course, authentic marxism is far from a being a static dogma and must constantly analyse the endless changes brought about by the most dynamic and expansive society yet seen in human history. But the essence of modernism lies in invoking the name of Marx to strip marxism of its founding principles, of all its revolutionary traits. It is thus characterised by some or all of the following elements:

 - First and foremost, the rejection of the revolutionary nature of the working class. The failure of the revolutionary attempts of 1917-23 demonstrated, for modernism, the historic failure of the working class, and even its enthusiasm for the counter-revolution – whether because of its submission to fascism (a strong element in the writings of Adorno, for example) or because “traditional” marxism itself was seen as being responsible for Stalinism (which would later align these “post-marxist” ideologies with the main themes of the ideological campaigns which followed the 1989 “collapse of communism”). In the period of the post-war boom, Marcuse, having concluded that the working class of the west had been bought off by economic prosperity and “one dimensional” ideologies like consumerism, began scrabbling around for other “revolutionary” subjects, such as the students protesting against the Vietnam war or the peasants allegedly leading the “anti-imperialist struggle” in the peripheries of the system[2];

- the rejection of any continuity with progressive historical development, both generally and more particularly that of the proletarian movement: Marx is accepted, but often Engels is dismissed as at best a vulgariser; the Second International pays no role in the development of marxism and is identified entirely with its opportunist wing; the same treatment can also be reserved for the Communist International, seen as no more than the source of latter-day “Soviet Marxism”;

- in line with the above, the rejection of the goal of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the construction of a revolutionary class party. Indeed, revolutionary militancy is often presented as the highest form of alienation.

 Marxism is thus transformed into an individual utopian rejection of capitalism at the cultural ideological level, distorting the early Marx and his approach to the problem of alienation for this purpose, or turning the critique of political economy into a sophisticated argument in favour of the perennial, unchanging nature of capitalism and a dismissal of the theory of the decadence of capitalism.

Modernism penetrates the revolutionary movement

In our article “Modernism: From leftism to the void”, published in World Revolution number 3 in April 1975, we identified the Frankfurt School as one of the main sources of modernism, and showed that its main proponents had openly identified with ruling class and the imperialist war of 1939-45:

“In the 30s and 40s, the Stalinist fellow-travellers at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt (Marcuse, Horkheimer, Adorno) began to lay down the framework used by modernists today. According to them, marxism and the proletariat were failing because they were not being ‘revolutionary’ enough. For example, the workers had not fervently rallied to the defence of Republican Spain in 1936-38… Unable to see that the crushing of the workers’ uprisings of 1917-23 ultimately allowed for a new imperialist war, these dilettantes enthusiastically ‘chose’ to support the Allied side during that very same imperialist conflict”.

The article points out, for example, that, during the war, Marcuse served with the US Office of Intelligence Research in the State Department and became acting head of its East European section.

The article’s title, locating the origins of modernism in the left wing of capital, is perfectly accurate in this case. However, later experiences confirmed that modernism, like the various distortions of socialism criticised in the Communist Manifesto, could also take root in currents that had initially sought to place themselves on the terrain of the proletariat. In the 1960s, faced with the post-war economic boom, the group Socialisme ou Barbarie set out to prove that Marx had been wrong about the inevitability of economic crises in capitalism. In 1948, after breaking with Trotskyism, S ou B had insisted that capitalism had become a decadent system and were greeted by the Gauche Communiste de France as a potentially positive development, even though the GCF warned them explicitly about the difficulties of a complete break from Trotskyism and about the intellectual arrogance of seeing themselves as alone capable of solving the problems facing the working class and the revolutionary movement, without any reference to the left communist tradition which had already posed profound questions about the defeat of the 1917-23 revolutions and the nature of the “socialist” system in the USSR and elsewhere[3]. In reality, Sou B were to prove that they were no less entranced by capitalist growth in the 50s and 60s than a figure like the social democrat Bernstein had been in the 1890s. And as they increasingly came to see the dogmas of Stalinism and Trotskyism as rooted in marxism itself, they began to call into question not only the economic contradictions of the system but even the fundamental contradiction between the working class and capital, replacing it with a nebulous conflict between “order givers and order takers” which reproduced the classic anarchist obsession with “authority”. A logical consequence of denying the inner contradictions of capital was the elaboration of a conception of socialism as a system of “self-management” which could co-exist with commodity production – another regression to anarchism presented as a new and radical alternative to “traditional marxism”[4].

SouB, and in particular their vision of generalised self-management, was a major influence on the situationist current whose moment of glory came in the events of May-June 1968. An article by Marc Chirik in Révolution Internationale 2, 1969[5], showed that S ou B’s influence also extended to the situationists’ rejection of the marxist conception of the profound link between the class struggle and an objective capitalist crisis. For them the huge class movements of 68 and afterwards were above all the consequence of subjective factors: at a general level, the boredom and alienation of “everyday life” under capitalism, but also, more specifically, of the exemplary intervention of the situationists themselves. The situationists were thus embedded in the modernist world-view, but having participated in a real class movement, and despite the classically “artistic” – in fact petty bourgeois – nature of slogans like “Never Work Ever” – were far less hostile to the struggle of the working class than some of those who succeeded them.

By the early 1970s, both S ou B and the Situationist International had ceased to exist, and the majority of the modernist currents – some of whom had passed through the school of S ou B and situationism, and even the Bordigist branch of the communist left - had developed a more “marxist” language which was able to discern the errors of self-management (even if, as we will see, they often resurrected it in in new forms) and insist that communism meant the eradication of the totality of capitalist social relations, based on wage labour and commodity production. This was the birth of the “communising” current which has since become the main form of modernist ideology. It is no accident that this development coincided with the revival of the communist left. The communisers, such the Invariance group around Jacques Camatte, the group Mouvement Communiste around Barrot/Dauvé[6], or the Organisation des Jeunes Travailleurs Révolutionnaires around Dominic Blanc, were much more willing to present themselves as heirs of the historic communist left but also as critics of its limitations, and above all of the “conservatism” of the revived communist left groups with their insistence on the need for militant political organisation and on the defensive struggle of the working class as the precondition for a future communist revolution. The elements in this new trend have referred to themselves as “communisers” because they claim to be the only real communists, the only ones who had understood what Marx meant in The German Ideology when he defined communism as “the real movement which abolishes the present state of affairs”. In this sense, while there were some early debates between the communisers and the new left communist groups[7] this updated expression of modernism increasingly became a destructive force against the communist left, as evidenced by the role of the so-called Bérard or ex-Lutte Ouvrière tendency which split with Révolution Internationale in 1974 and very rapidly disappeared from political life.

As we have said, the revival of the communist left in the late 60s and early 70s was deeply connected to the earthquake of international class struggle which shook much of Europe and the Americas, and also to the increasingly obvious return of the open economic crisis. In such a period, while the communisers, and above all Camatte, more and more called into question the central importance of the workers’ class struggle, the idea that the working class was merely a “class for capital”, and that its future lay in its negation rather than its affirmation as a class, carried far less weight than it was to do following the difficulties of the class struggle in the 1980s and above all with the onset of the phase of capitalist decomposition after the collapse of the eastern bloc in 1989. As we have argued elsewhere[8], this period has been marked by a real weakening of class identity, of the proletariat’s awareness of itself as a distinct and antagonistic force within capitalist society. These conditions provided more fertile soil for the communisers, who have in general argued that it is precisely this class identity that the proletariat needs to abolish, not as the ultimate result of a revolutionary struggle, but as its precondition.  And in a period in which the crisis of the system is more and more giving rise to popular revolts in which the working class has no distinct role, it can appear that the communisers’ ideas are being vindicated, and that we are beginning to see the “revolt of humanity” against capital which Camatte and others predicted back in the 1970s.

In parallel to this, the first signs of a revival of class struggle in the first decade of the new century was accompanied by a certain resurgence of anarchism, attracting young elements looking for revolutionary ideas but for the most part unable to connect with the genuine marxist tradition, which they still tended to associate with the defeat of the Russian revolution and the degeneration of Bolshevism. Given the paucity of anarchism’s theoretical framework, the communisers, particularly individuals like Dauvé and groups like Théorie Communiste, Aufheben and Endnotes, were able to offer the anarchist milieu an appearance of theoretical profundity, displaying their familiarity with marxist terminology while in no way challenging most of the central prejudices of anarchism, in particular the rejection of centralised political organisation. Looked at from another angle, the communisation current is itself a new variant of anarchism, as we will seek to demonstrate in subsequent articles in this series. But because many of its adherents refer not just to Marx but to Bordiga, the KAPD, and other components of the tradition of the communist left, they can often be confused with the real left communist tradition, and this can be an extremely negative factor in the political evolution of new elements searching for communist clarity.

For precisely this reason, it is essential that the communist left demarcates itself sharply from the communisation tendency around the most important questions which separate them

• First and foremost, by insisting that despite all the changes in the composition of the working class that we have seen over the last few decades, despite all the ideological and political set-backs experienced by the working class, it remains the only revolutionary class in capitalist society, and that its struggles in defence of its material interests remains the only soil in which a revolutionary assault on capital can grow. Thus, the repudiation of all theories which call on the working class to negate itself or to renounce its defensive struggles.
• Second, by reaffirming that to fight against the onslaught of bourgeois ideology, and for the eventual transformation of immediate economic struggles into a political and social offensive against the whole system, the revolutionary minority must be organised on an international scale and on the basis of a coherent political platform. Thus, the critique of the idea that communist militancy is “the highest stage of alienation”, that proletarian political organisations can only be “sects” or “rackets” and should dissolve into a loose cooperation between sovereign individuals. In doing so, we will show how hostility to revolutionary organisation has led parts of the communisation current towards political parasitism, and its propensity to individualism towards bourgeois careerism.
• Third, by defending the necessity for the working class to fight for its political dictatorship over society in order to begin a period of transition towards communism, as opposed to the communisers view of a kind of “grand dissolution” which bypasses both the need for working class political power and a period of transition.

On the method of this series

We see this series as an offshoot of our long-standing series on the historical development of the communist programme[9]. Thus, in taking up the points that distinguish us from the communisers listed above, we will also take a historical approach, focusing on certain of the “classical” texts of communisation theory from the 1970s and the trajectory of some of the main figures in the development of communisation theory. Thus, our projected articles will include:

• A review of the ICC’s first major combat against modernist/communisation theory in its own ranks, the “ex-Lutte Ouvière tendency” in the early 70s;
• A reminder of the political trajectory of Jacques Camatte, which in many ways reveals the true “secret” or direction of communisation theory;
• A critique of texts such as Camatte’s “On organisation” and the OJTR’s “Militancy: The Highest Stage of Alienation”
• A response to certain texts by Barrot/Dauvé on “communist measures” and the abolition of value.

In carrying out this work, we will also republish some of the ICC’s own texts in response to the modernist conception of communism and the class struggle, most of which have not been available for many years.

CDW

The capitulation of the proletarian German Social Democratic Party to imperialism in 1914 is well known amongst revolutionaries. So is the fact of the opportunist decline of the SPD that led to this momentous betrayal of the working class.

What is less well known is the continual struggle waged by the revolutionary wing of the Party since its inception against the forces of reformist opportunism, not just at the theoretical level by such seminal works as the Critique of the Gotha Programme by Karl Marx, the Anti-Duhring by Friedrich Engels, or Reform or Revolution by Rosa Luxemburg, but also at the level of the defence of organisational class principles. 

The following article, often drawing on research into books and documentation that are only available in the German lnguage, chronicles the history of this organisational struggle in two parts. The first part, published here, covers the period from 1872 to 1890, from the Gotha to the Efurt programmes; the second part, to be published subsequently, will deal with the ensuing period to 1914.

Part 1. 1872-1890

Chapter 1, 1872-5

From the Paris Commune to the Gotha Congress.

The fight to preserve key acquisitions.

After the suppression of the Paris Commune of 1871, the bourgeoisie reacted with a wave of repression across the whole of Europe. Of course, the Communards in France, more than 20,000 of whom had been murdered, 38,000 had been arrested and over 7000 deported by the Versailles government, were the main victims. But in view of this first major successful seizure of power in a city by the working class, workers organisations in other countries were also subjected to increased repression. At the same time, the ruling class stimulated an attack from within against the First International - with Bakunin and his Alliance of Socialist Democracy as spearheads. With the help of a secret organisation, the previous achievements of the First International were to be undermined at the level of functioning, the First International was to be reduced to anarchy. At the Hague Congress of 1872, the General Council of the First International, headed by Marx and Engels, exposed this plot. This struggle to defend the organisation was to become one of the most valuable treasures of the revolutionary movement's experience, the significance and consequences of which were largely underestimated at the time and long forgotten. In a series of articles (International Review 84-88), the ICC has described this struggle and its lessons in detail. We recommend them to our readers as indispensable material to understand the subsequent development.[1]

The German sections of the First International participated actively in the preparation of the Hague Congress - against the resistance of the rulers in Germany. After the Paris Commune, the formation of sections of the International had been banned in Germany, only individual adhesion was possible. Thus there was officially no membership of an organisation from Germany in the First International and also officially no local sections. In most European countries no organisation of any noteworthy size could exist if it openly declared its affiliation to the International after 1872. The government forbade the members living in Germany to travel to The Hague and to act as delegates, yet they managed to circumvent these coercive measures.

Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel, leading figures of the SDAP (Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei/Eisenacher [2] (1869-1875) were imprisoned for 2 years for high treason for adopting an internationalist position during the Franco-German war. Many comrades writing for ‘Volksstaat', (the publication of the SDAP) were arrested and the publication of material about the Hague Congress was forbidden by the authorities. Nevertheless the German delegation at the Congress was able to provide 15 delegates out of a total of 65 delegates (i.e. almost a quarter) and play an active role. Marx had received a mandate from Leipzig, Engels one from Breslau, and Cuno was chairman of the committee investigating the activities of the Bakuninist Alliance.

After the conclusion of the Hague Congress (2-7 September 1872), the delegates immediately went to the party congress of the Social Democratic Workers' Party (Eisenacher) in Mainz (7-11 September).

While in the beginning the Eisenachers took a vehement stand against the Bakuninists even after the Hague Congress, the statements of the ‘Volksstaat’ against the Bakuninists softened shortly after autumn 1872/73. In this phase Liebknecht abstained from criticizing the anarchists, he wanted to mollify the Lassalleans[3]. Marx and Engels, on the other hand, threatened that if the ‘Volksstaat’ stayed silent on the question, they would have to terminate their cooperation. Marx and Engels said we cannot achieve real unity by abandoning principles. Following criticism by Marx and Engels, the ‘Volksstaat’ reactivated its criticisms of the Bakuninists for a short time.[4] Meanwhile, the Lassalleans continued their support for the Bakuninists. In April 1873, Lassalleans rejected the decisions of the Hague Congress and even sent delegates to a Bakuninist meeting in Switzerland. 

The Gotha unification congress and the dilution of principles.

The tendency of the Eisenacher Party to make concessions to the Lassallean Party (General German Workers Association - ADAV) was justified, among other things, by the prospective unification. Nevertheless at the Coburg Congress in 1874 the SDAP still mainly discussed mutual support in the class struggle and an immediate unification of the SDAP and the ADAV was not on the agenda. Contrary to the vote of Marx and Engels however, the leaders of the SDAP raced to a quick unification in Gotha in March 1875 and founded the Socialist Workers Party of Germany (SAPD) with the Lassalleans.

"One must not be distracted by the cry for "unification" (...) Of course every party leadership wants to see success, that is also quite good. But there are circumstances where one must have the courage to sacrifice the current success for more important things. Especially for a party like ours, whose ultimate success is so absolutely certain, and which has developed so colossally in our lifetime and under our eyes, instant success is by no means always and absolutely necessary. (...) In any case, I believe that in time the capable elements among the Lassalleans will turn towards you by themselves and that it would therefore be unwise to eat an unripe fruit, as the unifying people want. By the way, the old Hegel already said: "A party proves to be the victorious one by splitting itself and being able to tolerate splitting".

In the same letter, Engels warned that after the Eisenachers saw themselves in competition with the ADAV, as it were, one "gets used to thinking about the ADAV in everything (...) In our opinion, which we have found confirmed by long practice, the right tactic in propaganda is not to alienate individual people and memberships from the opponent here and there, but to work on the large masses, who are still indifferent. A single new force that one has drawn from the raw is worth more than a Lassallean defector who always carries the seed of his wrong direction into the party." [5]

After the Paris Commune was defeated and the First International was de facto dissolved in Europe after 1873[6], the focus of the work shifted to the different countries. "The centre of the movement shifted to Germany"[7] where the Marxist tendency had won political authority thanks to its internationalism during the Franco-Prussian war.

In the 1870s, the SAPD then was one of the first parties to be founded as a merger of two existing parties in one country. Since no major international cooperation was possible immediately after the dissolution of the First International, the international labour movement was faced with the task of working towards the founding of a party in the different countries and placing it programmatically and organisationally on a higher level than in the 1860s.[8]

In Austria, the United Social Democratic Party of Austria was founded in April 1874 (its program was based on that of the Eisenachers).[9] In the other countries, the process of party formation only began later.[10]

The Gotha Founding Congress of the SAPD expressed some signs of progress, such as the fact that for the first time a party with fixed organisational principles existed in a whole country. The merger of two organisations had made it possible to overcome the "leader dictatorship" which had previously been exercised in the ADAV by Lassalle and to place the leadership of the party in collective and centralised hands. Lassalle, who died in a duel 1867, had played the role of a president with almost dictatorial powers and claims among the Lassalleans, and his approach still cast its shadow over the ADAV.

The statutes of the ADAV of 1872 demanded:

"III. membership § 3: Every worker becomes a member of the association with full and equal voting rights by simple declaration of membership and can resign at any time. § 6 The affairs of the association are administered by the executive committee, consisting of a president and 24 members”

In the following points above all the powers of the president were further defined. The statutes of the SAPD, founded in 1875, said however:

Ҥ1 Anyone can belong to the party who is committed to the principles of the party programme and actively promotes the interests of the workers, including by donating money. Those who do not contribute for three months are no longer regarded as party comrades".

Because there were already bans on the formation of associations and active participation in revolutionary organisations, the statutes avoided references to active cooperation in the organisation.   

It was stated that "party members who act against the interests of the party may be excluded from the board. Appeals to the party congress are admissible". (§ 2 Statutes). In this respect, continuity was established with the methods of the Communist League, which were, however, only passed on via the Eisenachers.

While the newly founded party therefore represented a step forward at the organisational level, the party reflected the great political immaturity at the programmatic level, which manifested itself in a multitude of birth defects.

Of the Lassalleans, 73 delegates were present for 15,322 members, 56 delegates for 9121 votes from the Eisenachers.[11] Because the Lassalleans were more confused, the leadership felt that compromises should be made towards them and programmatic dilution accepted in the interests of unity. When Karl Marx sent the “Critique of the Gotha Programme” to Wilhelm Bracke on May 5, 1875, the party leadership concealed it from Congress and party members; even Bebel, the most famous leader did not know about the letter:

"After the coalition congress will have been held, Engels and I will publish a brief statement stating that we are quite at odds with the above-mentioned programme of principles and have nothing to do with it. (...) Apart from that, it is my duty not to recognise by diplomatic silence what I believe to be a thoroughly reprehensible program that demoralises the party. Every step of the real movement is more important than a dozen programmes. If it was not possible to go beyond the Eisenach programme - and the circumstances did not allow this - we should simply have concluded an agreement for action against the common enemy. If, however, one makes programmes of principle (instead of postponing them until the time when such a thing was prepared by longer common activity), one erects milestones in front of the whole world by which it measures the progress of the party movement (...) One obviously wanted to avoid all criticism and prevent any reflection in the party. One knows how the mere fact of unification satisfies the workers, but one is mistaken in believing that this instant success is not too dearly bought. Incidentally, the programme is useless, [it only contains] a canonisation of Lassalle's articles of faith." [12]  [13]

Engels wrote in October 1875 in a letter to Wilhelm Bracke:

"We entirely agree with you that Liebknecht, through his zeal to reach agreement, to pay any price for it, has bungled the whole thing. (...) Once the unification process had been set in motion on a rotten basis and had been trumpeted, it was not allowed to fail”[14]

Marx and Engels' vehement criticism of this lack of clarity and even opportunistic attitude made clear how much Marx and Engels emphasised programmatic clarity, and that unity must not be brought about by the abandonment of the programme and the union with unreliable, unclear forces. It would be better to be few at first but working on a clear basis rather than many on an unclear basis. Marx and Engels thus took the view that unity should only be created on a clear basis and that clarity should not fall victim to unity. The marxists' adherence to programmatic intransigence and loyalty to principles characterised their behaviour toward opportunistic tendencies and forces that emerged later. In this respect, the attitude of Marx and Engels, to oppose unity at any price, but fight for clarity and without fear of demarcation, and possibly division, stood in contrast to the later policies of the SPD.

At the same time, the way in which Marx and Engels' criticism of these weaknesses was dealt with brought to light a tendency that has repeatedly arisen in the revolutionary movement: the evasion, if not the concealment, of criticisms on the pretext that unity or unification was more important than clarity. As we show below, it was not until 1891 (i.e. 16 years later and after Marx's death) that Friedrich Engels was able to push through the publication of this critique in the Neue Zeit against the fierce resistance of the opportunists in the party leadership. The Gotha Programme later facilitated the emergence of opportunism by anchoring certain opportunist views in writing. Only at Engels' insistence was a point included in the programme that proclaimed the solidarity of the German proletariat with the workers of all countries and its willingness to fulfil its international duties.([15]) In addition, apart from the insufficient emphasis on internationalism at the Gotha Founding Congress, almost no reference was made to the consequences of the experience of the Paris Commune. There was already a kind of gap in the historical continuity and in the transmission of the experience from the struggle for the organisation against the Bakuninists.

Another important aspect of the dilution or distortion of important political criticisms was their misrepresentation as something arising from personal motives. Even Franz Mehring, who wrote an otherwise penetrating biography of Marx and a history of German Social Democracy, fell into this trap:

"Marx didn’t realise that the draft programme faithfully reflected the theoretical views of both factions; he believed that the Eisenachers had already grasped all the consequences of scientific communism, while the Lassalleans were a retarded sect

"Usually accustomed to judging the workers' movement by the major importance of its steps, this time he put things too much under the microscope and searched behind small awkwardness, unevenness, inaccuracies of expression for sneaky intentions that really were not behind it. Nor can it be denied that his antipathy to Lassalle in this letter influenced his judgment..."[16]

Thus the discussion about basic principles was played down and presented as a question of personal antipathy between Marx and Lassalle. Instead of emphasising that the overcoming of Lassalleanism meant a partial liberation, Mehring wrote:

"Lassalleanism was extinguished in these Gotha days forever, and yet they were the days of Lassalle's triumph. However right Marx might have been with his objections to the Gotha programme, the fate of his letter clearly showed that the ways in which a powerful and invincible workers' party could develop in Germany as the carrier of the social revolution had been correctly recognised by Lassalle. "[17]  

At the same time, there were signs of ambiguity in the way that Mehring "contrasted" party development in different countries with development at the international level.

"The idea of international solidarity had taken root so deeply in the modern proletariat that it no longer needed external support, and the national workers' parties developed so peculiarly and vigorously through the industrial upheavals of the 1870s that they went beyond the scope of the international...”[18]

After the crushing of the Paris Commune and the impossibility of continuing the work of the First International, the activities of revolutionaries had first to be directed to the different countries in order to create the conditions for the foundation of parties. But this focus on the individual countries did not mean that international orientation and cooperation had become obsolete and that international solidarity or even an International would thus become superfluous, or that the rapid growth of the parties in different countries would even cause the national framework to grow beyond the international framework. Perhaps this view reflects Mehring's lack of international spirit, to which Engels had already referred in his previous criticism of the Gotha programme. An internationalist orientation can only be realised through a constant and conscious struggle against national or even localist priorities. Although the main part of the activities was focused on the development of the SAPD, efforts were also made to establish international contacts and prepare the foundation of the Second International in 1889. 

For reasons of space, we cannot go into the SAPD's contribution to the founding of the Second International here.

Moreover, the tendency to ‘forget’ acquisitions continued. The determination of a large part of the German delegates at the Hague Congress in 1872, and the subsequent defence of the policy of the General Council against the Bakuninists by the SDAP, seemed to have been buried in Gotha in 1875. The lessons of the Hague Congress, which had taken place only three years earlier and where revolutionary principles had been vehemently defended, were not taken up any further. There was no evidence of continuity and transmission of this experience. Instead, Mehring later also tended to portray this struggle, like the differences between Lassalle and Marx, as a conflict between the personal authority of Marx and that of Bakunin.

Chapter 2, 1878 to 1890

The period of the Anti-Socialist Law

The fight for revolutionary organisation against parliamentary opportunism

At the Gotha Unification Congress in 1875, Hamburg was elected as the seat of the party executive and Leipzig as the seat of the Control Commission. The ruling class was alarmed by the growing labour movement, and the SAPD was banned within the scope of the Prussian Law on Associations from March 1876, and a short time later, in Bavaria and Saxony as well. The bourgeoisie in Germany began to forge its plans for a general ban on the SAPD. The assassination attempts by two individuals were used as a pretext to pass the Socialist Law on October 21, 1878.

All associations with social democratic, socialist or communist aims were to be dissolved, printed publications and assemblies with the aim of disseminating such aims banned, as were educational associations, dance clubs and theatre clubs (the members of the SAPD were previously usually officially registered as members of an association).

"Subsequently, 1,299 printed publications, 95 trade unions, 23 support associations, 106 political associations and 108 so-called amusement associations were banned. Approximately 1,500 persons were sentenced to imprisonment, almost 900 were expelled from various places in the Reich. Those deported who did not go into exile were mostly forced to resettle in remote regions and tried to continue working politically there. Only the Reichstag fraction of the SAP remained unchallenged due to the right of voting a person in a constituency and was able to continue its parliamentary work."[19]

In other words, while the party was to be hindered in its activities at the grassroots level and the consolidation of an organisational tissue was to be prevented, its entire focus (and from the point of view of the rulers it was far better that this should be the case) was to be on parliamentary activity. Although Bismarck initially wanted to ban parliamentary activity as well, the other bourgeois factions in the Reichstag did not yield to Bismarck's insistence. The bourgeois parties' ultimate aim was to fully integrate the SAPD into the parliamentary machinery. Mobilisation for the elections thus became a focal point of their activities at that time. Compared to the repressive measures in Russia under the tsar, the Socialist Law in Germany was far less brutal but much more insidious.

Even before the Socialist Law had been passed in the Reichstag, the Hamburg-based Central Election Committee, acting as the party executive, had announced to the police authorities that the party organisation would dissolve itself, contrary to Bebel's and Liebknecht's stand on this issue, and had also called on the local sections to dissolve themselves! The party leadership proposed "absolute legalism":

"Hold fast to the slogan that we often call out to you: ‘our enemies must perish from our legality’. ‘Be calm, refuse to be provoked.’" [20]

As Marx and Engels wrote in a 1879 circular, the "anticipatory obedience" of the party executive was no anomaly:

"The party, under the pressure of the Socialist Law, shows right now that it is not willing to follow the path of violent, bloody revolution, but is determined ... to follow the path of legality, i.e. reform."[21]

Marx and Engels opposed this, in ironic terms:

“In order to take away the last trace of fear from the bourgeoisie, it must be clearly and concisely proved to it that the spectre is really only a spectre, that it does not exist. But what is the secret of the red spectre, if not the bourgeoisie's fear of the inevitable life and death struggle between it and the proletariat? (...) It is the representatives of the petty bourgeoisie who are registering, full of fear that the proletariat, pushed through its revolutionary situation, may ‘go too far’. (...) All historically necessary conflicts are reinterpreted into misunderstandings, and all discussions end with the affirmation: in the main we are all in agreement. "

"The Social Democratic Party is NOT to be a workers' party, is not to incur the odium of the bourgeoisie or anyone else; it should above all conduct energetic propaganda among the bourgeoisie; instead of laying stress on far-reaching aims which frighten away the bourgeoisie and after all are not attainable in our generation, it should rather devote its whole strength and energy to those petty-bourgeois patchwork reforms which, by providing the old order of society with new props, may perhaps transform the ultimate catastrophe into a gradual, piecemeal and as far as possible peaceful process of dissolution.“ [22]

At the same time, some voices in the SAPD articulated the need for violent reactions. Johannes Most advocated individual terror, which was rejected at the first congress of the SAPD in Wyden, Switzerland, in 1880.

The fight against spies and calumnies

The party continued the tradition developed since the Communist League, of resolutely resisting slander because it undermined confidence within the party. Thus, in 1882, the illegal organisation of the Berlin Social Democrats decided in their statutes:

Point 13: Every militant – even if he is a well-known comrade – has the duty to maintain confidentiality about the topics discussed in the organisation – no matter which topics are discussed. If a comrade hears from another comrade an accusation being made, he has the duty to maintain confidentiality in a first phase and he must demand this from the comrade who informed him about it; he has to ask for the reasons of the accusation and find out who spread it. He has to inform the secretary [of the local section], who has to take appropriate steps and who has to clarify the issue at a meeting with the presence of the accuser and the accused. If the person under accusation is the secretary, the information must be given to his deputy. Any other step such as in particular spreading suspicion without any proven reason and without being testified by the secretaries, will provoke a lot of damage. Since the police notoriously have an interest in promoting disunity in our ranks through spreading denigrations, any comrade who does not stick to the procedure described above runs the risk of being considered as a person who works on behalf of the police. “[23]

At the party congress in Wyden, a "resolution on the exclusion of Wilhelm Hasselmann from the party" was passed:

"After the Congress had been enlightened about Hasselmann's intrigues and unscrupulous conduct, it fully approved Hasselmann's exclusion proclaimed by the deputies and warned all foreign comrades to recognise that this personality has been exposed as a notorious slanderer”.

At the same Congress a "Resolution on the Exclusion of Johannes Most from the Party" was passed:

"Considering that Johann Most had for a long time acted against the principles of the party which he himself still defended under the Socialist Law and [since then] only followed the influences of his frequently changing mood;

in further consideration that Most became the spreader of any slander raised against the German Social Democracy, no matter which side it came from, and that he promoted notorious police agents in spite of warnings about them, only because they insulted the so-called party leaders;

- Finally, considering that Most has committed acts contrary to all laws of honesty,

The Congress declares that it rejects any solidarity with Johann Most and regards him as having left the Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany". [24]

Thanks to the network established by the members of the party, the party was able to expand its influence on the ground for a dozen years and also learned to organise material and political solidarity for the persecuted. In short, the harsh conditions of illegality did not discourage the party members, but rather strengthened solidarity among them.

Functioning under illegality

The remaining party bodies spoke out against a national secret organisation because it could be too easily dismantled by the police and the party would then be completely incapable of action. In fact, a combination of illegal and legal work (mainly in parliament) was used. In Germany itself, they organised the

 "publication of the illegal newspaper Der Sozialdemokrat, which was produced abroad and distributed in the Reich via a conspiratorial distribution network (including Red Field Mail). The legal and illegal activity had to be led by a secret official body called ‘Corpora', (inner circle or organisation). It was formally separated from the distribution apparatus of the Sozialdemokrat for security reasons. With the help of this factually illegal organisation, in which J. Motteler played a prominent role, the cohesion of the party was further made possible at grass root level. Informers were exposed in the newspaper Sozialdemokrat. Under the camouflage name ‘The Iron Mask’, the party's security service warned against informers and provocateurs (cf. Fricke, p. 182). 

On the one hand, this prevented the slide into a conspiratorial society, and on the other hand, an illegally functioning apparatus could be set up. Party meetings took place under the guise of singing clubs and smoking clubs.[25]

At the first party congress since illegality in Wyden, Switzerland, in 1880, the previous wording that the party wanted to achieve its goals by "all legal means" was deleted from the text because the party did not want its hands tied to legality.

The need for local members to have sufficient leeway for their own initiatives and to be in contact with each other via a network of confidants was discussed at the Wydner Congress.

“We cannot act according to a template, we cannot always consult the so-called ‘leaders’ in every single case, but neither should an individual act on his own. Joint consultation is necessary, no matter what form it takes, and joint action with the whole on important issues. This must be our guideline for all our actions.

So, organise yourselves, no matter how. The larger, better situated and more spiritually powerful places must support the smaller ones around them, and [since] the comrades cannot do this in greater numbers, the representatives from the different sections must often enter into oral exchange with each other. "[26]

Since the party was still allowed to nominate candidates for the Reichstag elections, "electoral associations" were founded in each constituency, which had the task of "theoretically forming the comrades and turning them into well-formed socialists. The administration of the party's affairs and the execution of its public agitation were still to provide the 'inner movement'”,[27] i.e. despite the legal meetings in electoral clubs for propaganda purposes, the party maintained the 'inner organisation', its underground organisational tissue. This was crucial for their survival.

However, this complementary "interplay" between centralisation and sufficient local initiative was later theorised and presented as a basic argument against centralisation.

At the Wydner Congress, the "official party leadership ... was transferred to the current Reichstag deputies."[28] However, the transfer of party leadership to parliamentarians on the basis of their immunity would turn out to be a trap, because a revolutionary party must not regard a parliamentary fraction as a "natural leadership“. Lenin later warned that parliamentary fractions "have certain traces of the influence of the general bourgeois electoral conditions."[29] Thus, this measure of transferring leadership into the hands of parliamentarians further contributed to not placing the emphasis on the initiative at the party grass root level, but very strongly focusing on parliamentary activities.

The actual party leadership, which centralised the illegal work, was de facto in the hands of a subcommittee of five people. However, due to great geographical dispersion, comrades were rarely able to meet and there were always major communication problems. In fact, Bebel (i.e. the most prominent leader) played a central role in the leadership of the party.

After the Copenhagen Congress of 1883, the official central organ of the SAPD still declared: "We are a revolutionary party, our goal is a revolutionary one, and we have no illusions about its parliamentary implementation.[30] But opportunist impulses were unmistakably felt at the Copenhagen Congress. The Sozialdemokrat went on to write about the incalculable divergences at the Congress:

"We have no reason to hide the fact that on some issues the opinions of our comrades diverge, for it is precisely a sign of the strength of our party that it nevertheless stands out externally as a united whole. As hard as the spirits burst into each other as openly and unreservedly one expressed one another's opinion, on the other hand the general aspiration clearly emerged: not finding a majority, but confrontation and understanding. Not by cliques that rivalled each other, but by comrades who disagreed on one question and agreed on the other, uninfluenced by personal relationships. And this lively exchange of views on the various questions of tactics, etc., showed that our party is in no way exposed to the danger of ossification, that there is no papacy and no orthodoxy in it, but that within the principles laid down in our programme it has room for every honestly fought conviction”. (ibid.)

But the willingness to discuss divergences within the shared programmatic framework was quickly questioned.

While on the one hand the party did not allow itself to be too fixated on the repression under the Socialist Law, on the other hand fears of a continuing illegality of the party arose more and more, especially among the members of the Reichstag who were legally active in the Reichstag. And there was a tendency for the Reichstag fraction to become autonomous and for an opportunist development to take place in its ranks. There was a growing gap between parliamentarians and the "grass roots". Already in 1883, i.e. a few years after the beginning of the Socialist Law, Bebel wrote to Engels: "And there is no doubt that among our parliamentarians there are especially people who, because they do not believe in the level of  revolutionary development, are inclined to parliamentarism and are very reluctant to take any sharp action."[31] A little later Bebel wrote to W. Liebknecht: "More than ever the thought of abandoning parliamentarianism comes to my mind, it is a good school for sinking into the political mire. We will see enough of this in our own friends."[32] In 1885 Bebel, the longest serving and most resolute SAPD member of the Reichstag, also warned:

"The Reichstag mandate satisfies their ambition and vanity, they see themselves with great self-satisfaction among the elect of the ‘nation’. They develop a taste for parliamentary comedy while taking themselves very seriously. Moreover, most of them no longer study or have gone astray with their studies, they are also alienated from practical life and do not know what it looks like... "[33] Engels spoke of an attempt by the opportunists "to constitute the petty bourgeois element as the ruling, official one in the party and to push back the proletarian to a merely tolerated one. "[34]

Opportunism in parliamentary garb

On March 20, 1885, the Social Democratic Parliamentary Group of the Reichstag published a statement against the criticism of the parliamentary group by the SAPD newspaper Sozialdemokrat:

"In recent times, especially in the month of January of this year, several open and hidden attacks against the Social Democratic Parliamentary Group of the German Reichstag could be read in Sozialdemokrat. They referred in particular to the behaviour of the Social Democratic members of the Reichstag on the issue of the steamship subsidy. (....) It is not the paper which determines the position of the parliamentary group, but the parliamentary group which has to control the position of the paper. "[35] [36] 

Bebel protested: "Through this statement the parliamentary group raises itself to absolute ruler over the position of the party organ. Der Sozialdemokrat is then no longer a party organ, but a parliamentary organ, and the party comrades are forbidden to express any opinion which is unpleasant or uncomfortable for the fraction, and the freedom of the press which the programme demands for all is an empty phrase for their own party comrades "[37] 

And further protest letters were also written from various cities in Germany. For example, the Social Democrats' protest letter in Frankfurt/Main in April 1885:

“…the Socialist Law is actually beginning to have an educational effect; our deputies have already become very tame. (...) We comrades of Frankfurt (Main) see in this declaration of the parliamentary group an attempt at dictatorial reprimand, an attempt by the majority of the parliamentary group to introduce a kind of exceptional law into our inner party life (...) We can see from the tone of this ukase that the noble democratic self-confidence of the majority of the parliamentary group has given way to a reprehensible arrogance which is expressed in the term ‘storm of indignation’ (...). We do not need to explain that we do not grant any special (aristocratic) rights to the members of the parliamentary group... We declare that we will continue to subject the behaviour of our deputies to public scrutiny or criticism at the party congress, that we will continue to fight out differences of opinion in the public arena and that we will not allow ourselves to be reduced to unwilling bearers of ideas."[38] From Wuppertal Barmen came a similar letter of protest from the Social Democrats on 18.5.1885: “We are not among those who, having sent our representatives to parliament in greater numbers than ever before, expected miracles from the parliamentary activity of the same, we know very well that the emancipation of the workers is not fought out in the parliaments”. [39]

The SAPD deputy Wilhelm Blos rejected any revolutionary attitude of the Sozialdemokrat. As a result, electors from Wuppertal Barmen wrote the following statement:

“1. If Mr. Blos claims that his voters had sent him to Berlin to participate in the legislation and to influence it in the sense of the Social Democratic program, we cannot see this view as correct. We believe that it is contrary to the party's position to call ‘parliament’ the main reason or even the only cause of electoral activity. For our part, we have voted:

a) Out of agitational and propagandistic considerations;

b) To protest loudly against today's class rule through our votes;

c) To enable our representatives, if necessary, to express this protest decisively in parliamentary speeches.” [40]

The confrontations shown here made it clear that during these years two wings clashed, leading Engels to the insight that the division of the party could arise. In May 1882, Engels wrote to Bebel:

“I have long since had no illusions that one day the bourgeois elements of the party would come into conflict and that there would be a divorce between right and left wing, and in the handwritten essay on the yearbook article, I even expressed this as highly desirable. (...) I did not explicitly mention the point in my last letter, because it seems to me that there is no hurry with this split. (…)

On the other hand, they know that under the rule of the Socialist Law we also have our reasons for avoiding internal divisions that we cannot debate publicly”.[41] 

But even under the conditions of the Socialist Law, he did not consider the necessity of a split to be excluded. For only a few months later he took up the same question: “The controversial question is purely a matter of principle: should the struggle be conducted as a class struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, or should it be allowed to drop the class character of the movement and the programme … wherever one can get more votes, more 'followers'? (...) Unification is quite good as long as it possible, but there are things that stand above unification.[42]

“I would consider any split under the Socialist Law to be a misfortune, since any means of communication with the masses is cut off. But it can be imposed on us, and then you have to face the facts.” [43]

And he placed the same emphasis on an aggravation of opposites, and that you shouldn't shy away from division at the right time: “The division into the proletarian and the bourgeois camps is becoming more and more pronounced, and once the bourgeois have exerted themselves to outvote the proletarians, the rupture can be provoked. This possibility must, I believe, be kept in mind. If they provoke the rupture - which they would have to drink themselves some courage for - it's not so bad. I always take the view that as long as the Socialist Law exists, we should not provoke it; but if it does, then we have to go with it and then I'll be in your side.” [44]

Even under the harsh conditions of illegality, Social Democracy at the time sought not to isolate itself internationally. Because the reorganisation of political groups and parties in Europe gathered pace during the 1880s, German Social Democracy became a pioneer of international contacts and the preparation of a new International.

“In order to establish a regular connection between the socialists and socialist associations abroad among themselves and with the party in Germany, and to maintain communication between the latter and the brother parties abroad, a communication centre outside Germany is created, which has to organise exchanges between the individual associations, receive all complaints, applications, etc., and deal with them in an appropriate manner.” [45]

Despite the Socialist Law, the rulers did not succeed in smashing the party or suppressing its influence. On the contrary, in 1878, the year the Socialist Law was introduced, the SAPD received: 437,000 votes (7.6%), 2 deputies after the main election, 9 after the run-off election; 1890: 1,427,000 votes, i.e. 19.7% of the votes, 20 deputies in the main election and 35 after the run-off election.[46] The great electoral successes thus reflected the support for the SAPD. But at the same time they not only increased the weight of the Reichstag deputies within the party, but also the overall parliamentary orientation and the democratic ideology which grew with it.

Chapter 3, 1890/1

The end of the Anti-Socialist Law and the new programme and statutes at Halle and Erfurt

In September 1890, the Socialist Law was lifted. The SAPD was renamed SPD at the Halle party conference shortly thereafter.

Due to the conditions of the Anti- Socialist Law, the debates about the programme could only take place to an extremely limited extent. Now, with the end of the law, at the party conference in Halle 1890 and especially in Erfurt 1891, the programme question was put as a central point on the agenda. After extensive discussions with more than 400 meetings and a multitude of articles and discussion contributions in the SPD press, it was planned to make important corrections to the Gotha programme. In our series of articles in IR 84-88 we have dealt extensively with the debates and criticisms of the positions of the Erfurt programme, therefore we continue to concentrate here on the organisational question.

In 1891 Marx and Engels' critique of the Gotha programme was published for the first time and widely discussed. The party leadership active at the time of Gotha, which at that time had withheld the criticisms of Marx and Engels from the party, agreed to these criticisms in 1891 at the Erfurt Congress. Thus, the specifically Lasallean and vulgar-socialist views of the Gotha programme were overcome.

At the Halle and Erfurt Congresses, the views of the oppositional, anarchistic group “Die Jungen” (the Young), which appeared for the first time, were also discussed and rejected.

The Statutes - a mirror reflecting organisational principles

The statutes regulated membership as follows: point 1 “Any person shall be considered as member of the party who agrees with the principles of the Party Programme and supports the Party to the best of his or her ability”.[47] Members were thus required only to adhere to the principles of the Party Programme and not to the details of the Party Programme itself. For people like Ignaz Auer[48], this was an occasion to speak out against "narrow-mindedness" at the level of the programme, because “some may have objections to this or that particular point and a slight deviation of any kind is not harmful”. According to Auer this was intended to give members scope for their own interpretation of the party's programme.

“According to the situation of the association legislation in all larger German states, the party conference in Halle had to refrain from the creation of a centralised organisation. Any attempt to establish an association existing in the whole of Germany, with local memberships, representatives, regular dues, membership cards, etc., would only result in the dissolution of the party in the shortest possible time for violation of the provisions of any paragraph of the Vereinsgesetz. (...) Since political associations are not allowed to communicate with each other in most of Germany, no correspondence or other connection may take place between the local associations and the party leadership. (...) Now, however, the party leadership (...) must have connections everywhere (...). This task should be fulfilled by the confidants (hommes de confiance) (...). These confidants should primarily be the correspondents to whom the party leadership addresses its communications and who in turn inform the party leadership about what is going on in the individual towns and constituencies”.[49]

The opposition group of Die Jungen, which appeared for the first time, advocated a loose concept of party membership. They spoke out against a firmly established party organisation and pleaded for a loose, non-binding form of organisation. According to them, a general verbal commitment to the SPD or voting for an SPD candidate was sufficient to claim to be a social democrat.

In Bebel's draft of the statutes for the party conference in Halle, the party conference formed the "highest representation of the party". Bebel emphasized concrete, firm rules of conduct that were binding for all members of the party. This emphasis on binding rules of conduct was groundbreaking for the later debate at the 2nd Party Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party in 1903 (see the article in International Review 116 1903-4: the birth of Bolshevism [205]..).

The relationship between the Reichstag fraction and the party as a whole was also discussed for the first time at the Halle Party Congress. After the end of the Anti-Socialist Law Bebel wanted to transfer the party leadership from the Reichstag fraction to the party congress and the party executive elected by it as the decisive authority. The party executive should be accountable to the party congress, and the Reichstag fraction should thus be deprived of its special rights. Resistance arose on the part of the parliamentarians. It was also planned at the congress in Halle that the party executive elected by the congress should control the party organ Vorwärts. Ignaz Auer continued to insist on special rights for the Reichstag fraction: the fraction should be given the right of supervision and control over the party executive and thus over the entire party activity, which meant the fraction was placed over the party executive elected by the party congress. According to Auers' point of view the statutes should require the submission of the party to the members of parliament. Georg v. Vollmar, a member of parliament, demanded in the debate on the organisational question at the Halle Congress that “each local section should decide independently on its own organisational form, that splitting the organisation into autonomous sub-organisations was also a good protection against possible further repression."[50] At the same time Auer rejected the programmatic principles of the party. Here one could feel the theorisation of hostility to centralisation and the desire to subordinate the party and its central organ to the parliamentary fraction.

Bebel himself described the draft he submitted to Engels as a "compromise work".[51] Bebel later admitted, in view of the resistance of the parliamentarians: “I let myself be persuaded and gave in for the sake of peace”. A short time later, Bebel confessed to Victor Adler: “I once again recognised how much damage is created when one gives in to the move to the right.”[52] Finally, though, the party adopted a statute in which the party executive took over the party leadership. With the recognition that the party congress was the highest representation of the party, with the binding nature of the documents and resolutions adopted by the party congress, with the accountability of the party executive to the party congress, with the recognition of the newspaper Vorwärts as a central organ, the principles for the functioning of the party according to the "party spirit" were laid down. Lenin was later able to rely on these party principles in 1903.

Given the great weaknesses of the 1875 Gotha programme, the 1891 Erfurt programme was a step forward. The reformist Lassallean ideas still present in the Gotha programme had been overcome; a scientific framework was put forward, insisting that capitalism was still doomed to failure because of its contradictions, and that the working class could bring about the only possible solution through the conquest of political power: the overthrow of this society. Nevertheless, there was a crucial shortcoming in this programme: there was no talk of the necessary dictatorship of the proletariat in overturning capitalism. Engels had criticised the political demands of the draft in the debate on the draft programme. He took the opportunity “to give a bashing to the ‘peaceful opportunism’ ... and the fresh, pious, cheerful and free 'growing into' of the old mess socialist society.”[53] In the final version, however, nothing substantial was changed in the political demands Engels had criticised; in fact, his critique was suppressed and only published 10 years later.[54] 

Engels’ warning against reformist illusions ...

Influenced by the hope for a "repression-free life in democracy"[55] and a hope in some circles already noticeable in 1890-91 for society to grow into socialism, Engels warned: “Out of fear of a renewal of the Socialist Law, out of remembrance of all sorts of premature statements made under the rule of that Law, the present legal situation in Germany should suddenly be able to satisfy the party's demands peacefully. One fools oneself and the Party by claiming that ‘today's society is growing into socialism’” ... [56]

But while Engels rightly warned of the danger of opportunist hopes, he himself fell into a certain euphoria which Rosa Luxemburg later picked up at the founding congress of the KPD. (see IR 88 The German Revolution: The Failure to Build the Organisation [206]

... overcome temporarily by euphoria

In the years since the Socialist Law, the SPD had increased its votes in the elections by more than 20%. This caused euphoria and illusions about a corresponding increase in the power of the working class. As early as 1884, after the SAPD had won half a million votes, Engels told Kautsky in a letter:

“For the first time in history, a solidly united workers’ party stands there as a real political power, developed and grown under the toughest persecutions, inexorably conquering one post after another (...),,inexorably working its way up (so) that the equation of its growing speed and thus the time of its final victory can already be mathematically calculated now [1884].” [57] And in the autumn of 1891 Engels wrote: “Eleven years of Reichsacht [the Anti-Socialist law] and siege have quadrupled their strength and made them the strongest party in Germany. (...) The Social Democratic Party, which managed to topple a figure [as powerful] as Bismarck, which after eleven years of struggle broke the Anti-Socialist Law, the Party, which like the rising tide overflows all dams, which pours over state and land, penetrating into the most reactionary agricultural districts, this party today is about to reach the point where it can determine with almost mathematically exact calculation the time in which it will come to power.

(...) In the elections of 1895 we can thus count on at least 2.5 million votes; but these would increase around 1900 to 3.5 to 4 million. (...) The main strength of German Social Democracy, however, lies by no means in the number of its voters. You only have voting rights at the age of 25 years, but you can already be conscripted at the age of 20 years. And since it is precisely the young generation that supplies our party with its most numerous recruits, it follows that the German army is increasingly infected by socialism. Today we have one soldier in five, in a few years we will have one in three, and around 1900 the army, formerly the Prussian element of the country, will be socialist in its majority. We are moving closer and closer to this situation, almost inevitably like the ‘hour of destiny’. The Berlin government sees it coming, as well as we do, but it is powerless” [58] “That the time is approaching where we are the majority in Germany, or yet the only party strong enough - if peace remains - to take the helm .”[59] And also in the last years before his death, for example in 1892, he said: “(...) the victory of the European working class [depends] not only on England. It can only be ensured by the cooperation of at least England, France and Germany. In the latter countries the workers' movement is well ahead of the English. In Germany it is even within a measurable reach of triumph.”[60] In 1894 he even predicted that “we can (almost) calculate the day on which state power will fall into our hands”. [61]

This glorification of the election results is also made clear by the statement Bebel made at the Hamburg Party Congress in 1897:

“Reichstag elections have always been the most important event for us as a fighting party, because they give us the opportunity to stand up for our ideas and demands with all the necessary vigour, because we can see from the election result how the development of our party in the past period has been; they were and are the yardstick for us of how far the party has come on its advance to victory. From this point of view, we considered the elections in 1897 to be the best opportunity to measure our strength.”[62]

Before falling into this temporary euphoria, however, Engels had stressed before the Erfurt Congress that the SPD should continue along the revolutionary path and should not allow room for ideas about a 'lawful, peaceful' path of development towards socialism.

The necessity of a clear demarcation and, if necessary, separation from the opportunists

In view of the great divergences between Lassalleans and Eisenachers at the beginning of the 1870s, Marx and Engels had warned of the danger of the loss of programmatic clarity and insisted on a sharp demarcation. Again and again they emphasised: “(...) In our party we can use individuals from every social class, but not groups which stand for capitalist, middle-class or middle peasant interests”.[63] Even when, at the time of the Socialist Law, more and more people from different backgrounds, including the ruling class, were constantly joining Social Democracy, Engels insisted in a correspondence with Bebel and Liebknecht:

“When such people from other classes join the proletarian movement, the first demand is that they do not use remnants of bourgeois, petty-bourgeois ideology, etc.. (...) If there are reasons to tolerate them [people with bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideas] for the time being [in a workers' party], there is an obligation only to tolerate them, not to allow them to influence the party leadership, to remain aware that the break with them is only a matter of time.”[64]

“The proletariat would abandon its leading historical role (...) if it made concessions to these (petty-bourgeois and bourgeois) ideas and desires.”[65]

Therefore, Engels also considered the possibility that after the repeal of the Anti-Socialist Law there could be a split between the proletarian and petty-bourgeois wings in the party.

“We owe all this mess largely to Liebknecht with his penchant for educated wiseacres and people in bourgeois positions, with which one can impress the Philistine. He cannot resist a literary man and a merchant who fancies socialism. But in Germany these are the most dangerous people (...). The split is sure to come, but I maintain that we should not fall into provocations and let it happen under the Anti-Socialist Law.”[66]

It was obvious that the approach of the state aimed at smashing and splitting the party, and that the party moving closer together was the main tendency in this phase. But determination in the face of repression does not automatically prevent opportunist tendencies. On the contrary, opportunism may even proliferate more without consciously and pratically being held in check. 

In 1890, shortly before the repeal of the Socialist Law, Engels also recognised:

“The party is so large and big that absolute freedom of debate within it is a necessity. There is no other way that the many new elements that have joined us in the last three years and that in many areas are still quite green and raw, be integrated and that they assimilate and be ‘formed’ (...). The largest party in the Reich cannot exist without all the shades in it being fully expressed, and even the appearance of dictatorship à la Schweitzer must be avoided. "[67]

In order to build up a certain protection against unacceptable deviations, the leading party posts were to be filled with full-time functionaries paid by the party. However, this in turn did not offer any real protection against opportunism or even censorship by the party leadership. In order to be able to conduct the fight against opportunism and its representatives in the Reichstag faction more freely, Engels even said that the radical forces should have an independent press organ:

“Your 'nationalisation' of the press becomes a great evil if it goes too far. You absolutely must have a press in the party which is not directly dependent on the executive committee and even the party congress, i.e. which is in a position to openly oppose individual steps of the party within the programme and the adopted tactics and also to freely subject the programme and tactics to criticism within the limits of the party statutes”.[68]

In a letter to Bebel, Engels not only warned him against the right-wing approach and its mouthpiece Vollmar, but he also made a number of tactical recommendations.[69]

The "Jungen"

The 1890 Halle Party Congress also saw the first open debate with the opposition group labelled by the bourgeois press as the "Jungen".[70] In fact, the only common denominator appears to have been their low average age.[71]

Their social composition was extremely heterogeneous. Politically, they were united above all by their warning of the dangers of parliamentarianism.

“1.) The attitude of the Social Democrats in the Reichstag, which at times was likely to awaken the hope that the situation of the working class could already be significantly improved within capitalist society. 2.) The agitation in the last Reichstag elections, which often amounted more to winning seats in parliament than to forming social democrats. 3.) The fraction's advocacy of bourgeois candidates in the last run-off elections. 4.) The parliamentary group's approach to the question of 1 May.(...)[72]  6.) A certain way of comrades treating objective criticism as personal insults.” [73]

But this political criticism of opportunist tendencies in the party became blurred and lost credibility because Bruno Wille insinuated "corruption" in the ranks of SPD parliamentarians and thus tended to pin the problem on individuals.

At a major SPD gathering in Berlin at the end of August 1890, in which more than 10,000 party members took part, Bebel confronted the criticisms of the SPD in a debate with some representatives of the “Jungen”. At the end of the debate, a resolution was passed in which of the approximately 4,000 counted participants (of the 10,000 participants only half could fit into the hall) about 300-400 voted against the resolution written by Bebel.

“The assembly declares the assertion made by various sides that the Social Democratic Reichstag fraction was corrupt, that it intended to rape the party, and that it was anxious to suppress freedom of expression in the party press, as a grave insult to the fraction, or to the party leadership, which lacked all proof. The Assembly also declares unjustified the attacks directed against the parliamentary activity of the fraction to date.” [74]

At the party conference in Erfurt, an investigation commission presented its findings on the accusations of some of the “Jungen”. However, the mandate of this commission had dealt with two tasks at the same time: with regard to the accusations of systematic corruption and the fact that party funds were given to parasites, the commission acquitted the accused of the charges.

At the same time, it rejected the political criticism expressed in an anonymous flyer distributed at the Halle party conference. The leaflet said: “We do not therefore accuse the leaders of dishonesty, however, but that they showed too much consideration for the powers that be, resulting from the changed position in life and the lack of contact with proletarian poverty, the heart beat of the people in agony”.[75]

“The worst thing that the Socialist Law has brought us is corruption” (Wille referred above all to political behaviour and directed this accusation primarily against the party leadership).[76]

At the same time, the Jungen warned of the danger of the party decaying.[77]

The Commission countered this with its political findings: “1.) It is not true that the revolutionary spirit is systematically being killed by individual leaders. 2.) It is not true that a dictatorship is practiced in the party. 3.) It is not true that the whole movement has decayed and the Social Democracy has sunk down to a pure reform party of petty bourgeois direction. 4) It is not true that the revolution was solemnly sworn off at the tribune of the Reichstag. 5.) To this day, nothing has been done to justify the accusation that attempts were made to bring into harmony the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.”[78]

Finally, some members of the Jungen who continued to uphold the accusation of corruption were expelled at the Erfurt party congress. Previously, other members had resigned from the party. After a rejected appeal against their exclusion, the opposition founded the "Association of Independent Socialists" (Verein Unabhängiger Sozialisten) on November 8, 1891, shortly after the Erfurt Party Congress (its organ became the Socialist, which appeared from 1891-1899). Engels said it spread "nothing but gossip and lies"[79]

This opposition, which emerged at the beginning of the 1890s, had shown a vague awareness of the increasing danger of the party's degeneration. But by putting the criticisms of the party's policies into the category of accusations of bribery against party leaders - without any concrete evidence - and thus personalising them - its well-founded warnings of the dangers of sinking into degeneration lost their impact and could be used by the opportunists. Previously, some representatives of the Jungen (Werner and Wille) had demanded that a central organ of the party (i.e. in the form of a newspaper) was not necessary at all. Some of them also spoke out against centralisation and only for loose structures, and they spoke out against binding membership criteria.

The founding appeal of the "Independent Socialists" stressed that the “organisational form of today's party [restricts] the movement of the proletarian social classes”. Instead, they advocated a “free organisation,” and argued that the purpose of the organisation was to be a “discussion and education association.”[80]

The "Independent Socialists" split shortly after their founding - some returned to the SPD, others went over to the anarchists.

For the SPD, dealing with this heterogeneous group had been a twofold challenge. On the one hand, accusations at the level of behaviour, such as allegations of corruption, should not be left unchecked. And those who continued to uphold such accusations without any evidence should not be allowed to claim such things without any sanctions.

But at the same time, this was a test of the willingness of the party to deal with warnings of opportunism, which were inevitably confused and sometimes misleading, and were presented in a brawling manner, as Engels said. A policy of exclusion due to political divergence was not on the agenda. Before the Halle party conference, Engels spoke out against a policy of exclusion from the party:

“I will probably see Bebel and Liebknecht here before the Congress and do what I can to convince them of the imprudence of all expulsions that are not based on striking evidence of the party's injurious actions, but merely on charges of endless opposition”.[81]

“It is clear that you will be able to deal with the Jungen and their followers at the Congress. But make sure that no germs are laid for future difficulties. Do not make unnecessary martyrs, show that freedom of criticism prevails, and if someone has to be expelled then only in cases where quite blatant and fully provable facts (...) of wickedness and betrayal exist.”  [82]

After the Erfurt party congress Engels approved their exclusion, mainly because the Jungen had continued to spread unproven suspicions and accusations within the party. But shortly after the party had excluded them, he realized that people like Vollmar (representatives of the right) were "much more dangerous" than the Jungen.[83] A short time later he adopted a nuanced attitude. He described the attacks of the Jungen against the "petty-bourgeois elements" in the party as "priceless". [84]

Even Bebel recognised the positive role of the Jungen after the publication in the summer of 1892 of Hans Müller's Der Klassenkampf in der Sozialdemokratie (The Class Struggle in Social Democracy). “It's quite good in itself that there are a few ankle snappers who remind you to watch out that you don't stumble. If we didn't have this opposition, we'd have to make ourselves one. If you scold them at the next party conference, I'll sing their praises.” [85]

————-

The battle that we have described between the revolutionary and opportunist tendencies in German Social Democracy became even more intense in the following period from 1890 to 1914. We will describe this exacerbated conflict in the second part of the article.

Dino