A close sympathiser of the ICC makes an appeal to the organisations of the proletarian political milieu to take up their responsibility in response to the dangerous manoeuvres of an adventurer.

I would like to express my full support for the ICC’s text published on Gaizka[1]. Above all, it must be recognised that the ICC has not published the article on Gaizka as part of an attack on the individual (his real name is carefully omitted), but as an identification of an opportunist, adventurist element that is able to derail the milieu. More broadly, the article of the ICC sets out to put a finger in the wound with regard to the programmatic and organisational weakness of the milieu, of which the uncritical acceptance of Nuevo Curso (NC) by the milieu is an expression.

The latest article, in tandem with the article on the history of the so-called ‘Spanish Communist Left’[2], unveils the fraudulent nature of Nuevo Curso’s politics. Its overtures to historical Trotskyism have been adequately criticised as antithetical to the programmatic positions of the communist left. So why then publish an article on the leading element in Nuevo Curso? The existence of NC demonstrates how easily the milieu can be enraptured by adventurist elements. In what follows, I will point out some of the questions that the rise of Gaizka poses for the milieu.

The nature of adventurist elements

It is not our goal here to repeat what has already been confirmed with regard to the nature of this particular element in Spain. But it seems to me that the nature of these adventurist elements has to be understood more historically. The history of the proletariat, and the history of its political organisations, has been marred by the appearance of ‘great leaders’ who have tried to use these movements for their own personal glory. One of the main examples was the figure of Lassalle, but there have been others. But adventurism has to find a fertile host in order to fester. We need to consider the reasons for which some scattered, weakly politicised elements are able to create another ‘left communist’ grouplet that is equally able to regroup itself under the guidance of any other existing groups in the milieu. And why it is that other groups are willing to accept the existence of tendencies that are so clearly in contradiction with their own programme?

Historically, as the texts by the ICC on adventurism have shown, the prominence of adventurist elements is primarily predicated on the weakness of the proletarian milieu at a particular historical moment. That is not to say that organisations are helpless to do anything in a difficult historical moment for communists, but it requires a strong theoretical and organisational firmness to be able to go against the current.

In other words, it is imperative that the milieu be able to confront the attack on its theoretical principles. There should be a full reflection on how and why it is that we are currently being haunted by elements that seek to deviate from the tradition of the Communist Left. Generally, the problem seems to reside in the weakness of the milieu. But before going into this weakness, it might be fruitful to understand how a new organisation might legitimately become part of the milieu. In doing so, we champion the concept of the milieu, precisely because it prevents us from putting our heritage between brackets every time a new group appears, and because it limits what can be legitimately held to be considered ‘communist’; and additionally because it can exclude what, on the basis of historical experience, can never be a position of the working class.

You can’t reinvent the wheel

And yet, it is possible to come to the milieu with new ideas, and to join the milieu as a new group, or join one of the existing groups, while holding opinions that might seem to disturb common wisdom. In fact, it is precisely the fierce struggle against the Second International dogma that enabled the Left Fractions to break on a clear basis with the old organisation and maintain their proletarian kernel.

However, there can be no theory that is not developed in debate with reality and in debate with other political groups that currently exist. And we cannot ignore what has already been extensively proven by history, for instance the regressive role of the unions. For us communists, there can be no reinvention of the wheel: at this moment in time, given the fragility of our political current, and given the demographic distribution of our militants, and more importantly, the difficult political moment we are in (with the borders, populism, politics of blame, etc.) any sowing of political doubt regarding the basic principles of our politics is quasi-suicidal.

In defending the milieu and the (unacknowledged) points of agreement that it represents, it should be equally unthinkable that one represents both a communist organisation and a bourgeois organisation.

Of course, it is impossible to live and work in capitalism without becoming somewhat entangled in it, but there is still an important difference with working as an advisor to a political figurehead and with actively supporting a bourgeois party and its ideology. If such dual representation of communist and bourgeois causes were accepted, it would obscure the meaning of communism, and it would cloud the way the working class should direct its attention.

As was said earlier, a break has to be made. Neither of these two conditions, despite being common sense, has been met by the leading figure of Nuevo Curso. No explanation of Gaizka’s political oscillations has been provided, and neither has his organisation fundamentally defined its differences in relation to the other groups. Nor, should we note, has it issued a real defence of the existence of the so-called Spanish Left. The clarity of communist theory has to be safeguarded by engaging in debate, by openly developing a set of shared positions that define communist politics. Unfortunately, the milieu seems to be unable to do so.

This leaves us in a particularly difficult political position, in which adventurists elements are able to grow uninhibitedly, and gain an unearned legitimacy. It would be foolish to deny the possibility of legitimate differences in programmatic points between communist groups. But it is vitally important that we do not leave the doors open to the manoeuvres of adventurers and leftist positions, which seems little earned to be the most immediate danger if we continue to let elements like Nuevo Curso enter unhindered. Parasitic groups like the so-called International Group of the Communist Left (IGCL) will, undoubtedly, persist in defending the exact opposite position of the ICC, saluting the appearance of a new current among the others, as it suits their goal of imploding the milieu for their own purposes of liquidating theory and organisation. It further demonstrates their ultimate purpose, and their underlying hatred of clarification, their love of ‘choice’ i.e. democracy, and their inability to engage in discussions without seeing their opinions as their own personal property. Their errors lead them to distort the current criticisms of NC as a form of character assassination, as that is their own modus operandi, and they simply cannot think outside of it.

The weakness of the milieu

We cannot deny that new arguments or revised theories might be valid in political debate between groups. The invocation of a so-called ‘Spanish left’ is both a consequence and a symptom of an unwillingness to debate within the milieu, that is to say to fully map any that might legitimately remain, and is thus an obstacle to the ability of the milieu to move forward on a common platform. The creation of a new communist tradition is to sidestep the debate and an expression of the fundamentally parasitic nature of this group.

So, we have to ask, what has the milieu done until now? Generally, it has accepted the existence of the new elements, and has failed to critically engage with its positions. Translated texts that appear from Nuevo Curso are introduced by other groups with little to no comment on its political deviations. Apparently, for some parts of the milieu, the reverence for the ‘miracle’ of the emergence of new elements leads them to an almost devotional attitude towards any and all elements that appear.

The moment seems to deceive most current political groups. Some young new elements, led on by their own coming to communist positions, tend to think that the party is about to be founded in the (very) near future. The fundamental error is to think that even if we are able to regroup the left communist milieu as one organisation, it instantaneously becomes the ‘party’. It is not a party because it has no actual impact within the working class: it would merely be yet another party, indistinguishable from all the other small leftist parties that have nothing as their content. It would be foolish to ‘regroup’ solely to regroup. On the contrary, what is needed now is vigorous theoretical discussion to make such a regrouping possible in the future on a solid programmatic and organisational basis.

I salute the work that the ICC has done to theoretically identify the roots of Nuevo Curso, and to detail in what manner an adventurer like Gaizka has been able to go under the guise of a ‘new theory’ to pull searching elements into the swamp between communism and leftism. I can only wholeheartedly hope that the milieu will be able to overcome its weaknesses and can begin to reinitiate the debates that are necessary to begin a process of necessary programmatic solidification, and subsequently, the exclusion of elements that are not actively approaching these positions.

Merwe, 2020-07-10

Racial tensions in the United States are related to the role played by the slave system in the development of primitive accumulation in that country. Slavery existed throughout the Americas and the Caribbean (Brazil, Spanish colonies, the Caribbean islands) but in no other developed country has this system conditioned social relations and the obstacles to working class unity as much as in the US. At another level of development and importance, the case of South Africa has some similarities [1].

Capitalism in its origins, after the “discovery” of the Americas, was marked by slavery [2]. And it was in the Americas in particular, not just in the US, that this system took root. To understand the history of the advent of capitalism, of the formation of the working class, including the present situation, it is necessary to address the problem of slavery.

The trauma of slavery, of the slave trade, has marked the history of the African continent of course, but above all, the history of the American continent in all aspects, in particular in the development of the working class. A large part of the American working class has its origins in slavery. We are not going to talk here about the role of the ruling classes (aristocracy and bourgeoisie) of the old European monarchical regimes in the abominable “triangular trade” between the main ports of the European powers, the African coasts and the Americas.

Slavery and primitive accumulation

As Marx writes: "The discovery of gold and silver in America [especially by the Spanish and Portuguese colonisers, Editors’ Note], the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signaled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation." (Capital, Volume I, Chapter 31, “Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist” [3])

The primitive capitalist accumulation under the old regimes, still marked by feudalism, was often carried out with slave labour. And Africa, to the misfortune of this continent, will continue to be, from the 17th, 18th and even much of the 19th century, an arena for “slave-hunting”. This type of exploitation will not be the same as that of capitalism, but its early days it served the process of primitive accumulation: “The sporadic application of cooperation on a large scale in ancient times, in the middle ages, and in modern colonies reposes on relations of dominion and servitude, principally on slavery. The capitalistic form [of cooperation], on the contrary, presupposes from first to last the free wage-labourer, who sells his labour power to capital. Historically, however, this form is developed in opposition to peasant agriculture and to the carrying on of independent handicrafts. From the standpoint of these, capitalistic cooperation does not manifest itself as a particular historical form of cooperation; but cooperation itself appears to be a historical form peculiar to, and specifically distinguishing, the capitalist process of production. (…) The simultaneous employment of a large number of wage-labourers in one and the same process forms the starting point of capitalist production.” (Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 9, “How Capital revolutionises the Mode of Production”, (A) “Cooperation”). Since capitalism began and developed in a non-capitalist environment, which at first was overwhelmingly dominant), it also developed in the midst of and thanks to other forms of exploitation and “cooperation”.

Feudalism brought under its control the old primitive communist communities that it “left alone” as long as they regularly paid tax in kind (agricultural, livestock or handicraft products) and in human beings (servants and soldiers). On the other hand, capitalism tends to transform all social relations into commercial and wage relations, and yet in the course towards them it is capable of using old forms of exploitation such as slavery, making them much more profitable through refined and systematic barbarism.

In the 19th century, slavery continued to exist on a large scale, as in the cotton-producing states in the US South: there were as many as 5 million slaves until well beyond the mid-century. They sold their production to the Northern states and, above all, to the first great capitalist country of the time, Great Britain. For decades, after American independence, the slave system remained vigorous [4] serving the process of accumulation in that immense country. But the confrontation between the capitalism of the Northern States and the slave States of the South became inevitable, in particular because of the expansionist dynamic towards the West, leading to the Civil War.

And, after the colonisation of Egypt, Great Britain began to stop buying the cotton of the South of the US. This, with the usual cynicism of the ruling classes, intensified the anti-slavery campaign waged by a good part of the British bourgeoisie [5].

And yet there was an exponential increase in the number of slaves over decades: " When, the first census of slaves was taken in the US in 1790, their number was 697,000; in 1861 it had nearly reached four millions", as Marx recalls in Capital (Capital, Volume I, Chapter 15 "Machinery and Modern Industry", Section 6 “The theory of compensation as regards the workpeople displaced by machinery”) And that took place in the US, the first country in the world “liberated” from the old regime, and together with France a “democratic” beacon for the rising bourgeoisies of other countries.

 “Hence the negro labour in the Southern States of the American Union preserved something of a patriarchal character, so long as production was chiefly directed to immediate local consumption. But in proportion, as the export of cotton became of vital interest to these states, the over-working of the Negro and sometimes the using up of his life in 7 years of labour became a factor in a calculated and calculating system. It was no longer a question of obtaining from him a certain quantity of useful products. It was now a question of production of surplus-labour itself.” (Capital, Volume I, “The working day”, Section 2: “The greed for surplus labour. Manufacturer and boyard”).  Despite these huge profits, it was still not a fully-fledged capitalist system.

The accompaniment of wage-earning exploitation by the system of racial segregation

The consequences of the "stain", that is to say the insult to human morality that slavery represented in the country that would end up being the most powerful on earth, did not disappear by magic after the Civil War. Slavery was gone, but not its consequences in the difficult struggle of the working class. As much as it was in the interest of the bourgeoisie to end slavery, we know very well that the ills of past class societies are concentrated in capitalism as if it were a melting pot of them all. The bloody Civil War [6] accelerated the spread of wage labour throughout the US, with black workers gradually being incorporated into "free" labour, but this "freedom to be exploited" was enveloped almost from the beginning by a system of racial segregation that added horrible suffering to this part of our class and created a dangerous division within the proletariat.

Racial separation laws remained in effect in virtually every state, backed by repeated sentences of the Supreme Court. The height of cynicism was attained by the Supreme Court, which only three years after the end of the Civil War (in 1868) ruled that “Negroes must live apart. The white man called them by their first name only and could abuse them for any reason. Blacks could vote, but only if they paid a special tax and the names of all Supreme Court presidents and judges were known by heart.” [7]

The legal system of segregation protected and encouraged a parallel, supposedly ”popular” system (thanks mainly to the fanaticism of the white petty bourgeoisie) of aggression, collective killings, and systematic lynchings. The petty bourgeoisie, especially in the Southern States, but not only there, unleashed their destructive fury with metronome regularity to terrorise the proletarians of slave origin. The racism of the American petty bourgeoisie reflects one of the ideological features of American capitalism: a culture imbued with a violent, biblically-inspired puritanism, one of the bases of which is the furious, visceral horror of any mixture of “races”. True, racism and the rejection of others is a widely shared mentality in all class societies, but in the case of the US it is a founding element of the country.

In Opelousas (Louisiana, 1868), New Orleans, and Memphis (1866) the white rabble reacted with lynchings to the attempts of the blacks to exercise the “new rights”.  “In Thibodaux, Louisiana, 1887, more than 300 sugar cutters died during a strike for the right to stop living in the former slave quarters.” (https://www.lavanguardia.com/internacional/20200603/481582308546/violenc... [4])

The 20th century was even worse: "Up to 250 died in Wilmington, (1928 in North Carolina) including women and children when a white mob attacked one of their newspapers over an anti-segregation article. Several hundred more died in East St. Louis (Missouri in 1917) when a rumour spread that a black worker had spoken to a white woman at a union meeting. In Elaine (1919 in Arkansas) the trigger for the death of more than 200 blacks, also with women and children among them, was a labour claim by the pickers in the fields of the white landowners. And in Tulsa, (1921 in Oklahoma) it all started when a group of white people tried to lynch a young black man they accused of stealing. Up to 300 people died and 8,000 lost their homes when the angry white population set fire to Black Wall Street and the surrounding black neighbourhood.” (https://www.lavanguardia.com/internacional/20200603/481582308546/violenc... [4])

The system of racial segregation was reinforced by a half-illegal militia, the Ku Klux Klan, that persecuted black workers and inflicted savage torture on them in ritual acts. Officially dissolved in 1871, it reappeared in 1915 and is still preserved through local groups that defend a xenophobic, white supremacist and racist ideology. The big American democratic parties have occasionally openly encouraged these blatantly barbaric expressions of capitalism; at other times they have expressed their “outrage” about them, to favour the trap of “anti-racism”, yet they have always tolerated them as a complementary means to keep the working class divided.

The struggle of the workers’ movement against slavery

When slavery in the US was at its height, Marx (1860) described the life of the proletarians in England, [8] an atrocious “life” as Engels had already described it in his famous book in 1845 [9]. No doubt the life of the proletarians in those times was as miserable and exhausting as that of many slaves. But it is not the same, for the future of the revolutionary class, the exploitation of slavery as “the existence of the free wage-labourer, who sells his labour power to capital”. The proletariat experiences a new form of exploitation that contains the possibility, if it is able to develop a conscious struggle, of overcoming the contradictions of capitalism by installing a communist society. The exploitation of the proletariat entails a universal suffering encompassing all forms of oppression and exploitation that have existed in class societies and that, consequently, can only be resolved by a universal revolution going to the roots of all the exploitation and oppressions that exist in capitalism and, therefore, in all class societies. [10] That's why one of the aspects of the working class struggle had to be the fight against slavery, especially in a country like the US.

In view of the situation of the American Civil War, the IWA (International Workers Association, First International), did not hesitate to send a message of support, written by Marx, to the Northern States led by Lincoln. It was not a question of supporting one faction of the bourgeoisie against another reactionary class (the big landowners of the South) [11]. Marx rightly thought that the end of slavery would give a boost to the unification of the working class. And so in Capital (written at the same time as the end of the Civil War in the US and the “official” end of slavery, 1865)he establishes a link with the struggle for the 8 hour day: “In the United States of North America, every independent movement of the workers was paralysed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded. But out of the death of slavery a new life at once arose. The first fruit of the Civil War was the eight hours’ agitation, that ran with the seven-leagued boots of the locomotive from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from New England to California.” (Capital, Volume I, “The working day”, Section 2: “The greed for surplus labour. Manufacturer and boyard”). 

What about the working class in America?

Both Marxists and anarchists clearly put forward the unity of the working class, whatever its colour. This tradition took shape at the beginning of the 20th century in the IWW, the well-known revolutionary industrial union in the US, which was formed on the basis of an internationalist policy, against war and obviously for the unification of the working class, whatever its colour. [12] We already know the limits of revolutionary unionism and the failure of the IWW. But, in the worker's memory will remain “The experience of the IWW, the exemplary courage of its militants in the face of a ruling class for whom no violence or hypocrisy was too vile, is thus a reminder that the workers of America are indeed the class brothers of workers the world over, that their interests and struggles are the same, and that internationalism is not a vain word for the working class, but the touchstone of its very existence. The divisions between native-born, English-speaking workers (even if the latter were only second generation immigrants themselves) and newly arrived immigrant workers who spoke and read little or no English had long been a cause for concern in the workers’ movement in the US. In a letter to Sorge in 1893, Engels warned against the bourgeoisie’s cynical use of divisions within the proletariat, which retarded the development of the workers’ movement in the US. The bourgeoisie skilfully used race, ethnic, nationality and linguistic prejudices to divide workers amongst themselves, and to disrupt the development of a working class that saw itself as a united class. These divisions were a serious handicap for the working class in the US because it cut off the native Americans from the vast experience gained by workers in Europe and made it difficult for class conscious American workers to keep up to date with the international theoretical developments within the workers’ movement.”  (“The IWW: The failure of revolutionary syndicalism in the USA, 1905-1921”; International Review no.124 - 1st quarter 2006)

In a letter of December 2, 1893, Engels replied to a question by Friedrich Adolf Sorge about the absence of a significant socialist party in the US, explaining that “There is no denying that conditions in America present considerable and peculiar difficulties to the steady growth of a labour party”.   Among these difficulties, one of the most important was “immigration, which splits the workers into two groups, native-born and foreign, and the latter again into 1. Irish, 2. Germans, 3. a number of smaller groups, each speaking only its own language - Czechs, Poles, Italians, Scandinavians, etc. And, in addition, the negroes. To form a party of one’s own out of all these calls for exceptionally strong incentives. Every now and again a powerful élan may suddenly make itself felt, but all the bourgeoisie has to do is to stick it out passively, whereupon the dissimilar working-class elements will disintegrate again.” (https://www.koorosh-modaresi.com/MarxEngels/V50.pdf [5])

Black workers, who had already begun to flee to the North during slavery (when even in those states they could be persecuted and sent back to the South), began to go to the industrial zones especially from the beginning of the 20th century. And this “division” that Engels speaks of was reflected in the appearance of ghettos, a trend that was accentuated with the counter-revolution. The abominable ignominy of “modern” slavery had the particularity of its “unique” “racial” origin (sub-Saharan Africa, as opposed to ancient, Medieval or Eastern slavery where the slave could be of very different origins) so that newly proletarianised former slaves were immediately seen as having just come out of their commodity-object status. The US bourgeoisie, on the other hand, prohibited until very recently “coloured” emigration, favouring in the great years of emigration to the US from the end of the 19th century until the 1930s, the European populations. It is true that the existence of “ethnic” neighbourhoods is a “tradition” in the urban habitat in the US, but with the black ghettos the separation was much more clear-cut.

Civil rights and police brutality

Racial segregation was officially abolished in 1964, a century after the abolition of slavery. The idea was to give a channel to a growing sector of the black bourgeoisie that was being hindered in their business by these laws. The “great fruit” of the Civil Rights Laws was the promotion of black people to the upper echelons of politics and business. In the Bush administration, Colin Powell, the butcher of Iraq, and Condoleezza Rice, secretary of state, stood out, with the high point being Obama's election in 2008 as the first black president.

However, for black workers nothing changed. They continued to be victims of police and judicial discrimination that makes a black person seven times more likely to end up in prison than a white person.

Especially cruel is the treatment of black people by the police, even though there are many more black police officers. The 1992 Los Angeles crime that sparked violent protests was horrible. During Obama's term there were more police killings than ever before [13].

The murder of Georges Floyd on May 26 at the hands of four Minneapolis police officers was a tragic further demonstration of this continuation of official ruling class violence. The dominant classes, through their states, have a monopoly on violence. They exercise it in general to impose their domination, especially against the working class. Alongside the “official” forces of order, there are militias, more or less illegal armed groups. Over the years, the US has become a paradigm of the most extreme violence. And in many other countries this extreme official, unofficial or illegal violence (take the “example” of Mexico) has been established to last as long as this criminal system lasts. All these scourges are old, yes, but the trend of this model has become general, it is sharpened in all corners of the planet. We are living today through the decomposition of the capitalist system and all that official, unofficial or illegal criminal violence is on the march. Whether we are ruled by democracies or dictatorships, by single or pluralistic parties, everyday life is marked by the growing violence of a criminal system, capitalism.

In the face of such outrages, very widely known this time thanks to the images of Floyd's agony transmitted by the whole world, people of all races and conditions took to the streets in outrage to end up demanding... a more democratic police, demanding the executioner to be more humane. On the one side, Trump throwing more wood on the fire, encouraging supremacists who are willing to shoot everyone that is not white; on the other side, the Democratic (and many Republican, like former President Bush) factions of the American political spectrum take the knee, calling on outraged artists and stars, supporting “patriotic” demonstrations (as the New York Times described the Black Lives Matter marches).

The fight for the unity of the working class

With the counter-revolution, from the 1930s onwards, the killings, the lynchings multiplied. In the Depression of 1929, the white petty bourgeoisie - well manipulated by the media that took advantage of its narrow search for scapegoats - attributed the crisis to “the Negroes”, “In Harlem, New York, there were an undetermined number of deaths and more than a hundred injured, in addition to numerous lootings, as a result of the alleged robbery of a young Negro in a white man's store. It was the first modern-day riot because it completely destroyed the shops. From then on, Harlem suffered episodes of almost continuous racial violence until the 1960s.” (https://www.zinez.net/internacional/20200603/481582308546/violencia-raci... [6])

In reality, the stain of slavery that had sullied capitalist development in the US and elsewhere ended up creating a barrier in workers' struggles in the US that has been difficult to break through.

This barrier has been raised higher by the social process of capitalist decomposition [14]. This involves a putrefaction of social relations, a fragmentation of society into ethnic, religious, localist, or “affinity” groups, that lock themselves in their own small ghettos to give themselves a false sense of community, of protection from a more and more inhuman world. This tendency favours the division in the ranks of the workers - accentuated to the point of paroxysm by the poisonous action of parties, unions, institutions, propaganda, etc. - into “communities” of race, religion, national origin etc. To add more fuel to the fire of racial and linguistic divisions in the US proletariat, the emigration of workers from Latin America, which became massive from the 1970s, has been used by the bourgeoisie to create more ghettos, to subject immigrant workers to illegality and to push down the living conditions of all workers [15].

However, some workers’ struggles in the last 50 years have crossed that barrier: Detroit 1965, the Chrysler wildcat strike in 1968, the Post Office wildcat strike in 1970, the New York subway in 2005, the Oakland strike during the Occupy movement in 2011... Despite their limits, these struggles are an experience from which we can draw lessons in the struggle for class unity.

In the 19th century fighting against slavery was fighting for the working class. Today, the brutality of the police, the white supremacists and the state in general (and its prisons) on the one hand, and the anti-racist movements on the other, serve to divide the working class and transform its most oppressed layers into an entirely separate population. Racism and anti-racism belong to the bourgeoisie. They are ideologies against the working class.

That's why the slogan of the proletariat is: We are neither white, nor black, nor any other color. We are a working class! As a banner in the protests against California's anti-immigrant law 187 said, WE ARE NOT COLOMBIANS, WE ARE NOT MEXICANS, WE ARE WORKERS.

Pinto 11-07-2020

[1] See the Series on the South African labour movement in our International Review https://en.internationalism.org/content/9459/history-class-struggle-south-africa [7]; https://en.internationalism.org/international-review/201508/13355/south-africa-world-war-ii-mid-1970s [8]; https://en.internationalism.org/international-review/201702/14250/soweto-1976-anc-power-1993 [9]; https://en.internationalism.org/content/16598/election-president-nelson-mandela-1994-2019 [10]

[2] See: “1492: The discovery of America” https://en.internationalism.org/internationalreview/200912/3406/1492-discovery-america [11]

[3] [12] The numbering of books or volumes, chapters and subchapters of Capital does not necessarily appear to be the same from one edition to another.

[4] [13] The majority thesis of American historians of the 1970s was that the South lost because of an inefficient and unprofitable pre-capitalist system. For some years now, the majority thesis has been that the slave system was fully capitalist. It is difficult to know what these academics want to demonstrate; perhaps what they are looking for is to know which system has been more brutal, exploitative and inhumane. And therefore they use marxism, for which capitalism is first and foremost a social relation, the last class society to be overthrown in order to put an end to the exploitation of man by man. Thus, according to a well-known French historian, Nicolas Barreyre, speaking very recently about the system of the cotton farmers of the South of the United States, “In the 1970s, the dominant idea among historians, as among economists, was that the slave-owning South lived in an inefficient and unprofitable pre-capitalist economy that could not survive against the North, which had entered the industrial and capitalist revolution since the early 19th century. After the 2008 crisis, historians have once again become interested in the origins of the American economic system, forging what has been called the ‘new history of capitalism’. The idea is that the slave economy of the South was fully capitalist, which contributed to the rise of capitalism in the North” (Interview in Le Monde of 28/06/2020).  We do not intend to make addenda to such eminent historians. The logic of the historians of the 1970s that the economy of the Southern States was “inefficient and unprofitable” because it was “pre-capitalist” seems to result from a rather vulgar version of “marxism”. Capitalism, at its height, made use of other non-capitalist economies for its expansion, both of markets and of sources of raw materials and capital. And until their full assimilation or destruction many of these economies were able to enrich themselves and serve the primitive accumulation of capital, especially when they belonged to the same nation. In the 19th century, throughout the world, there were systems not yet dominated by capitalism with which it did business, threatening them if necessary. See also https://en.internationalism.org/content/16709/american-civil-war-and-struggle-working-class-unity [14]

[5] [15] The hypocrisy of the English bourgeoisie knows no limits. On the one hand, it tolerated slavery in those countries that could serve it as allies and in those colonies where it suited its interests, while simultaneously turning itself into a “hammer against slavery” against rivals such as Spain, Portugal or Brazil, which did not have enough economic power to do without slavery, which they abolished very late (in 1886 in Spain and in 1888 in Brazil)

[6] [16] It was one of the deadliest in history “630,000 people died. Even today, this figure is half of all the casualties the US has suffered in all the wars it has fought since, including Afghanistan.” https://www.lavanguardia.com/internacional/20200603/481582308546/violencia-racial-eeuu-historia-racismo.html?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=claves_de_hoy [17]

[7] Source already cited in note 6, unless otherwise indicated we refer to this source in subsequent quotations.

[8] Just read: “Capital, Volume I, Chapter 10: The Working day; Section 3: Branches of English Industry Without Legal Limits to Exploitation”, [a shocking chapter, with the example of children and the 15 hours of work for a seven year old child!]

[9] Condition of the Working. Class in England https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/condition-worki... [18]

[10] [19] See: The principles of communism, in particular the points VI and VII https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm [20]

[11] “When an oligarchy of 300,000 slaveholders dared to inscribe, for the first time in the annals of the world, ‘slavery’ on the banner of Armed Revolt, when on the very spots where hardly a century ago the idea of one great Democratic Republic had first sprung up, whence the first Declaration of the Rights of Man was issued, and the first impulse given to the European revolution of the eighteenth century; when on those very spots counterrevolution, with systematic thoroughness, gloried in rescinding ‘the ideas entertained at the time of the formation of the old constitution’, and maintained slavery to be ‘a beneficent institution’, indeed, the old solution of the great problem of ‘the relation of capital to labor’, and cynically proclaimed property in man ‘the cornerstone of the new edifice’ — then the working classes of Europe understood at once, even before the fanatic partisanship of the upper classes for the Confederate gentry had given its dismal warning, that the slaveholders' rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a general holy crusade of property against labor, and that for the men of labor, with their hopes for the future, even their past conquests were at stake in that tremendous conflict on the other side of the Atlantic”. Address of the International Working Men's Association to Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/iwma/documents/1864/lincoln-letter.htm [21])

In 1864, more than 150 years ago, when the working class was still affirming itself as a class for the transformation of society, its organisations supported and had to support fractions of the bourgeoisie that were fighting against the - still important and strong - remnants of old systems of exploitation. Today, the reason that communists reject support for “democratic republics”, “human rights” and other bourgeois slogans is not that they are slogans “from another epoch”, but that they are, above all, hoaxes and weapons against the proletariat. And that's since the advent of decaying capitalism.

[12] See our series on the IWW: https://en.internationalism.org/internationalreview/200601/1609/iww-failure-revolutionary-syndicalism-usa-1905-1921 [22]; https://en.internationalism.org/ir/125-iww [23]

[13] [24] See the report Racial conflicts in the Obama era, https://www.vozpopuli.com/internacional/Barack_Obama-Racismo-Estados_Unidos-racismo-estados_unidos-obama-conflicto_racial-matanzas-negros_0_933206737.html [25]

[14] [26] See our “Theses on Decomposition”, https://en.internationalism.org/ir/107_decomposition [27]

[15] [28] See: "’Latino’ demonstrations in the USA: Yes to the unity of the working class! No to unity with the exploiters!”  https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/200605/1778/latino-demonstrati... [29]

Since we wrote about the elements that were to found the Anarchist Communist Group (ACG) in February 2018 [[1]], this organisation has gone through a process of defining its course and determining its programme. Its main objective was to turn away from the domination of identity politics, as had developed in the Anarchist Federation and in the anarchist milieu in general, and to return to the class struggle as the fundamental basis of its activities. After the group was founded it made some steps, as it said, “to break with the swamp of traditional anarchism” [[2]] and in the direction of class positions.

In June 2018 it took the initiative to start a campaign under the slogan “No War, but the Class War” (NWBCW). Other participants in this initiative were also the Guildford Solidarity Group and an organisation of the Communist Left: the CWO. At the inauguration of this campaign these three groups organised a joint meeting in London. In the year thereafter the ACG organised different public meetings on the subject of which some were organised together with the CWO, as in January and April 2019. [[3]]

On different occasions it defended the class struggle as the only solution for the liberation of all those who are subjugated to oppression by capitalism, as was the case when an ACG member gave a presentation at a Rebel City Collective meeting at the Anti-University in London in June 2018: “Though the fight against oppressions may take priority for those oppressed at different times, ultimately they will only achieve full liberation as working class women or people of colour when classes are abolished” [[4]].

Having said this we also must establish that the attempts of the group to leave the anarchist swamp behind has not really succeeded, since there are too many points on which it has not been able to make any significant progress towards communist positions. One of the striking examples is the way it wants to solve the problem of the anti-Zionism in the article “Identity politics and anti-Semitism on the left” [[5]].

The left and anti-Zionism

For a number of years there has been an intense campaign against leftist groups and individuals in Britain who defend an anti-Zionist position. The campaign has been directed in particular against the left wing in the Labour Party which was openly accused of anti-Semitism. In response to this campaign certain anarchists decided to take the side of the Labour Party.

In 2016 “Winter Oak”, an anarchist group that is particularly concerned with ecology, did not yet openly take the side of the Labour Party but warned against “a toxic new ideological weapon [that] has been unleashed by the capitalist system (…): the witch-hunt accusation of “anti-Semitism”. This phenomenon has come to its head in the UK in recent weeks with fevered accusations of 'anti-Semitism' within Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, which seems to be regarded as dangerously radical.” [[6]]

David Graeber however openly defended the Labour Party against the smear campaign. In December 2019 he posted several messages on Twitter, targeting the reportage in The Guardian on institutionalized anti-Semitism in the Labour Party. “If you add up false with misleading, 90% of Guardian news articles on IHRA controversy [[7]] were designed to trick the reader into falsely believing Labour was institutionally #antisemitic. This was an historical crime against truth. Who were editors? They need to be shamed for this” [[8]].

While this is a real ideological campaign led by various bourgeois factions, this does not mean that anti-Semitism in the Labour Party does not exist. Corbyn and the Trotskyists indeed made and still make common cause with the most extreme Islamic gangs like Hamas and Hezbollah, and in doing so they act as “a vehicle not only of a more shamefaced anti-Semitism, but of its most open manifestations” [[9]]. The ACG is able to face this reality when it wrote that “many who support the Palestinian cause (…) seem genuinely unable to distinguish between criticising Israel and sowing hatred against a people” and that “left wing ideas of anti-Zionism have become increasingly colonised by anti-Semitic forms” [[10]].

Due to the intensity of this campaign, in Britain (and elsewhere), it has indeed become increasingly difficult to criticise the state of Israel without being accused of anti-Semitism. And every element or group that considers itself as part of the left in general – in contrast to the revolutionary communist left - is faced by this dilemma. In order to circumvent this dilemma, the ACG therefore decided no longer to speak of anti-Zionism. Instead it argues “that it is far safer to use more precise and unambiguous phrases like opposing the Israeli state, its policies, or its actions” [[11]].

According to the ACG “a problem arises when we see identities before we see relationships” [[12]], in other words: before seeing classes. If classes were put first and identities second one would, it seems, be freed from the problem of the identification of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. Has the problem of the identification of both really been solved by this? We don’t think so. Identity politics, which is a trap for the working class struggle, as the AGC rightly admits, is persistent and more difficult to combat than the ACG thinks.

This is quite clearly shown by the article of the ACG in which it makes an appeal to help “the anti-racism movement in this country and worldwide” with the argument “racism, other prejudices, and systems of oppression, are so tightly linked that in fighting one of them, we also fight the others” [[13]]. Here the ACG puts race before classes again since it starts from the premises that fighting racism automatically means fighting capitalism. “Racism divides the working class against itself” [[14]], the ACG writes, and this is of course true, but it forgets that its support for anti-racism divides the working class as much. And the picture by the article, with its publicity for Black Lives Matter, a campaign that puts race above class, only underlines this.

But let’s return to the question of anti-Zionism. In its attempt to avoid the use of this word, another problem has arisen: that of the acceptance of the state of Israel if only it would be “a secular, non-discriminatory, democratic state”, since “states exist, and we need to work within the reality we have before us” [[15]]. What is the meaning of this statement, which is indistinguishable from the programmes of the anti-Zionist left? Have anarchists not always tried to reject and combat the bourgeois state as a repressive organ in the service of the ruling class?

In the ACG’s more general writings, there seems to be no confusion on this point. “The State is the means by which the ruling class retains and enhances its power” [[16]]. “Any economic system based on wage labour and private property will require a coercive state apparatus to enforce property rights and to maintain the unequal economic relationships that will inevitably arise” [[17]]. But, if this is really the ACG’s conception of the state, it has to explain at least how it reconciles its anti-state position with the phrase that in the case of Israel “a secular, non-discriminatory, democratic state” is “acceptable”?

The question of identity politics cannot be solved by expelling it through the front door only to let it slip in through the back. Even above the article, in which the ACG says that it prefers no longer to use the word Zionism, there is a picture of a billboard with the slogan: “Confront Zionism, Boycott Israel”, signed by the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network. This whole trick with the word Zionism doesn’t bring the group one step closer to the internationalist position it claims to defend. On the contrary, it is still submerged in the international campaign that forces each and every one to support or reject the “legitimacy” of the Zionist state.

The difficult path of internationalism

Ten years ago we wrote about internationalist anarchism. And we defended the internationalist tendencies within anarchism as an expression of proletarian internationalism. Today we think that a group as the ACG globally defends internationalist positions. But this position is not clearly and solidly established and based on a working class approach: on the proletariat as the class that can only emancipate itself by emancipating the whole of the non-exploiting world population from the scourge of exploitation and repression by means of a worldwide revolution.

That’s why we also underlined that “The anarchist movement (...) remains a very heterogeneous milieu. Throughout its time, a part of this milieu has sincerely aspired to the revolution and socialism, expressing a real will to finish with capitalism and exploitation. These militants have effectively placed themselves on the terrain of the working class when they affirmed their internationalism and dedicated themselves to joining its revolutionary combat.” But “deprived of the compass of the class struggle of the proletariat and of the oxygen of discussion and debate with the revolutionary minorities it produces, elements trying to defend class principles were often trapped in the intrinsic contradictions of anarchism” [[18]].

And this is exactly what we see today with the ACG. It is not able to defend a consistent internationalist position. We can see this with their position “accepting” a secular democratic Israel. But it can also be seen, for example in its statement regarding the invasion of the Turkish army and the situation around Afrin: “An Internationalist Position”.

The statement starts with a clear denunciation of the different bourgeois factions in the imperialist conflict. “As anarchist communists we do not support any faction in an inter-imperialist war (...). We also do not support nationalist political parties who have the goal of establishing new States, no matter how libertarian the rhetoric may be. There may well be examples of self-organising in areas of Rojava but (…) it is not a move towards genuine self-organisation if you are able to do it because the great leader has said that this is what you should do” [[19]].

So far, so good, but then the ACG pulls a rabbit out of its hat as it ends this statement with the words: “the situation is very complicated and (...) we do not then support uncritically the nationalist parties such as the YPD, which have assumed the leadership of the resistance” [[20]], which at least seems to imply that it 'critically' supports nationalist parties such as the YPD; despite the fact that it also characterizes this party in the same article as “one of high-disciplinary and authoritarian political parties” [[21]].

Support for the “lesser evil” leads to the abandonment of internationalism

For the ACG there is supposedly no such thing as the “lesser evil” “No faction of the capitalist class is worth supporting and none is “a lesser evil”!” [[22]]. But, from our experience, we know that anarchism very often ends up choosing the “lesser evil”. If the Kurds are attacked by Saddam, there are anarchists who consider the Kurds the lesser evil and supports them – especially if they advertise an ideology of “democratic confederalism” and talk about a “Rojava revolution”. If the Catalans rise up against the authoritarian regime of Madrid in 2017, there are anarchists who consider the Catalans the lesser evil and tends to support them.

A clear example of this policy of the “lesser evil” is shown by the article, recently published by a group in the Philippines on the website of the ACG without any criticism, called “Philippines: call for international solidarity”. This article concludes with a slogan that says: “Fight for social justice! Fight fascism and state sponsored terrorism!” [[23]] Moreover, above the article there is a picture on which one can read “Destroy fascism”. The ACG claims to defend the struggle of the proletariat on its own class terrain, but this slogan has nothing to do with the working class struggle and only deflect the workers away from their class terrain. The slogans make an appeal to fight for democracy in general which, in the end, means nothing else than bourgeois democracy. This is a trap for anarchism which goes back to its policy of the 1930’s.

The ACG does not consider the ministers of the CNT-FAI in 1936-1937as real anarchists and writes that their antifascist policy “paved the way for World War II.” [[24]]. But how does the ACG explain then what happened after 6 October 1934 when Luís Companys had declared an independent Catalan State in a Spanish Federal Republic? For after this proclamation was suppressed by the Spanish army and the Catalan government was arrested, the CNT issued a Manifesto in which it put “itself forward as the best rampart against fascism and insists on its right to contribute to the anti-fascist struggle. Against the whole tradition of the CNT and against the will of many anarchist militants, it abandoned the terrain of workers’ solidarity to embrace the terrain of anti-fascism and ‘critical’ support for Catalan nationalism.” [[25]]

In World War II this same anti-fascism lured the anarchists into the orbit of the Allied countries. Anarchists formed anti-fascist combat groups all over Italy to defend the “lesser evil” against the regime of Mussolini, even in honour of Malatesta who had never betrayed internationalism: “In Genoa, anarchist combat groups operated under the names of the ‘Pisacane’ Brigade, the ‘Malatesta’ formation, the SAP-FCL, the Sestri Ponente SAP-FCL and the Arenzano Anarchist Action Squads. (....) Anarchists founded the ‘Malatesta’ and ’Bruzzi’ brigades, amounting to 1300 partisans: these operated under the aegis of the ’Matteotti’ formation and played a primary role in the liberation of Milan” [[26]].

The examples above show clearly that, in the practice of everyday struggle, it is not so easy for an anarchist organisation to maintain its internationalist position. And the main reason for this failure is that anarchism. and even anarchist communism, don’t have a clear understanding of what the proletariat is and a historical method for clarifying its tasks in particular historical epochs. Without such a method it is impossible to develop a solid, universal and coherent political programme, as has been developed in particular by the organisations of the communist left. We will return to this in another article.

Dennis, July 2020

 

The aim of this polemic is to stimulate a debate in the proletarian political milieu. We hope that the criticisms we make of other groups will give rise to responses because the communist left can only be strengthened through an open confrontation of our differences.

Faced with major social upheavals, the first duty of communists is to defend their principles with the utmost clarity, offering workers the means to understand where their class interests lie. The groups of the communist left have above all been distinguished by their loyalty to internationalism in the face of wars between bourgeois gangs, states, and alliances. Despite differences over their analysis of the historic period in which we live, the existing groups of the communist left – the ICC, the ICT (Internationalist Communist Tendency), the various Bordigist organisations – have generally been able to denounce all wars between states as imperialist, and to call on the working class to refuse any support for their protagonists. This marks them off very sharply from pseudo-revolutionaries like the Trotskyists, who invariably apply an utterly distorted version of marxism to justify support for one bourgeois faction or another.

The task of defending proletarian class interests is of course also posed by the eruption of major social conflicts – not only movements which are clearly expressions of the proletarian struggle, but also by large mobilisations which involve large numbers protesting on the streets and often clashing with the forces of bourgeois order. In the latter case, the presence in such movements of workers, and even of demands linked to working class needs, can make it very difficult to put forward a lucid analysis of their class nature. All these elements existed, for example, in the Yellow Vest movement in France, and there are those (such as the group Guerre de Classe) who concluded that this is a new form of the proletarian class struggle[1]. By contrast, a number of the groups of the communist left were able to see that this was an inter-classist movement, in which workers were participating essentially as individuals behind the slogans of the petty bourgeoisie, and even behind openly bourgeois  demands and symbols (citizens’ democracy, the Tricolore, anti-immigrant racism, etc)[2].  This did not mean that considerable areas of confusion were excluded from their analyses. The wish to see, despite all this, some working class potential in a movement which had evidently begun and continued on a reactionary terrain, could still be discerned among some of the groups, as we will see later on.

The Black Lives Matter protests pose an even bigger challenge for revolutionary groups: there is no denying that they originated in a wave of genuine anger against a particularly disgusting expression of police brutality and racism. Furthermore, the anger was not restricted to black people and it went far beyond the borders of the US. But outbreaks of anger, of indignation and opposition to racism, do not automatically lead in the direction of the class struggle. In the absence of a real proletarian alternative, they can easily be instrumentalised by the bourgeoisie and its state. In our opinion, this has been the case with current BLM protests, and communists are thus faced with the necessity to show exactly how a whole panoply of bourgeois forces – from the BLM on the ground to the Democratic Party in the US, to major branches of industry, even the heads of the army and the police – have been present from day one to take charge of legitimate anger and use it for their own interests.

How have communists responded? We will not deal here with those anarchists who think that the acts of petty vandalism by Black Blocs within such demonstrations is an expression of class violence, or with “communisers” who think that looting is a form of “proletarian shopping” or a blow against the commodity form. We can come back to these arguments in future articles. We will limit ourselves to statements made by the groups of the communist left in the wake of the first riots and demonstrations following the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

Three of the groups belong to the Bordigist current, and in fact all of them have the title “International Communist Party”, so we will define them according to their publications: Le Proletaire/The Proletarian; Il Partito Comunista/The Communist Party; /Programma Comunista/The Internationalist. The fourth group is the Internationalist Communist Tendency

Is the Black Lives Matter movement proletarian?

All of the statements issued by these groups contain elements we can agree with: for example, the intransigent denunciation of police brutality, the recognition that such brutality, like racism in general, is a product of capitalism and can only be eliminated through the destruction of this mode of production. Le Proletaire’s statement makes this very clear:

“In order to get rid of racism, whose roots can be found in the economic and social structure of bourgeois society, it is the mode of production on which it grows that must be gotten rid of, starting not with culture and “conscience”, mere reflections of the capitalist economic and social structure, but with proletarian class struggle, in which the decisive element is the shared wage worker condition, regardless of the color of the skin, the race, or the country of origin. The only way to successfully oppose every form of racism is the struggle against the ruling bourgeois class, regardless of the color of its skin, its race or its country of origin, because it is benefiting from all oppressions, from all forms of racism, from all forms of slavery”.[3]

Il Partito’s slogans make the same point: “Workers!
Your only defense is in organization and struggle as a class
The answer to racism is communist revolution!”[4]

However, when it comes to the most difficult question facing revolutionaries, all these groups, to a greater or lesser extent, make the same cardinal error: the riots following the murder and the Black Lives Matter demonstrations are part of the movement of the working class. The Internationalist writes:

“Today American proletarians are obliged to respond with force to police abuse and do well to retaliate blow by blow to the attacks, just as they do well to respond blow by blow to the “white supremacist” scoundrels, demonstrating by the practice of mutual defence that the proletariat is a single class: whoever touches one of us touches us all”[5].

Il Partito:

“The severity of the crimes committed by the representatives of the bourgeois State in recent weeks and the strength of the proletariat’s response to them certainly prompts a search for historical comparisons. The protests and riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968 come immediately to mind, as do those that followed the acquittal of the police who beat Rodney King in 1992”.

The ICT:

“The events in Minneapolis are yet another addition to a historical and systemic problem. In addition to suffering unemployment at twice the rate of their white counterparts (a consistent number since the 1950s), the black proletariat is disproportionately targeted by police violence, with seemingly no end in sight to the death toll. Yet, the class shows itself, again, to be combative in those dire moments. The black workers of America, along with the rest of the proletariat standing in solidarity, took to the streets and pushed back against state repression. Nothing has changed. In 1965, just like in 2020, the police kill, and the class responds in defiance to the crooked social order they murder for. The struggle continues”.[6]

Of course, all the groups add the qualification that the movement “doesn’t go far enough”:

The Internationalist:

“But these revolts (which the mass media, the organs and expression of the bourgeoisie, insist  on downsizing as ‘protests against racism and inequality’, thus condemning any form that goes beyond the complaining and whining of the poor devils) must be a lesson and remind proletarians all over the world that the knot to be untied is that of power: rebelling or burning police stations is not sufficient and it is not enough to seize goods from the stores or money from the banks and the pawnshops”.

Il Partito:

 “The present antiracist movement makes a serious mistake when it separates itself from the class basis of racism, continuing political action solely along racial lines in hopes of appealing to the bourgeois State. It has stopped short of openly declaring the role of law enforcement and the military in the maintenance of the capitalist State and the political domination of the bourgeoisie. For people of color, and for the proletariat as a whole, the solution lies in the conquest of political power away from the State, not in appealing to it”.

ICT:

 “While we're encouraged to see sections of the class fighting back, the tendency for these riots is to die down after a week or so as order is restored and oppressive structures are rebuilt”.

To criticise a movement for not going far enough only makes sense if it is going in the right direction to begin with. In other words, it would apply to movements on a class terrain. In our view, this was not the case with the protests about the murder of George Floyd. 

What is the “terrain of the working class”?

There is no doubt that many of the participants in the protests, black, white and “other”, were and are workers. Equally no doubt that they were and are rightly outraged by the vicious racism of the cops. But neither are enough to confer a proletarian character on these protests.

This is true whether the protests took the form of riots or pacifist marches. The riot is not a method of proletarian struggle, which necessarily takes on an organised, collective character. A riot – and above all, the act of looting – is a disorganised response of a mass of separate individuals, an expression of pure rage and despair, but one which exposes not only the actual looters, but all those participating in street protests, to intensified repression from the far better organised forces of a militarised police force.

Many of the demonstrators saw the futility of the riots, which were often deliberately provoked by the savage assaults by the police, and which gave free rein to further provocations by shady elements in the crowds. But the alternative advocated by BLM and immediately taken up across the media and the existing political apparatus, above all the Democratic Party, was the organisation of peaceful marches raising vague demands for “justice” and “equality” or more specific ones like “defunding the police”. And these are all bourgeois political demands.

Of course, a genuine proletarian movement may contain all kinds of confused demands, but it is primarily motivated by the need to defend the material interests of the class and is therefore most often focused – in an initial period - around economic demands aimed at mitigating the impact of capitalist exploitation. As Rosa Luxemburg showed in her pamphlet on the mass strike, written after the epoch-making proletarian struggles in Russia in 1905, there can indeed be a constant interplay between economic and political demands, and the struggle against police repression may well be part of the latter. But there is a big difference between a movement of the working class demanding, for example, the withdrawal of police from a workplace or the release of imprisoned strikers, and a general outpouring of anger which has no connection to the resistance of workers as workers and which is immediately taken in hand by the ‘oppositional’ political forces of the ruling class.

Most important of all: the fact that these protests are first and foremost posed around the question of race means that they cannot serve as a means for the unification of the working class. Irrespective of the fact that the marches were from the beginning joined by many white people, many of them workers or students, the majority of them young, the protests are presented by BLM and the other organisers as a movement of black people which others can support if they wish. Whereas a working class struggle has an organic need to overcome all divisions, whether racial, sexual, or national, or it will be defeated. And again, we can point to examples where the working class has mobilsed against racist attacks using its own methods: in Russia in 1905, aware that pogroms against the Jews were being used by the existing regime to undermine the revolutionary movement as a whole, the soviets posted armed guards to defend Jewish neighbourhoods against the pogromists. And even during a period of defeat and imperialist war, this experience was not lost: in 1941, the dockers of occupied Holland came out on strike against the deportation of the Jews.

It is no accident that major factions of the ruling class have been so eager to identify themselves with the BLM protests. As the Covid-19 pandemic began to hit America, we saw an important number of working class reactions against the criminal irresponsibility of the bourgeoisie, its attempts to force whole sectors of the class to go to work without adequate safety measures and equipment. This was part of a global reaction in the working class[7]. And while it’s true that one of the reasons for the anger behind the protests sparked off by the murder of George Floyd was the disproportionate number of black victims of the virus, this is above all the result of the position of black and other minority groups in the poorest sections of the working class – in other words, of their class position in society. The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic contains the possibility of highlighting the centrality of the class question, and the bourgeoisie has shown itself only too willing to push it into the background.

The role of revolutionaries

When they are faced with a developing movement of the working class, revolutionaries can indeed intervene with the perspective of calling for it to “go further” (through developing autonomous forms of self-organisation, extension to other sectors of the class, etc). But what if large numbers of people are being mobilised on an inter-classist or bourgeois terrain? In such cases, there is still a need to intervene, but then revolutionaries have to recognise that their intervention will be “against the stream”, mainly with the aim of influencing minorities who are questioning the basic aims and methods of the movement.

The Bordigist groups, perhaps surprisingly, didn’t talk much about the role of the party with regard to these events, although The Internationalist is right – in the abstract – when it writes that

“the revolution is a necessity that requires organization, a programme, clear ideas and the practice of collective work: in simple terms, the revolution needs a party to direct it”.

The problem remains: how does such a party emerge? How do we go from the present dispersed milieu of small communist groups to a real party, an international organ capable of providing political leadership to the class struggle?

This question goes unanswered by The Internationalist, which then reveals the depth of its misconception of the party’s role:

“The struggling proletariat, the rebellious proletariat, must organize with and in the communist party”.

Merely declaring that your group is The Party doesn’t make it so, not least when there are at least three other groups all claiming to be the true International Communist Party. Neither does it make sense to argue that the entire proletariat can organise “in the communist party”. Such formulations express a total lack of understanding about the distinction between the revolutionary political organisation – which necessarily only regroups a minority of the class – and class wide organisms such as the workers’ councils. Both are essential instruments of the proletarian revolution. Here we should say that Il Partito at least is more aware that taking the road to revolution requires the emergence of independent class-wide organisations, since it calls for workers’ assemblies, although it weakens its argument by calling for them “in every workplace and within every existing trade union” – as though genuine workers’ assemblies are not essentially antagonistic to the trade union form. But Il Partito doesn’t make what is perhaps a more crucial observation: that there was no tendency whatever for actual workers’ assemblies to develop as part of the BLM protests.

The ICT doesn’t agree with calling itself the party. It says that it is for the party but it is not the party[8]. But it has never made a really deep critique of the mistakes that lie at the root of Bordigist substitutionism – the error, made in 1943-45, of declaring the formation of the Internationalist Communist Party in a single country, Italy, and in the depths of the counter-revolution. Both the Bordigists and the ICT have their origins in the PCInt of 1943, and both theorise the error in their own way: the Bordigists with the metaphysical distinction between the “historic” and the “formal” party, the ICT with its idea of the “permanent need for the party”. These conceptions separate the tendency towards the emergence of the party from the real movement of the class and the effective balance of forces between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Both involved abandoning the Italian communist left’s vital distinction between fraction and party, which aimed to show precisely that the party cannot exist at any moment, and thus to define the real role of the revolutionary organisation when the immediate formation of the party is not yet on the agenda.

The last part of the ICT leaflet clearly highlights this misconception.

The subheading of this section of the ICT’s leaflet sets the tone: “7. The urban rebellion needs to be transformed into world revolution”.

And it continues:

While we're encouraged to see sections of the class fighting back, the tendency for these riots is to die down after a week or so as order is restored and oppressive structures are rebuilt. In order for the power of the capitalists and their mercenaries to be truly challenged and abolished, what is needed is an international, revolutionary class party. Such a party would be a tool in the hands of the working class to organize itself and direct its pent up rage towards not only tearing down the racist state but building worker power and communism”.

This single paragraph contains a whole compendium of errors, from the sub-heading onwards: the present revolt can move on a straight line to world revolution, but for this to happen, you need the world party. This party will be the organising means and the instrument for turning base metal into gold, non-proletarian movements into proletarian revolutions. The passage reveals the extent to which the ICT sees the party as a kind of deus ex machina, a power that comes from who knows where, not only to enable the class to organise itself and destroy the capitalist state, but which has the even more supernatural ability to transform riots, or demonstrations which have fallen into the hands of the bourgeoisie, into giant steps towards the revolution.

This is not a new error. In the past we have criticised the illusion of the PCInt in 1943-45 that the partisan groups in Italy – entirely aligned to the imperialist war on the side of the Allies – could somehow be won over to the proletarian revolution by the participation of the PCInt in their ranks[9]. We saw it again in 1989 when Battaglia Comunista not only mistook the coup d’État by the security forces which ousted Ceausescu in Rumania for a “popular insurrection”, but also argued that it only needed the party to lead it in the direction of proletarian revolution[10].

The same problem with the Yellow Vests last year. Despite describing the movement as “interclassist” we are told that

“Another body is needed, this is an instrument that unifies the class ferment, enabling it to make a qualitative, that is a political, leap, to give it a strategy, and anti-capitalistic tactics, to direct the energies emanating from the class conflict towards an assault on the bourgeois system; there is no other way forward. In short, the active presence of the communist, international and internationalist party is necessary. Otherwise, the rage of the proletariat and the declassed petit bourgeoisie will be crushed and dispersed; either brutally, if needed, or with false promises”. [11]

Again, the party is invoked as the panacea, an ahistorical philosopher’s stone. What’s missing from this scenario is the development of the class movement as a whole, the need for the working class to recover its sense of itself as a class, and to overturn the existing balance of forces through massive struggles. Historical experience has shown that not only are such historical shifts necessary to enable the existing communist minorities to develop a real influence within the working class: they are also the only starting point for transforming the class character of social revolts and providing a perspective for the whole population oppressed by capital. A clear example of this was the massive entry of the workers of France into the struggles of May-June 1968: by launching a huge strike movement in response to police repression of student protests, the working class also changed the nature of the protests, integrating them into a general reawakening of the world proletariat.

Today, the possibility of such transformations seems remote, and in the absence of a widespread sense of class identity, the bourgeoise more or less has a free hand to recuperate the indignation provoked by the advanced decay of its system. But we have seen small but significant signs of a new mood in the working class, a new sense of itself as a class, and revolutionaries have the duty to cultivate these green shoots to the best of their ability. But this means standing up to the prevailing pressure to bow down in front of the bourgeoisie’s hypocritical calls for justice, equality and democracy inside the boundaries of capitalist society.

Amos, July 2020