Thirty years ago, the fall of the Berlin Wall demonstrated the bankruptcy of the reviled Stalinist regimes. This event was the real symbol of the implosion of the Eastern Bloc.

Its thirtieth anniversary has been the chance for the bourgeoisie to use the same lies today as yesterday. The working class has to permanently reject and fight back against this ideological assault.

This anniversary has unfolded without fanfares in an atmosphere of gloom. Contrary to the euphoria and popular jubilation of November 9 1989, the "great party" organised by the bourgeoisie fell flat[1]: "the incorrigibly pessimistic Europeans have faced the thirtieth anniversary (...) like a funeral. Morale is low"[2]. And, as a "sign of a lack of enthusiasm for the celebration, none of the major western leaders went to Berlin on Saturday November 9"[3]. Finally, only the odious propaganda of the bourgeoisie served to decorate this drab occasion.

The necessity to maintain the great lie about the "death of communism"

Facts are stubborn and the bourgeoisie is not too confident about accounting for these last thirty years. Even the Stalinist monster, so detested beforehand in the regimes of the east, has sometimes aroused a wry nostalgia and doubts from populations of the "liberated" territories, as the situation has degraded so much since:

"Thirty years ago, communication and solidarity between people were so much better. Today one must fight for everything, for work, for somewhere to live, for a doctor. Before the doctor wasn't an accountant, today he is an entrepreneur", said Amoud"[4].

And in fact the state of society is still catastrophic, most notably in the territories of the ex-Easter Bloc - grimmer if anything. The growing threats of capitalist society are pushing the population into the arms of the populists who pretend that they will "protect" them. A good number of these countries (Hungary, Poland, etc.) are thus marked by openly right-wing regimes, prone to virulent nationalism and a "bunkerisation" of their frontiers. The decomposition and chaos of the capitalist world radically contradicts the lying promises of the bourgeoisie, denting the illusions it spread at the time of the fall of the Wall in November 1989 when it promised a radiant future: a sort of democratic benevolence for the world and for the "unified German nation". At the time of these events, the perspective of being finished with Stalinist terror and chronic shortages led to an immense relief which fed the illusions of East Germans, and these illusions were used to the hilt by the western bourgeoisie in order to divide the workers and mount a vast ideological campaign, the greatest lie against the proletariat: the fall of the wall and the bankruptcy of Stalinism meant "the death of communism"! Today, even if they go about it more artfully given the rancour and anger within the populations faced with the so-called "benefits of democracy", the whole political class and its media serve us up the same nauseating speeches: "Even if today Europe is in crisis in some areas, we shouldn't forget that the fall of the Berlin Wall signalled the end of communism and totalitarian regimes"[5].

At the time we were already fighting against this idea that Stalinism=communism, which has been hammered home ever since then. And what we said then remains absolutely valid today:

Recent events have been the occasion for a barrage of lies, and in the lead the biggest and vilest of them: the claim that this crisis repre­sents the failure of communism, and of marxism! Over and above their various antagonisms, democrats and Stalinists have always formed a holy alliance in saying to the workers that so­cialism (however deformed) reigns in the East. For Marx, Engels, Lenin, Luxemburg, for the entire marxist movement, communism has always meant the end of the exploitation of man by man, the end of classes, the end of frontiers, all made possible only on a world scale, in a soci­ety governed by the abundance of "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs", where "the government of men gives way to the administration of things". The claim that there is anything "communist", or even ap­proaching "communism", in the USSR and the countries of the Eastern bloc, ruled by exploitation, poverty, and generalised scarcity, is the greatest lie in the history of humanity." [6]

All the political factions of the bourgeoisie feed themselves on this same repeated lie and with the same complicity in order to make this same, gross assimilation of Stalinism with communism: from democrats and leftists to the extreme-right as we see for example  with the AfD and its insidious slogan "Today as yesterday: freedom rather than socialism"[7]. Thirty years later, the bourgeoisie hammers home this same nail into the consciousness of workers. And only the Communist Left is today capable of denouncing it!

The euphoria of 1989 and the propaganda of the illusion-mongers faced with capitalist reality

A little while after the fall of the Berlin Wall, President Mitterand in his November 22 speech to the European parliament evoked the vibrant manner of this historic event. Standing close to his great friend Chancellor Kohl, he said: "liberty and democracy, inseparable one from the other, have brought us their most impressionable victories" thanks to the fall of the wall. Twelve months later, in the wake of the "benefits" of the wall coming down, the knights of freedom of the western world straightaway launched themselves into a bloody crusade in the Middle East, the first Gulf War, under the aegis of the United States. This was a war in which the 500,000 deaths were supposed to, according to the mantra of the White House at the time under George Bush Snr., bring in "a new world order" for "peace, prosperity and democracy".

For thirty years, contrary to the propaganda of these charlatans, the dynamic destructiveness of capitalism is there for all to see in its degradation everywhere and on every level. Judge for yourselves:

- The "New World Order" and "Peace"? The fall of the Berlin Wall opened up a Pandora's Box. What followed wasn't a "new world order" but the greatest chaos in history[8]. Thus, on every continent and territory of the planet, the tendency towards “every man for himself” is exacerbated and military conflicts multiply, generalise and spread. In the countries on the periphery of capitalism, notably in Africa and the Middle East, as in Asia, the world is falling into growing instability, multiplying massacres and bloodbaths. Above all we've seen real scenes of war at the very heart of Europe and the western world, unprecedented since 1945. From the war in ex-Yugoslavia with its charnel houses, through conflicts in Georgia, Ukraine, etc., and the multiplication of attacks since the tragedy of the Twin Towers in the United States, September 2001, "peace" has been the peace of the grave. The catastrophe of the Twin Towers, which was unimaginable beforehand, inaugurated a terror, a banalisation of scenes of war and barbarity throughout the heart of the "civilised" world: attacks in Madrid (Atocha station, 2004), London (July 2005), Paris (Bataclan concert, November 2015), etc. One could also add the horror of the more recent ravages of war in Syria and its collateral damage, the intensive bombardments which recall the worst exactions of the Second World War. Similarly, we can also add the massacres and famines in Yemen (with the involvement of western imperialisms such as Britain and France who have unfailingly provided arms to the Saudi regime). Note as well that the global arms race has heated up again in a terrifying fashion.

- As for "prosperity"? For thirty years, the economic situation globally has degraded at every level, scandalously exposing growing inequalities. Since the world financial crisis of 2008, proletarians have felt the growing weight of exploitation and the justifications for it from bourgeois politicians that are more and more cynical: attacks on living conditions and wages, unemployment and the explosion of precarious work, degradation of the health services and mounting homelessness. All this aggravated by reforms in the pipeline and those to come, pensions for example. Added to these attacks we have seen the systematic pillage of resources and the despoliation of the environment motivated by the desperate search for profits in a world in crisis. In brief, the infernal logic of moribund capitalism now clearly threatens the survival of human civilisation.

- More "democracy"? For thirty years states have only toughened-up their repressive arsenals. Decomposition has only maintained and favoured nationalist and xenophobic reflexes, populist ideology and every man for himself. The bourgeoisie has above all profited from the bloody terrorist attacks in order to beef up its juridical and police apparatus and the criminalising of social conflicts. Brutal repression and violence have gradually increased at every level. That means that rather than much-vaunted "public freedoms", it leaves the real face of the "democratic state" more transparent, revealing an apparatus which coldly monopolises violence so as to maintain its order against the exploited. We should also raise the issue of the great "democratic spirit" of the countries of the western world who are everywhere building new walls draped with razor wire, militarising maritime or terrestrial borders and knowingly leaving immigrants to die, as practiced by the EU in the Mediterranean. The idea of "democracy" is anyway an empty concept while society remains divided into antagonistic classes based on the exploitation of labour. This doesn't at all stop the bourgeoisie from adapting its hypocritical speeches in order to crow about its "great principles" and its "values"; it does this to cover up and justify all its crimes so as to excuse its bloody system and the exactions of its exploiters. Today, while the declining mode of production is in agony and dragging us down towards the abyss, the bourgeoisie asks us to defend it by pushing its principal ideological mystification: the "democratic values" which have always served to cover up its atrocities. It's in this sense that we should interpret the insistencies of Chancellor Angela Merkel in her commemoration speech where she warned about the dangers of "totalitarianisms" and "growing revolts" (notably, populism in the east): "the values that Europe is based upon, liberty, democracy, equality, rights and the preservation of human rights can't be taken for granted" and "(they) must always be defended" she added. Accordingly, for the bourgeoisie: "if this thirtieth anniversary can be useful it must be in trying to re-think the democratic model for all those who have adopted it..."[9] As it's obliged to mask its weaknesses, the bourgeoisie needs to regain some credibility, to "re-think" its "democratic model" that's in trouble in order to... better attack and keep the exploited quiet!

What lessons? What perspectives?

From the thirty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the proletariat must keep these essential lessons in its head:

- Communism is neither "dead" nor "bankrupt". It is Stalinism, the political expression of Eastern Bloc state capitalism, which has foundered and fallen under the blows of the crisis of this decomposing system.

- The proletariat must reject all the lying media campaigns, notably all the traps feeding divisions: for example in Germany those opposing the "Ossies" to the "Wessies", but also the traps which opposes "populist" ideologies to "anti-populism" and other democratic ideologies.

- The bourgeoisie will always be a class of liars, obliged to permanently mask its domination and its exploitation of the proletariat. Its promises, such as those of 1989-90, are nothing but wind, empty phrases aiming to anesthetise the proletariat.

- The fall of the Berlin Wall and the implosion of the Eastern Bloc are the most spectacular expressions of the crisis and the decomposition of this system. From now onwards, capitalism can only fuel the dreadful spiral of destruction and has no other possible future. It's thus necessary to destroy it before its decomposition engulfs humanity.

Faced with all the destruction that the logic of this system imposes upon us, there is only one solution and that is the struggle of the revolutionary class. That is an international combat of all the workers, beyond divisions, beyond and against all national divides and against the bourgeois state. Only the international proletariat can offer this alternative perspective, that of another society, without walls or barbed wire, without class and without exploitation: a real communist society.

WH (December 2019)

After years of weakness, the social movement against pension reform shows a re-awakening of the combativity of the proletariat in France. Despite all its difficulties the working class has begun to raise its head. Whereas, just a year ago, the whole social terrain was occupied by the inter-classist movement of the Gilets Jaunes, today the exploited of every sector and all generations have used the days of action organised by the unions to come onto the streets, determined to fight on their own class ground against this massive and frontal attack of the government which is hitting all the exploited.

The working class exists and "here it is"!

Whereas nearly ten years ago workers remained paralysed, totally isolated and alone in their own workplaces, these last few weeks they have returned to the route of collective struggle.

Aspirations to unity and solidarity in the struggle show that the workers in France have begun to again see themselves as part of one and the same class, having the same interests to defend. Thus, in several marches, and notably in Marseille, you could hear: "The working class exists!" In Paris, groups of protesters who didn't march behind the union banners chanted: "We are here, here for the honour of the workers and for a better world". In a demonstration on January 9, even onlookers on the edges of the union march sung the old song of the workers' movement: "The International", while students and schoolchildren behind their own banners chanted "The young with their problems, the old in their poverty!"

It is clear that in refusing to stay on its knees, the working class in France is about to re-discover its dignity.

Another very significant change in the social situation has been the attitude and state of mind of the "passengers" in the transport strikes. It's the first time, since the movement of 1995, of a transport strike that hasn't been "unpopular" despite the campaigns orchestrated by the media around the "difficulties" faced by "passengers" to get to work, to get home or those going away at the time of the holiday period at the end of the year. Nowhere, except in the state media, have we heard that the workers of SNCF and the RATP are taking rail passengers "hostage". On platforms, in trains and on the suburban routes, people waited patiently. In order to get around the capital, people managed without complaining about the striking workers: carpools, motor-bikes and scooters... But even more, the support and respect for the rail workers was concretised in the donations for the strikers, given in solidarity, who had sacrificed more than a month's wages (more than three million euros were raised in a few weeks!) who fought not only for themselves but also for others.

However, after a month-and-a-half of strikes, after daily protests bringing together hundreds of thousands of people, this movement has not forced the government to retreat.

Since the outset, the bourgeoisie, its government and its "social partners" have planned a strategy in order to get the attacks on pensions through. The question of the "age pivot" (access to full pension or not) was a card that it had kept up its sleeve in order to sabotage any response of the working class and let its "reform" go through thanks to the classic strategy of division of the "union front".

More than this, the bourgeoisie armed its police in the name of the maintenance of "Republican Order". Up front and in bold, the government deployed its forces of repression so as to intimidate us. The cops continually gassed and beat up workers (including females and older people) supported by the media which made the connection between the exploited class and the Black Bloc and other “wreckers”. So as to prevent the workers meeting up and regrouping at the end of the demonstrations in order to discuss together, the columns of the CRS dispersed them on orders from the Prefecture using stun grenades. The police violence wasn't at all down to individual errors or excited and out of control members of the CRS. What it announced was the future pitiless and ferocious repression that the dominant class will not hesitate to unleash against the proletariat (as it did in the past, for example the "Bloody Week" of the Paris Commune in 1871).

How can we force the government back?

In order to be able to confront the ruling class and force the government to retreat, the workers must take their struggles in hand by themselves. They should have no confidence in the unions - these "social partners" - who have always done deals behind their backs, in secret within the ministerial cabinets.

If we continue to ask the unions to "represent" us, if we continue to stand aside and wait for them to organise the struggle in our place, then we are indeed "fucked"!

In order to undertake our own struggle, spread and unify it, we must organise ourselves in massive general assemblies, autonomous and open to all the working class. It is in these GA's that we can discuss together; collectively decide what actions to take and form strike committees with elected delegates revocable at any time.

The experience of the young workers who took part in the movement against the "First Employment Contract" (CPE - a particular attack on young workers) in spring 2006, when they were still students or schoolchildren, should be remembered and transmitted to their comrades at work, to the young, to the older workers. How they made the Villepin government retreat obliging it to withdraw its CPE, which they did thanks to their capacity to organise the struggle themselves in their massive general assemblies in all the universities and without any trade unions. These GA's were not closed up affairs. On the contrary, the students called on workers, active and retired, to come and discuss in their meetings and to participate actively in the movement in solidarity with the younger generation confronted with unemployment and precarious work. The Villepin government had to withdraw the CPE without any "negotiation". Here the students, young precarious workers and future unemployed were not represented by any "social partners" and they won.

Even if we lose the battle we haven't lost the war!

The railworkers who have been the spearhead of this mobilisation cannot continue to strike alone without other sectors themselves engaging in the struggle with them. Despite their courage and determination, they can't fight in place of the whole working class. "Strikes by proxy" can't make the government retreat however determined they are.

The working class is not yet ready to engage in massive struggles today; even if numerous workers from all sectors, all categories of job (essentially from the public sector), and all generations took to the streets in the demonstrations organised by the unions since December 5. What we need to halt the attacks of the bourgeoisie is to develop active solidarity in the struggle and not only through donations which help the strikers "keep going".

The return to work which has already begun in the transport sector (notably the SNCF) is not a capitulation! To pause in the struggle is also a way of avoiding the exhaustion of the long and isolated strike which only leads to feelings of impotence and bitterness.

A large majority of the mobilised workers had the feeling that if they lost this battle, if they did not force the government to withdraw its reforms, we were "fucked". It's not the case! The present mobilisation and the massive rejection of this attack is only at the beginning, a first battle which announces others to come. Because the bourgeoisie, its government, its bosses will continue to exploit us, reduce our spending, drive us into poverty and into greater misery. Anger can only grow and lead to new explosions, to new movements of struggle.

Even if the working class loses this first battle, it hasn't lost the war. It can't give way to demoralisation!

The "class war" is made up of advances and retreats, moments of mobilisation and pause to renew the struggle at a stronger level.  The fight never goes along a "straight line" where all is won immediately. All the history of the workers' movement has shown that the combat of the exploited class against the bourgeoisie can only end in a victory that follows a series of defeats.

The only way to strengthen the struggle is to use periods of falling back in order to reflect and discuss together through a general regroupment, at work, where we live and in public areas.

The most combative and determined workers, whether active, unemployed, retired or students, must try to form "struggle committees" that cut across jobs and sector, open to all generations in order to prepare for future struggles. We need to draw the lessons of this movement, understand its difficulties to be able to overcome them in the next combats.

This social movement, despite all its limits, weaknesses and difficulties, is already a first victory. After years of paralysis, disarray and atomisation, it has brought hundreds of thousands of workers out onto the streets in order to express their will to fight against the attacks of Capital. This mobilisation has allowed them to express their need for solidarity and unity and it has also allowed them to experience first-hand the manoeuvres of the bourgeoisie in driving home its attacks.

It's only through the struggle and in the struggle that the proletariat can become conscious that it is the only force in society capable of abolishing capitalist exploitation and constructing a new world. The road that leads to a world proletarian revolution and to the overthrow of capitalism will be long and difficult. It will be strewn with ambushes and defeats, but it can't be any other way.

More than ever, the future belongs to the working class!

 

International Communist Current, January 13, 2020

Following the USA’s targeted assassination of Iran’s top military strategist Qaseem Soleimani, the talk in many of the world’s capitals, especially in western Europe - whether or not they voiced explicit support for the US action - was about the need to avoid an “escalation” of military tensions in the Middle East. Commenting on the limited nature of Iran’s initial response – a missile attack on US air bases in Iraq which seemed to have caused little damage or loss of life – the same voices were breathing a sigh of relief, hoping that Iran would now call it quits.

But the escalation of military confrontations in the Middle East– and the USA’s particular contribution to it – has deeper and wider roots than the current stand-off between Iran and the Trump government in the US. Already in the Cold War period the strategically vital region had been the theatre of a number of proxy wars between the US and Russian blocs, notably the Arab-Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973 and the “civil wars” that tore through Lebanon and Afghanistan or the war between Iran-Iraq in the 1980s. With the collapse of the Russian bloc at the end of that decade, the US sought to impose itself as the world’s only super-power, demanding that its former western bloc partners join the first war of Bush Senior’s “New World Order” against Saddam’s Iraq in 1991. But this New World Order soon proved to be a delusion. Instead of achieving a new global stability - one that would be dominated by the US of course - every new American military adventure only accelerated a slide into chaos: the current state of the two countries it invaded at the beginning of the new century, Afghanistan and Iraq, provides ample evidence of that. Under Obama, US reverses in these countries and the need to “pivot” towards the Far East to face up to the rising challenge of China further underlined the weakening of American imperialism’s grip on the Middle East. In Syria it has had to cede more and more ground to Putin’s Russia, which has now formed an alliance with Turkey (a NATO member) to disperse the Kurdish forces which had previously held northern Syria with the backing of the US[1].

However if the US has been in retreat, it has continued to insist that it has by no means withdrawn from the region. It has instead shifted its strategy towards unfailing support for its two most reliable allies in the region - Israel and Saudi Arabia. Under Trump it has virtually abandoned any pretence to be an arbiter between Israel and the Palestinians, supporting Netanyahu’s openly annexationist moves without demur. Equally, it has no qualms about supporting the Saudi regime which is waging a brutal war in Yemen and which brazenly murders opposition spokesmen like the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, killed and dismembered in the Saudi embassy in Istanbul. And above all, it has piled on the pressure against its chief enemy in the region, Iran.

Iran has been a thorn in the US flesh ever since the so-called Islamic Revolution which overthrew the strongly pro-US Shah in 1979. In the 80s it supported Saddam’s war against Iran in order to weaken the new regime. But the toppling of Saddam in 2003 has opened a large part of Iraq to Iranian influence: the Shia-dominated Iraqi government in Baghdad is closely aligned to the Tehran regime.  This has greatly increased Iran’s own imperialist ambitions in the entire Middle East: it has established a kind of state within a state via Hizbollah in Lebanon and is the main support for the Houthi forces battling Saudi Arabia and its proxies in Yemen. And Soleimani was the principal architect of Iranian imperialism in these and other adventures.

Trump’s decision to go ahead with the assassination of Soleimani was not, therefore, based on a mere whim of this admittedly unpredictable US president, but is part of an imperialist strategy backed by a considerable portion of the US bourgeoisie – even though pursuing its logic has certainly sharpened divisions within the military/political apparatus of the US ruling class. In particular it has angered those who supported Obama’s more conciliatory approach to Iran as embodied in the agreement on Iran’s nuclear programme, one of the first diplomatic deals to be ditched by Trump when he became president. This attempt to build bridges with Iran has also been the approach of the main European powers, including Britain, who have again expressed their misgivings about Trump’s policies following the Soleimani killing.

Behind the spiral of violence: the impasse of world capital

These bourgeois critics of Trump have complained that they can’t see the “long game” behind Soleimani’s assassination, that Trump hasn’t thought things through. They continue to affirm their commitment to rational, political, diplomatic solutions to the war-like conflicts and rivalries that are spreading throughout the globe. But capitalism’s slide into militarism is not the product of Trump or other bad leaders, but of the historic impasse of the capitalist system, and these “responsible” bourgeois factions are no less reliant on the military machine than Trump and other populists – the use of drone warfare in the Middle East and surrounding regions was pioneered under Obama.

Trump’s administration is founded on the recognition that both the old order of disciplined military alliances, which held sway during the Cold War, and the post-1989 New World Order project, are equally dead and that the real dynamic in the world since 1989 is “every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost”: this is the real significance of Trump’s “America First” slogan. And this in turn is the expression, at the level of international relations, of the underlying decomposition of capitalist society itself – of the final phase of capitalism’s decline as a mode of production, which was first clearly signalled by the outbreak of the First World War.  In this context, the US is no longer the gendarme of the world, but the principal factor in the descent into chaos. Trump is merely the personification of this remorseless tendency. That is why the “long game” being played behind the Soleimani killing, irrespective of the subjective fantasies of Trump or his acolytes and supporters, can only have one result: the escalation of military barbarism, whether or not this takes place in the shorter or longer term. And, as the nightmare in Syria starkly illustrates, the first victim of this escalation will be the mass of the population, the “collateral damage” of militarism. In this sense, whether intentional or not, the shooting down of the Ukrainian airliner over Tehran on the same day as the Iranian missile strike against US airbases demonstrates the real human cost of these military confrontations.

The Iran regime and the left wing of capital

The left wing of the capitalist political machine – the Democrats and “Democratic Socialists” in the US, the Corbynists in the UK, the Trotskyists everywhere – have their own agenda when they blame the racking up of tensions in the Middle East on Trump or US imperialism. This flows from the idea that America or the western powers are the only imperialists, and that they are opposed by non-imperialist or even anti-imperialist countries such as Russia, China – or Iran. This is a lie: in this epoch, all countries are imperialist, from the biggest and most influential states to the smaller and less global powers. Iran, no less than Israel, has its own imperialist drives, expressed in its attempts to use proxy forces to become the leading power in the Middle East. And behind them lurk the bigger imperialist states of Russia and China. By contrast, those exploited by capital, whatever nation state presides over their exploitation, have no interest in identifying with the imperialist adventures of their own ruling class

The left, while calling for the defence of the so-called “oppressed” nations and nation states, also claims to be on the side of the exploited and the oppressed in these countries, where the long reign of the war economy together with the impact of the world economic crisis –to which we can add the weight of US sanctions in a country like Iran[2] – has certainly led to a massive build-up of social discontent and opposition to the existing regimes across the Middle East. This has been demonstrated by the popular revolts in countries like Lebanon, Iraq and Iran in the past two years.  But while the leftists trumpet their support for these movements, they really undermine the possibility of an independent class movement emerging in these countries, because they refuse to criticise the weaknesses in these revolts where different class interests are melded together. Indeed, with their support for the “nationalism of the oppressed”, the leftists can only further strengthen the tendency of these revolts to take on a nationalist direction (as with the anti-Iranian slogans raised in the protests in Iraq, or the waving of the Lebanese flag as a false solution to sectarian divisions in Lebanon). And now that the regimes in Iran and Iraq, are for the moment, seeking to drown discontent towards the regime in a hysterical campaign of anti-American national unity, the left, by echoing the anti-US slogans, reveals itself as a cheerleader to the war effort of the Ayatollahs. And it is one of the ironies of the situation that the US assassination of Soleimani enables the Tehran regime to use these campaigns to bolster its credibility as the defender of Iranian “national interests”.

And yet, despite the well-publicised pictures of hundreds of thousands in the streets weeping for Soleimani, we doubt that the exploited and the oppressed of Iran and Iraq have been entirely taken in: this after all is the same Soleimani whose elite forces have been in the forefront of the merciless repression of the protests against the regime, which has left hundreds of corpses in the streets. The angry anti-government demonstrations that broke out across Iran immediately after the authorities admitted that they had shot down the Ukrainian airliner show that the “Sacred Union” promoted by the regime after the killing of Soleimani has no real solidity.

The working class in Iran has waged some courageous struggles in the past two years, revealing once again that it has the potential - as we saw at certain moments in 1978-79 – to provide a leadership to the mass of the population, to integrate their discontent into an authentically proletarian movement.

But for this to happen, the workers of Iran, Iraq and other countries in the front line of imperialist conflict will have to develop the capacity to avoid all the traps laid in their path, whether in the form of nationalism or illusions in the superiority of “western democracy”. And they will not be able to make this vital step forward without the active solidarity of the international working class, above all in the central countries of the system. The current struggles of the working class in France indicate that this is not a forlorn hope.

Against the escalation of military barbarism, the only way forward for humanity lies in the escalation of the international class struggle against capital, its national rivalries, its repression and its wars.

Amos, 12.1.20

The proletariat will only be able to free humanity from the increasingly suffocating chains of world capitalism if its struggle is inspired and fertilised by the critical historical continuity of its communist organisations, that thread that runs from the Communist League in 1848 to the current organisations that identify with the tradition of the communist left. Deprived of this compass, the workers’ reaction against the barbarity and misery imposed by capitalism will be condemned to blind, desperate actions, which may lead to a definitive chain of defeats.

The Nuevo Curso blog tries to pass off the work of Munis as part of the "Communist Left", but Munis never really managed to break with the erroneous approach and orientations of the Left Opposition that would degenerate into Trotskyism, a current that since the 1940s has clearly positioned itself behind the defense of capitalism, together with its big brothers, Stalinism and social democracy.

We responded to this claim with the article “Nuevo Curso and the ’Spanish Communist Left’: what are the origins of the Communist Left?”[1]

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

This article, written in August 2019, has been totally ignored by Nuevo Curso. The sound of its silence has resounded loudly in the ears of all of us who defend the heritage and critical continuity of the communist left. This is even more shocking when Nuevo Curso publishes a new article every day which deals with every imaginable subject from Netflix, to the Spanish King's Christmas message and the origin of the Christmas festival. However, it has not thought it necessary to devote anything to something as vital as developing arguments to justify its claim to pass off as part of the communist left the more or less critical link between Munis and the Left Opposition that gave rise to Trotskyism.

Our article concluded by saying: “Perhaps we are looking at a sentimental cult of a former proletarian combatant. If that is the case, we must say that it is an enterprise destined to create more confusion because its theses, turned into dogmas, will only distil the worst of his errors… Another possible explanation is that the authentic Communist Left is being attacked with a spam ‘doctrine’ built overnight using the materials of that great revolutionary. If such is the case, it is the obligation of revolutionaries to fight such an imposture with the maximum energy”.

The worst thing about the defeat of the 1917-23 world revolutionary wave is that the gigantic distortion perpetrated by Stalinism was passed off as "communism", "Marxism" and "proletarian principles". Today's revolutionary organisations cannot allow all the heritage that was painfully developed over almost a century by the communist left to be replaced by a spam doctrine based on the confusion and opportunist gangrene that was the Left Opposition. This would be a brutal blow to the perspective of world proletarian revolution.

The origins of Nuevo Curso

In September 2017 we discovered the blog called Nuevo Curso[2], which initially presented itself as being interested in the positions of the communist left and open to debate. That’s at least what NC said in its response to the first letter that the ICC sent them. Here is their reply:

“We don’t see ourselves as a political group, a proto-party or something like that…On the contrary, we see our work as something ‘formative’, in order to aid discussion in the workplaces, among the young, etc, and once we have clarified certain basic elements, serving as a bridge between the new people discovering marxism and the internationalist organisations (essentially the ICT and you, the ICC) who, as we see it, have to be the natural solidifying forces of the future party even though they are very weak today (as, of course, is the entire working class)” [3]

This approach disappeared a few months later, without a detailed and convincing explanation, when NC declared itself to be the continuation of a so-called Spanish Communist Left, the origins of this being Munis and his group, the FOR[4]. We have already pointed out that this claimed ancestry was nothing but a confusion between the communist left and Trotskyism, and that from the standpoint of the continuity of political principles, the positions of NC were not in continuity with those of the communist left, but with Trotskyism or, at best, with attempts to break with Trotskyism[5]. There is thus no programmatic continuity between NC and the communist left.

But what about organic continuity? This is what they originally said about themselves:

“Under the blog and the ‘School of Marxism’, we are a small group of five people which has worked and lived together for 15 years in a work cooperative which functions as a community of possessions. This is our way of resisting precarity and earning a living. And also of maintaining a way of life where we can discuss, learn and be useful to our families and friends in a difficult period” (ibid)

And as they also recognised, their main activity was far from being marxist criticism; in general, in the absence of something more concrete, it consisted of devoting their efforts “to making organised work possible in a productive manner (a new cooperative or communitarian movement which would highlight the technological possibility of a de-commodified society, i.e. a communist society”[6] (ibid).

On the other hand, in addition to this central nucleus, and apparently coming from different dynamics of reflection and discussion, various groups of young people converged towards this group in several towns[7].

What is surprising is how with such elements, NC’s website presented itself from the beginning by referring to the positions of the communist left. The role of one of the elements who contributed to this is explained in this letter

“one of us (ie of the cooperativist nucleus, editor’s note), Gaizka[8], who was one of your contacts in the 1990s, and who, as he said of himself, had learned a lot about marxism from you. The fact that we counted on him and on the library he brought with him was an important part of our process” (ibid).

In fact, this “cooperativist member” appeared at our public meeting in December 2017 on the centenary of the Russian revolution and was someone we already knew, the above-mentioned Gaizka, who in the 90s had taken part in a programmatic discussion with the ICC. At the end of the meeting he told us that he was in contact with a group of young people, to whom he was “giving a marxist formation”, encouraging us to make contact.

Our response to his proposal to make contact was that he should first clarify certain political behaviours which he had not managed to explain in the 90s, and which involved careerist attitudes and a close and long maintained relationship with the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE)[9] at the same time as laying claim to the positions of the communist left[10].

He didn’t reply to this in December 2017, nor, after that, to the four letters we sent to him in similar terms; that’s why, according to the proletarian tradition of trying to clarify these kinds of “obscure” episodes in political life, we are still asking for explanations. In the absence of these explanations, the monitoring of his political activity[11] since we met him shows that links with the PSOE have been maintained.

The uneven path of Gaizka

1992-94: contact with the ICC, and sudden disappearance

In 1992, Gaizka made contact with the ICC, presenting himself as a member of a group called “The Spartacist Union”, which claimed to defend the positions of the German communist left (positions which no longer seem to his taste). In reality, this was essentially him and his partner[12] ; and at this point their acquaintance with the programmatic positions and traditions of the communist left was more an aspiration than a reality.

From the beginning, he was interested in joining our organisation very quickly and felt ill at ease when discussions had to be prolonged to make the necessary clarifications, or when certain of his behaviours were questioned – in particular concerning another element who had joined a discussion circle in Madrid, in which Battaglia Comunista also occasionally participated.

The discussion on his political history also posed problems. Although he told us that he had been in contact with the Socialist Youth (of the PSOE), he showed a sort of fascination with the experience of the kibbutz[13], and made comments which seemed to link him to Borrell[14] and the pro-Israel Socialist lobby[15]. What’s more, Gaizka never clarified his organisational relationship with the PSOE or his break with it.[16]

In 1994, in the ICC, there were debates going on about the problem of the weight of the circle spirit in the workers’ movement since 1968 and on affinity-based relations under the cover of “communitarian” projects for living. During discussions on our principles of organisation, we presented Gaizka with our positions on all this. And it is perhaps for this reason that, when we asked him directly for explanations about the aspects of his trajectory which seemed unclear[17], first of all he didn’t seem at all surprised, despite the fact that we introduced this meeting as a confrontation that was being recorded (we had never recorded a discussion with him before that). And second, he did not give us any explanation at all and disappeared from the milieu of the communist left. Until now!

Links with the PSOE kept up…

What posed questions about Gaizka’s political trajectory was not the fact that, at a certain moment, he had been a sympathiser or militant of the Socialist Youth and that he had not said this clearly; what merited an explanation was the fact that, despite his claims of being convinced by the positions of the communist left, his life history left many traces which revealed a political relationship with people who were or had been high-ranking functionaries in the PSOE.

In 1998-9, he participated as an “adviser”, without ever making precise what this meant, in Borrell’s campaign in the PSOE primaries, as can be seen from some of his accounts on the internet. One of our militants saw him on television in the candidate’s office[18]. Gaizka tried to minimise the question by saying that he was only there as an “office boy” in the campaign, someone that Borrell hadn’t even noticed. But the truth is that certain PSOE leaders, like Miquel Iceta[19] for example, said publicly that they had met Gaizka during this campaign. And it doesn’t seem very logical that the high-ups in the PSOE should go to Borrell to ask him to introduce them to his office boy.

Furthermore, during these same years, Gaizka also participated in a “humanitarian mission” organised by the European Council of Humanitarian Action and Cooperation in Kosovo[20] alongside David Balsa, now president of the Euro-Central American Conference, and formerly president of the European Council of Humanitarian Action and Cooperation. He is a former leader of the Socialist Youth and a former member of the Executive of the Socialist Party in Galicia. In a letter to the Italian Radical Party, Gaizka said that he was “the lad who went to Albania in my place”.

Apart from what this suggests regarding suspicions of a closer relationship between Gaizka and the PSOE than he admitted, this implies an active participation in an imperialist war under the cover of “humanitarian action” and the “rights of man”[21].

In 2003, he was also an adviser in the campaign for the PSOE’s Belloch[22] for the mayor of Zaragoza, and this time he admits: “I was very involved in the campaign of the mayor, Juan Alberto Belloch, to redefine the city as an urban space, as an economic landscape, where there could be a development of types of enterprises linked to real communities, very transnational and hyper-connected”.

In 2004, after the terrorist attacks of 11 March and the national electoral victory of the PSOE, Rafael Estrella wrote a prologue for a book by Gaizka, full of praise for his qualities. This gentleman was a member of the PSOE, a spokesman for the Commission for Foreign Affairs in the Congress of Deputies, and president of the parliamentary assembly of NATO[23]. The book underlined the incapacity of the right-wing Popular Party to understand the Atocha attacks, but there is not one word of criticism of the PSOE. Felipe Gonzalez quoted from it on occasions.

This same PSOE deputy later became Spain’s ambassador in Argentina in 2007 (until 2012) and invited Gaizka to present his book at the embassy, putting him in contact with the political and economic milieu in this country.

Another “patron” who played an important role in Gaizka’s South American adventure was Quico Maňero, of whom he says in a dedication to another of his books: “To Federico Maňero, friend, connector of worlds and so many times a master, who for years has pushed us to ‘live in the dance’ of continents and conversations, received us and took care of us everywhere we went. Without him, we would never have been able to live as neo-Venetians”.

This is what the Izquierda Socialista (a left current in the PSOE) says about this gentleman:

“the branch of REPSOL[24] in (or owned by) Argentina is the affair of Señor Quico Maňero, the former husband of Elena Valenciano[25], a historic leader of the PSOE (general secretary of the Socialist Youth), adviser to enterprises close to Felipe Gonzalez, named in 2005 as a member of the Argentine Administrative Council of REPSOL-YPF. He is currently the object of an inquiry into the Invercaria scandal and the Andalusian funds of the ‘reptiles’ (a financial scandal) from which he received 1.1 million euros”[26].

During the same period, in 2005, Gaizka worked for the Jaime Vera Foundation of the PSOE, which traditionally is an institution for forming the party’s political cadres, and it seems that in 2005, this body began an international programme for the formation of cadres with the aim of gaining an influence beyond Spain’s borders. In this context, Gaizka participated in the formation of the “K-Cyberactivists” in Argentina, who supported the campaign of Cristina Kirchner in 2007, when she became the president.

“The idea was born two years ago of a political agreement with the government. It was in 2005, among twenty young people selected by the Casa Rosada (the seat of the Argentine president) to be formed by the Jaime Vera Foundation, the government school of the PSOE leaders, the Spanish Socialist Party. They included the creators of the K-Cyberactivists: the militant Sebastian Lorenzo (www.sebalorenzo.co.ar [9]) and Javier Noguera (nogueradeucuman.blogspot.com), a government secretary of José Alperovich, the governor of Tucumán…We were stupefied when he spoke to us about blogs and social networks, declared Noguera to La Nación. This was the least of it: the Spanish ‘professor’ was the worldwide reference for cyberactivism…the same one who, a month ago, accompanied by Rafael Estrella, presented his new book in Buenos Aires”[27]

During the years after 2010, and especially after the electoral defeat of the PSOE, there is less proof of involvement with this party.

…And sometimes with right wing liberalism

In fact, before the PSOE’s victory in 2004, Gaizka tried to draw the covers of the PP over himself, and collaborated with the PP Youth, in setting up Los Liberales.org, which according to this organisation would serve “to create a repertoire would bring a bit of order to online Spanish liberalism. This weekend we set ourselves to work and, after several hours in front of the computer, we mapped out what existed on the internet, the product of different liberal and libertarian families (not to be confused with the anarchists) which are sometimes at odds with each other. This is how Los Liberales.org was born, a non-partisan project for liberals and those who are interested in this kind of thought”[28].

This household included people like Jiménez Losantos[29] and his paper Libertad digital, for whom Gaizka wrote several articles, or the Christian liberal conservatives, about whom the others were not sure whether they should be seen as liberals or as part of the extreme right.

As the journalist Ignacio Esolar[30] wrote in the book la Blogoesfera hispana, this club “didn’t last long. Ideological disagreements between the founders put an end to the project”

What is someone like Gaizka doing in a place like the communist left?[31]

An examination of Gaizka’s political Curriculum Vitae clearly shows his close relationship with the PSOE. Since it definitively abandoned the proletarian camp at its extraordinary congress in April 1921[32], the PSOE has a long history in the service of the capitalist state: under the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera (1923-30) its union the UGT acted as a police informer, snitching on many CNT militants; and Largo Caballero, who acted as a bridge between the PSOE and the UGT, served as an adviser to the dictator. In 1930, the PSOE quickly changed its tune and put itself at the head of the forces which, in 1931, established the Second Republic, where it headed a government in collaboration with the Republicans from 1931 to 1933. It should be noted that during these two years, 1500 workers were killed in the repression of strikes and uprisings. Later on, the PSOE was at the heart of the Popular Front government which led the war effort and the process of militarisation, giving carte blanche to the Stalinist thugs to repress the workers’ uprising in Barcelona in May 1937. With the re-establishment of democracy in 1975, the PSOE was the backbone of the state, becoming the party that would serve longest at the head of government (1982-1996, 2004-2011, and since 2018). The most brutal measures against the conditions of the working class were imposed by PSOE governments, notably the reconversion plans of the 80s which involved the loss of a million jobs, or the programme of social cuts launched by the Zapatero government and which Rajoy’s PP government would continue.

It's with this bastion of the bourgeois state that Gaizka has been collaborating; we are not talking about “rank and file elements”, more or less duped, but with those high up in the party, no more or less than with Borrell who has been named responsible for the foreign policy of the European Commission, and with Belloch who was a minister of the interior, with Estrella who was president of the parliamentary assembly of NATO.

In Gaizka’s CV, you don’t find the slightest trace of firm conviction in the positions of the communist left; to be clear, it’s not as if he has any political convictions at all, since he has not hesitated to flirt at one point with the right-wing camp. The “marxism” of Gaizka is rather a form of “Groucho-marxism”: remember the celebrated comedian Groucho Marx when he quipped: “here are my principles. If you don’t like them I have others in my pocket”.

This is why the question is: what is that has made Gaizka create Nuevo Curso as a “historic” link with the so-called “Spanish Communist Left”? What does this gentleman have to do with its positions, with the historic struggle of the working class?

And in continuity with that, what is a parasitic group like the “International Group of the Communist Left” doing in all this? Certain members of the IGCL were members of the central organ of the ICC in 1992-94 and were au fait with the behaviour of Gaizka at the time, just as they are today since he is the main animator of Nuevo Curso. But they are turning a blind eye to this, keeping quiet and trying to hide his trajectory and declaring that this group is the future of the communist left and things like that.

“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….”[33]

“Thus the constitution of Emancipacion as a fully-fledged political group 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”[34].

In the tradition of the workers’ movement, whose historical continuity is represented today by the communist left, principles of organisation, of functioning, of comportment and the honesty of militants are just as important as programmatic principles. Some of the most important congresses in the history of the workers’ movement, like the Hague Congress of 1872, were dedicated to this struggle for the defence of proletarian behaviour (and this despite the fact that the congress took place a year after the Paris Commune and was faced with the necessity to draw out its lessons)[35]. Marx himself dedicated a whole book, which took him more than a year, interrupting his work on Capital, to the defence of proletarian behaviour against the intrigues of Herr Vogt, a Bonapartist agent who organised a campaign of slander against Marx and his comrades. We have recently published an article on the denunciation by Bebel and Liebknecht of the dishonest behaviour of Lassalle and Schweitzer[36]. And in the 20th century, Lenin devoted a book – One Step Forward Two Steps Back – to drawing the lessons of the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party regarding the weight of behaviour alien to the proletariat. We can also cite Trotsky who called upon a jury of honour to defend his integrity against Stalin’s slanders.

The fact that someone who has close links with the high up leaders of the PSOE should suddenly arrive in the camp of the communist left should alert all groups and militants struggling for the historic interests of our class, including those involved in the Nuevo Curso blog who are doing so in good faith, believing that they are fighting for the principles of the communist left.

In 1994, we asked Gaizka to clarify his trajectory and his already dubious associations at the time. He disappeared from the scene. In 2018, after he came back bearing a whole rucksack of contacts in the upper spheres of the PSOE, we again asked him and he stayed silent. For the defence of the communist left, its integrity and its future contribution, we must ask him to account for all this.

ICC  20.1.20