Marc Chirik passed away 30 years ago, in December 1990. In tribute to the precious contributions of our comrade, of this great revolutionary in the line of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, we are republishing the two articles from International Review 65 and 66 that were written just after his death. These two articles go over the broad lines of his life and summarise what he brought to the proletarian cause and the defence of marxism.

In this short introduction to these texts, we simply want to underline three essential elements which characterised his life and revolutionary activity.

First, during the course of his life as a militant for more than 70 years, he was, from his youth to his last breath, a devoted fighter, a tireless combatant for the cause of the proletariat and communism. He dedicated all his energy to the intransigent defence of internationalist principles and of marxism. He never ceased to be at the forefront of the struggle, putting to good use his political, theoretical and organisational experience. Revolutionary militancy was a constant compass in his life. Even during the terrible period of the counter-revolution, Marc never gave up the work of patiently elaborating and clarifying the positions of the communist left. During these dark years, he fought against all the betrayals of the proletarian camp but also struggled inside all the organisations in which he militated, against opportunist manoeuvres, against centrist attitudes, against both academic and activist deviations. He was able to hold out during this period and with the same determination was able to play an active part in the resurgence of the proletariat onto the historic scene in May 1968, enthusiastically involving himself in the regroupment of the revolutionary forces which were born out of that period, and which gave birth to the ICC. He brought all his militant energy, his conviction and experience to orienting and constructing this organisation, as well as to the efforts towards the coming together of the organisations of the proletarian political milieu in the 1980s, towards the mutual confrontation and clarification of their positions.

Another fundamental trait of his character was his ability to keep alive the theoretical acquisitions of the revolutionary movement, particularly those produced by the left fraction of the Communist Party of Italy. As a result, he was able to maintain a lucid and critical analysis of the evolution of the world situation. This political “flair”, founded on the global analysis of the balance of class forces, enabled him to question certain “dogmas” of the workers’ movement, not by distancing himself from the historical materialist method, but on the contrary by anchoring himself in in the dynamic evolution of historical reality. At the end of his life, he made a final theoretical contribution by being one of the first in the ICC to recognise that capitalism had entered into the terminal phase of its decline, the phase of decomposition. He also argued that the proletariat could in no way make use of capitalism’s putrefaction and that this situation raised the stakes for the proletariat and the survival of humanity.

The last element we want to emphasis is his determination to transmit the lessons of the workers’ movement and the organisational experience of revolutionaries to the new generations in order to form new militants and to allow the ICC to ensure a political continuity in the future struggles of the class. He was totally convinced of the indispensable need for the revolutionary organisation as a bridge between past, present and future, and he was conscious that he himself represented a link to the past historical experience of the class, that he was part of the living memory of the workers’ movement. While always insisting that “the proletariat gives rise to revolutionary organisations and not revolutionary individuals”, he also laid great stress on the individual responsibilities of each militant and the need for solidarity and respect between comrades.

Nothing can better express Marc’s life than Rosa Luxemburg’s simple phrase: “I was, I am, I will be”.

The articles can be found here:

Marc, Part 1: From the Revolution of October 1917 to World War II | International Communist Current (internationalism.org) [2]

Marc, Part 2: From World War II to the present day | International Communist Current (internationalism.org) [3]

After the Russian revolution in 1917, the revolution in Germany in 1918, the creation of the Communist International in 1919, we mark the hundredth anniversary of the tragic crushing of the revolt by the workers, soldiers and sailors of Kronstadt in March 1921 with a document “The lessons of Kronstadt” from International Review 3[1], in order to indeed draw the key lessons of this event for the struggles of the future.

In March 1921, the Soviet state, led by the Bolshevik party, used its military forces to put an end to the workers’ and sailors’ revolt in the Kronstadt garrison on the island of Kotlin in the gulf of Finland, 30 kilometers from Petrograd (today St Petersburg). The 15,000 insurgents were attacked by 50,000 Red Army troops on the evening of 7 march. After ten days of bitter combats, the Kronstadt uprising was suppressed. It’s not possible to get reliable figures for the number of victims, but it has been estimated that there were 3,000 killed in the fighting or executed on the side of the insurgents, and 10,000 dead on the Red Army side. According to a communique of the Cheka dating from 1 May 1921, 6,528 rebels were arrested, 2,168 executed, 1,955 sentenced to forced labour (1,486 for five years), and 1,272 freed. The families of the rebels were deported to Siberia, and 8,000 sailors, soldiers and civilians managed to escape to Finland.

Less than four years after the seizure of power by the working class in October 1917, these events were a tragic expression of the degeneration of an isolated revolution coming to the end of its tether. This was a workers’ revolt by partisans of the Soviet regime, by those who in 1905 and 1917 had been in the vanguard of the movement, and who during the October revolution had been seen as “the pride and glory of the revolution”. In 1921, the Kronstadt insurgents demanded the satisfaction of the same demands as the Petrograd workers who had been on strike since February: liberation of all imprisoned socialists, end of military rule, freedom of expression, of the press and of assembly for all those who work, equal rations for all workers… But what underlined the importance of this movement and expresses its profoundly proletarian character was not only the reaction against the restrictive measures, but above all the rection to the loss of political power by the workers’ councils to the benefit of the party and the state, which had substituted themselves for the councils and claimed to represent the aims and interests of the proletariat. This was expressed in the first point of the resolution passed by the insurgents: “In view of the fact that the present Soviets do not express the will of the workers and peasants, immediately to hold new elections by secret ballot, with freedom to carry on agitation beforehand for all workers and peasants”.

The bourgeoisie, when it talks about the suppression of the revolt by the Red Army, always tries to prove to proletarians that there is an uninterrupted chain linking Marx and Lenin to Stalin and the Gulag. The aim of the bourgeoisie is to make sure that workers turn away from the history of their class and don’t reappropriate their own experiences. The theories of the anarchists arrive at the same conclusions by starting off from the allegedly authoritarian and counter-revolutionary nature of marxism and the parties acting in its name. The anarchists have an abstractly “moral” view of these events. Beginning with the idea of the authoritarianism inherent in the Bolshevik party, they are incapable of explaining the degeneration of the revolution in general, and the Kronstadt episode in particular. This was a revolution that was becoming exhausted after seven years of world war and civil war, with an industrial infrastructure in ruins, a working class that had been decimated, starved, confronted with peasant uprisings in the provinces. A revolution that had been dramatically isolated and where an international extension had become less and less likely after the failure of the revolution in Germany. Faced with all the problems posed to the working class and the Bolshevik party, the anarchists simply close their eyes.  

Considered from the perspective of the world proletarian revolution, the fundamental historical lesson of the repression of the Kronstadt revolt concerns the question of class violence. While revolutionary violence is a weapon of the proletariat to overthrow capitalism and its class enemies, under no pretext can it be used within the working class, against other proletarians. Communism can’t be imposed on the proletariat by force and violence because these means are categorically opposed to the conscious nature its revolution, which can only advance through its own experience and the constant critical evaluation of this experience. The decision by the Bolshevik party to crush the Kronstadt uprising can only be understood in the context of the international isolation of the revolution and the terrible civil war which had swept the country. Nevertheless, such a decision remains a tragic mistake, since it was exerted against workers who had risen up to defend the main weapon in the conscious political transformation of society, the vital organ of the proletarian dictatorship: the power of the Soviets.

The article can be found here: The lessons of Kronstadt | International Communist Current (internationalism.org) [5]

ICC, March 2021

With the recent military coup in Myanmar, the army officially took back power. But had it really ever left? The Myanmar army, a central institution of the state and, historically, the gangster in chief, has been imposing its dictatorship and making the most of its position for decades. It is, in fact, the only force still able to maintain order, stability and unity in a country of more than 130 different ethnic groups, where ethnic divisions and conflicts are legion. Because of this the imperialist appetites of powers such as China, Russia, the US and India focus on the army, which only serves to intensify tensions in this highly strategic region of Asia. The Myanmar army has usually asserted its interests by force, with open support from Chinese and Russian imperialism.

Despite the 2015 election and the handover to a façade of democratic government, the first since 1961, the February 1st coup was part of the logic of permanent military domination by an all-powerful army that has never ceased to be a state within a state since independence in 1948. Burma (as the country was known until 1989) has been ruled without interruption by generals like Aung San Suu Kyi's own father who was assassinated by rivals in 1947. The icon of democracy, supposedly the face of peace, has now been overthrown by soldiers who previously arrested her, then imprisoned her for many years, finally bringing her to power in 2015. Aung San Suu Kyi was able to come to an accommodation with these same soldiers without a moment's hesitation, unscrupulously supporting the bloody repression of the Rohingyas in 2017. In fact, the Burmese armed forces have never relinquished power, granting themselves key ministries and a substantial percentage of seats in parliament. 

An expression of sinking into decomposition...

On 22 December 2020, the head of the Tatmadaw (the official name of Myanmar's armed forces) reaffirmed that the armed forces must also play a leading role in the defence of "national policies, the sasana [Buddhist religion], traditions, customs and culture". He could have added that the Burmese army's power is not only military or "cultural" (sic), it is also economic. The army has had control of the country's economy since the coup of 1962. Today, officially, it has 14% of the national budget, although in reality it's much more, when corruption and largely opaque financing are taken into account.

In addition to its involvement in jade mining, the teak wood industry, precious stones and (the icing on the cake), the highly profitable drug trade, the Myanmar military also benefits from the dividends reaped by a conglomerate it owns, the Myanmar Economic Holding Public Company Ltd (MEHL), one of the country's most powerful and corrupt organisations. MEHL has expanded its influence into virtually every economic sector, from breweries to tobacco, mining and textile manufacturing. Historically, for the capitalist state, it is often the army which, as a last resort, ensures national cohesion and the defence of bourgeois interests in situations of internal division and confrontation. Myanmar is certainly no exception, but it is a caricatural example. If the army has ensured a certain unity of the country in the face of ethnic divisions, its interests remain in "divide and rule", to guarantee its profits, to maintain the dissensions of the various bourgeois factions in order to maintain its power.

The coup led by General Ming Aung Hliang is the latest incarnation of the process of growing chaos and decomposition where it is sometimes difficult to get one's bearings in such a maelstrom of confrontations, violence, ethnic cleansing and barbarism... And all the street demonstrations of the population in defence of the bourgeois clique of Aung San Suu Kyi, this faith in democratic illusions, all this only promises ever more chaos and repression. Every crisis in Burma, as in 1988 or 2007, has, in practice, led to bloody repression with thousands of deaths each time. This is still a possibility today with live ammunition being used by the forces of repression which have already claimed their first victims. So, why a coup now?

Many bourgeois commentators consider this coup d'état to be unexpected, incomprehensible, in view of the military domination that has never wavered, including in recent years with the opening up of democracy under military control, and the coming to power of Aung San Suu Kyi in April 2016. Hypotheses are put forward in the media: the army chief, Min Aung Hlaing, soon to retire, could have been brought before the International Court of Human Rights for crimes against humanity. Another explanation: the latest crushing victory of Aung San Suu Kyi's party in the legislative elections would have been a bitter setback for the military junta, which was not able to accept it... All these elements, however plausible they may be, express above all the exacerbation of the struggles between the different factions of the bourgeoisie within the Myanmar state apparatus, all this to the detriment of the stability and rational management of the state itself.

In other words, the respective interests of each faction, whether dressed in military uniform or in the cloak of democracy, take precedence over the overall interests of the national capital, increasingly fuelling corruption at the top of the state as well as at all levels of the functioning of society. Myanmar's already precarious economic situation has worsened dramatically with the pandemic. In addition to rising unemployment, historically always high, and the impoverishment of the population, and while GDP has fallen dramatically in recent years in one of the poorest countries in the world, according to the IMF, there's a growing humanitarian and health crisis, which has already caused the emigration of hundreds of thousands of people to Bangladesh and Thailand. Ultimately, the events in Myanmar are an expression of the same decomposition that permeates every pore of bourgeois society, from the assault on the Capitol to the global health crisis...

… and the sharpening of imperialist tensions

But these disputes between factions are not enough to completely explain the situation. It is above all in imperialist rivalries and tensions that you find out what's at stake. The main western powers, starting with the US, have unanimously condemned this military operation. Immediately after the coup, the US asked the UN for a resolution to this effect and demanded sanctions against Myanmar. This resolution was not adopted because of the vetoes of Russia and China. In the context of the growing confrontation between China and the United States, Burma remains a key strategic area. At stake is the control of the South China Sea, Taiwan and the Bay of Bengal. Chinese imperialism has absolutely no interest in allowing any "stabilisation", particularly with any democratic pretensions, which would benefit the US above all. Maintaining the mire in Myanmar is a Chinese strategic choice in Asia, access to the Bay of Bengal being a major objective for China, as well as India. It is therefore in China's interest to maintain instability by, for example, supporting guerrillas in the north, for instance in Rakhine (Arakan) State, while at the same time treating the military in the right way, notably by calling the latest coup a "ministerial reshuffle"! One of Beijing's objectives is to complete the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor (CMEC), which will allow access to the Indian Ocean, bypassing the Straits of Malacca, which has always been controlled by the US Navy. It is committed to maintaining stability in trade and political relations with Myanmar. Above all, it is a major strategic pawn in its "Silk Road" project, along which Beijing needs to secure points of support, notably in the form of future military bases and diplomatic alliances. Following Beijing's expression of support for Pakistan, strong support in the region for Myanmar's military regime is an opportunity to defend its interests while blocking proposals for embargoes and sanctions on the Myanmar military regime demanded by the United States.

Russian imperialism has implicitly endorsed the coup. "A week before the coup, Russian Defence Minister Sergey Shoygu travelled to Myanmar to finalise an agreement on the supply of ground-to-air missile systems, surveillance drones and radar equipment, according to Nikkei Asia Magazine. Russia has also signed an agreement on flight safety with General Ming, who is said to have visited Russia six times in the last decade". India finds itself in a trickier situation: while it resolutely opposed the putsch of the Burmese military regime 30 years ago, it did not stop forging links with the Burmese regime, both with the junta and with the Aung San Suu Kyi faction. Today, Modi's government is tempted to continue the dialogue with its neighbour. But it wants at all costs to avoid giving up even an inch of ground to China.

In the trap of the defence of democracy

Faced with this third coup d'état, and in a context of crisis where 60% of people live in extreme poverty, the whole population reacted, particularly the younger generation. Numerous street demonstrations and even strikes have occurred. This movement of "civil disobedience" with acts of sabotage in transport, telecommunications and information technology, with the aim of "restoring democracy", will not put an end to this situation of chaos and violence. Even if it is clear that the army has underestimated the civil resistance by provoking an unprecedented movement of rejection, especially among young people, the social movement that is developing on the purely bourgeois terrain of democratic demands does not contain the seeds of a better future.

Young people have many illusions in the bourgeois democracy of recent years. But the defence of the democratic state, the defence of the party of Aung San Suu Kyi, an accomplice in the crimes perpetrated by the army against the Rohingya people, is a trap that can only bring them serious disappointments. Despite the poor economic record of four years in power of "State Counsellor" Aung San Suu Kyi, she remains popular with a population marked by the years of dictatorship (1962-2011). However, the democratic party and the military junta are two sides of the same coin, that of the bourgeois state. The latter is a body whose function is to maintain social order and the status quo in order to preserve the interests of the ruling class and not to improve the lot of the exploited and oppressed. As a result, the hundreds of thousands of youth and workers participating in these demonstrations are prisoners of a movement that only reinforces the capitalist order. The defence of democracy is a trap and a true dead end. Worse: fighting on this terrain can only lead to impotence and bloody sacrifices for the working class as well as for the whole population.

Stopio, 27 February 2021

150 years ago, on 18 March 1871, the proletariat mounted its first revolutionary offensive – the one that gave birth to the Paris Commune. Though the bourgeoisie declared an all-out war on it, the Commune resisted for 72 days, until 28 May 1871: the ruthless repression cost the lives of 20,000 proletarians. Since then, the Paris Commune, whose memory has been passed down from generation to generation of the working class, remains an example, a reference and a legacy for the exploited of the whole world, though not for its executioner, the bourgeoisie, which is currently holding indecent commemorations to falsify its own history and to bury the precious lessons that the workers' movement was able to draw from it.

For several weeks, historians, journalists, politicians and writers will all be serving up vile propaganda in the newspapers and on the television and radio channels on behalf of their class. From the right to the left, including the extreme left, the whole bourgeois class will churn out lies, from the most flagrant to the most subtle.

For 'the right-wing' the communards are bloodthirsty savages

If the right-wing was indignant about the timidity with which the state planned to “commemorate” the bicentenary of the death of Napoleon I, it has of course showed a total disdain for the Communards (1), these “murderers”, these “troublemakers”, these “agents of disorder” who should just stay where they are, i.e. six feet under. You have to go back to 2016 to see how Le Figaro, a well-known French right-wing newspaper, bluntly states what the “party of order” has always thought in substance, and unequivocally: “The Communards destroyed Paris, massacred honest people and even starved Paris by destroying the large warehouses that stored the grain reserves that supplied the bakers of Paris”. This shameless slander knows no bounds. This is how the insurgents, already regarded as vermin at the time, became responsible for their own famine and at the same time for starving the “honest people”. In other words, if the working class in Paris was reduced to eating rats, it was their own fault! As usual, and especially since the aftermath of the event, the right-wing, which has always felt terrorised by the “dangerous classes”, repeats over and over again a kind of hate speech, equating the Communards with bloodthirsty savages.

But this campaign of crude accusations, trampling on the truth, cruelly lacking any finesse, is very easily seen through for what it is by the working class. It therefore remains in the hands of the forces of the left of capital to carry out the real and necessary work of falsifying the meaning of the Paris Commune.

The Left lays claim to the Commune, the better to subvert it

For 72 days from 18 March, the Paris City Hall will organise no less than fifty events to supposedly celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Commune. The stage will be set on 18 March in Square Louise Michel (18th arrondissement of Paris), in the presence of the “socialist” mayor of the capital, Anne Hidalgo.

This location has not been chosen at random. Louise Michel was one of the most famous and heroic fighters of the Commune who, when she was tried, refused even to accept any pity from the executioners of the Commune, saying to their faces: “Since it seems that every heart that beats for liberty is only entitled to a bit of lead, I claim my share! If you are not cowards, kill me”. So who are these people who, today, want to stage the memory of the Commune in a totally truncated way? Who are Madame Hidalgo and her entire “socialist” city council? Nothing less than the descendants of the social-democratic traitors who irretrievably passed into the camp of the bourgeoisie at the time of the First World War.

Since then, in opposition or in government, the “socialists” have always acted against the interests of the working class. Therefore, for purely political reasons, Anne Hidalgo's Deputy Mayor cynically exploits the memory of Louise Michel in the 2021 commemorations by quoting her: “Everyone is seeking a way forward, we are too, and we think that the day when liberty and equality reign is when the human race will be happy”. For the Communards, these words meant the end of wage slavery, the end of the exploitation of man by man, the destruction of the bourgeois state. That is what the words “liberty” and “equality” meant to them. That’s why, instead of the tricolour flag of France, which flies on the roof of the Hôtel de Ville (town hall) in Paris today, the Communards erected the red flag, a symbol of the struggle of the workers of the whole world! But for this class of exploiters and mass murderers, the “reign of liberty” is nothing more than the reign of commerce and the domination and exploitation of proletarians in workshops and on production lines.

The Socialist Party have increased rallies to the glory of bourgeois democracy in the four corners of the capital and the left-wing intellectuals, writers and film-makers have released lots of films and books to dilute the revolutionary character of the Commune. Also, the bourgeois press, like the Guardian, (2) passes it off as a “people's struggle” and compares it to the interclassist movement of the “Yellow Vests” in order to deny its unquestionably proletarian character. But the Paris Commune was neither a struggle for the implementation of bourgeois values and democracy, that most sophisticated form of class domination and capital, nor a struggle of the “people of Paris”, or even of the “petty-bourgeoisie”. On the contrary, it incarnated a struggle to the death to overthrow the power of the bourgeois class, of which the Socialist Party and all the spokespeople of the “left” are the worthy representatives today.

The extreme left of capital completes the dirty work

The leftists are not to be outdone when it comes to making their own little contribution to the falsification of the experiences of the workers' movement. More often than not they provide the most insidious of distortions.  Thus, the Trotskyists of the NPA (Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste) peddle the cause of “direct democracy” to distort the meaning of the Commune. These leftists do recognise that the Communards made an attack on the state, but only so they can draw false lessons from this and draw conclusions harmless to capital which they zealously support. The NPA, for example, in the Loiret district, in a bulletin they published on 13 March, gives space in its pages to the historian Roger Martelli (3) whose prose is a real plea for bourgeois democracy: “With no fixed doctrines, not even a finished programme, the Commune did in a few weeks what the Republic would take a long time to realise. It opened the way to a conception of ‘living together’, based on equality and solidarity. Finally, it set out the possibility for a less narrow representative, more direct citizen-oriented form of control. In short, it sought to put into practice the 'government of the people by the people', which US President Lincoln had announced years earlier.”

What an utter disgrace this is! Martelli shamelessly spits on the grave of the communards! The NPA, in a totally open and “uninhibited” way, reduces the Commune to a simple democratic reform dressed up as popular participation. In the end, the future prefigured by the Commune is reduced to the bourgeois democratic ideal!

Jean Jaurès, despite his reformist prejudices, at least had the intellectual honesty, unlike the falsifiers of the NPA, to say that: “the Commune was in essence and in substance the first great pitched battle of labour against capital. And that’s precisely why it was defeated, why it was slaughtered”. (4)

For its part, Lutte Ouvrière (LO), the other main French Trotskyist party, contributes with its fake radical language to this campaign of falsification by pretending to oppose parliamentary democracy (in which LO has been participating for decades) to the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., in its eyes, a more radical form of bourgeois democracy. This is how this electoralist party explained it in 2001: “In a programme which they did not have time to develop, the Communards proposed that all the communes from the big cities to the smallest hamlets in the countryside should organise themselves according to the model of the Paris Commune and that they should constitute the basic structure of a new form of truly democratic state.” (5). That said, LO is then quick to point out: “This does not mean that revolutionary communists are indifferent to so-called democratic freedoms, quite the contrary, if only because they allow militants to defend their ideas more openly". (6)

The organisations of the left of capital play without question the most treacherous role, consisting in presenting the Commune as an experiment in “radical” democracy, which would have had no other objective than improving the functioning of the state. Nothing more! 150 years later, the Paris Commune is once again faced with the Holy Alliance of all bourgeois reactionary forces, like it did in its own day with the Holy Alliance of the Prussian state and the French Republic. The political treasures bequeathed by the Commune are what the bourgeois class seeks to hide and bury.

The Commune is a key moment of working class history

Indeed, as Marx and Engels stated loud and clear in its aftermath, the Paris Commune waged the first revolutionary assault of the proletariat by fighting for the destruction of the bourgeois state. The Commune aimed to immediately consolidate its power by abolishing the standing army and the state institutions, and by adopting the permanent revocability of the members of the Commune who were responsible to all those who had elected them.

The historical conditions were not yet ripe at this time - it was well before the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 in Russia - but the Communards did introduce plans to form workers’ councils, “the finally discovered form of the dictatorship of the proletariat” as Lenin put it. So it was not the construction of a “truly democratic” state that the Communards made their objective, but the rejection of the domination of the bourgeois class. The Paris Commune demonstrated that the “the working class cannot simply take control of the existing state machinery and use it for its own purposes”. (7) This is one of the essential lessons that Marx and the workers' movement drew from this tragic experience.

If the Paris Commune was a premature insurrection that ended in the massacre of the finest flower of the world proletariat, it was nevertheless a heroic struggle of the Parisian proletariat, an invaluable contribution to the historical struggle of the exploited class. For this reason, it remains fundamental that the working class of the 21st century is able to appropriate and assimilate the experience of the Commune and the invaluable lessons that revolutionaries have drawn from it.

Paul, 18 March 2021.

To deepen the lessons of the Paris Commune, we recommend reading the following articles on our website:

• Paris Commune of 1871: When the workers first took power | International Communist Current (internationalism.org) [11]
• On the 140th anniversary of the Paris Commune | International Communist Current (internationalism.org) [12]
• 1871: The first proletarian dictatorship | International Communist Current (internationalism.org) [13]

(1) In the Paris City Council, right-wing politicians opposed the celebration of the 150th anniversary of the Commune, leading a deafening campaign on the legitimacy and even the national duty of celebrating the death of Napoleon Bonaparte.

(2) “Vive la Commune? The working-class insurrection that shook the world”, The Guardian (7 March 2021).

(3) Linked to the reviving current of the Stalinist party in France, the PCF, now close to the left-wing party, La France Insoumise, with a very muscular nationalist discourse.

(4) Jean Jaurès, Histoire Socialiste.

(5) “Democracy, parliamentary democracy, communal democracy”. Cercle Léon Trotski intitulé issue n° 89 (26 January 2001). In this article, which says a lot about LO’s democratic ideology, the Trotskyist party adds, without batting an eyelid: “Of all bourgeois institutions, the municipalities [i.e. the cogs of bourgeois democracy where LO has the best chance of obtaining elected representatives] are still potentially the most democratic, because they are the closest to the population and the most subject to its control”. No comment...

(6) “La Commune de Paris et ses enseignements pour aujourd’hui”, Lutte de classe, issue no.214 (March 2021).

(7) Marx et Engels, Preface to the Manifesto of the Communist Party (24 June 1872) https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/pre... [14]

Below we are publishing substantial extracts from a letter from one of our readers, followed by our response. This letter criticises our "Report on the question of the historic course", adopted at the 23rd ICC Congress and published in International Review 164. The comrade also addresses another issue: that of the prospect, still possible, of a generalised nuclear war.

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My multiple readings of the report on the historic course published in the International Review number 164 have left me very perplexed and doubtful. I find it very difficult to form a precise and definitive opinion on this text. Rather than taking a position, I prefer to share with you some somewhat disjointed and disparate remarks. I hope that these remarks will help to move the debate forward, possibly in letters from the paper's readers.

The first remark is a certain astonishment at the appearance now of this questioning. Indeed, the ICC, even if it makes no claim to any 'Bordigist' invariance, has never performed a 180° about face in this way. I have no other example of such a calling into question of a 'cornerstone' position of this importance in the 45 years since the creation of the ICC. Do tell me if there have been any precedents? […]

The second concerns the moment when this historic 'revolution' has happened, that is to say 30 years after the collapse of the USSR and its imperialist bloc. What event in recent months, internal or external to the ICC, has provoked this calling into question of one of its programmatic cornerstones, 30 years after 1989? The only 'internal' event was the need to take stock of the 40 years of the ICC and to revise an analysis which was no longer appropriate. I remember many discussions in public meetings over the last 30 years where this affirmation of the historic course, against the questioning by sympathisers about the state of the working class, where this was a decisive argument in the argumentation.

Third remark: the distinction between the historic course and the balance of forces between the classes is difficult to grasp and does not convince me. A first understanding on my part of this text is the evolutionary character in one direction contained in the expression "historic course" as opposed to a perception of the balance of forces between the classes as a blocked, indecisive and ultimately random situation as to its evolution. To illustrate my position, I will use the expression of Albert Einstein in his criticism of the postulates of quantum mechanics: "God does not play dice". Finally, the notion of the historic course is more relevant to me because in the balance of force between the classes 'measured' at a given moment, there is a basic tendency, a movement (which can be reversed) which is continually at work and which will go to its conclusion. To conclude this remark, I have the impression that there has been a 'pessimistic' evolution in the ICC's appreciation of the historic course over the last 50 years. We went from a course toward 'revolution' in the 70s and 80s, then to a course toward 'class confrontations' of the 90s and 2000s to finish with the current perception of a course announcing the defeat of the proletariat.

One last remark that I will develop further, because my ideas are clearer on this, and it concerns an argument put forward by the ICC to justify its abandonment of a historic course in practice. This argument is the current non-existence of military blocs and the lack a tendency toward different countries coming together to form such blocs. Unlike the alliances preceding the First World War between France, the United Kingdom and Russia on the one hand, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Turkey on the other, or the alliances preceding the Second between France, the United Kingdom and Poland this time and Germany, Italy and the USSR (Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact!) on the other; there have been no such alliances since the collapse of the USSR. Apart from the question of long-range nuclear weapons, there is at the moment one country that does not need to have formed a united and perfectly controlled and sustained bloc in order to embark on a war which, if not global, will not be confined to a theatre of operations limited in time and space (as in the two wars against Saddam Hussein, for example). It is of course the United States that has the economic power, the military supremacy and the bases nonetheless for intervention anywhere in the world. For a war with battles in different parts of the planet, which take place simultaneously and over a fairly long period of time (several years) to occur, all that is needed is for another power, which has several vassal states through foreign trade and economic investment, to set up military bases abroad in these vassal states, start building aircraft carriers and generally an efficient and numerous navy, so that at some point the risk of widespread conflict becomes a significant probability. This country already exists, it is China which, thanks to the Covid-19 epidemic, may soon overtake the United States economically. The possibility of a 'blunder' in the coming years over the Taiwan question, degenerating into a generalised confrontation between these two countries in different places, forcing other states to position themselves and to take sides with one or the other (e.g. France, the United Kingdom and Germany for the United States within the framework of NATO, and Russia for China) is a possibility that is not at all far-fetched. Battles in countries in the East and bombings in Western Europe could result from this situation. I think that the question of war is not at all overcome by the theory of decomposition replacing the theory of the historic course.

To conclude on this last remark, by chance I recently read two articles in the press that add grist to the mill. In Obs magazine, in a brief article on the evolution of the world economy, it says that the power that was at the origin of this pandemic is the only one that will, paradoxically, see positive growth in 2020. The article ends as follows: "When the crisis is over, we will have to make a new assessment of the forces at play. But already, we can announce that China is getting dangerously close to the United States". Canard Enchaîné reports the words of US nuclear weapons chief Charles Richard: "It's time for the US to revise and update its nuclear doctrine, because the nation has not taken seriously enough, until now, the possibility of direct armed competition with nuclear-armed adversaries. For 30 years the Pentagon has considered that there were no threats. This post-Cold War rhetoric is over. We have to accept the prospect that a nuclear war could one day take place. Our adversaries have taken advantage of this period to conceal their aggressive behaviour, increase their military potential and reconsider their tactics and strategies. We cannot expect our adversaries to respect the constraints that everyone has imposed on each other until now, depending on whether the war is conventional or nuclear, who now have a different conception of deterrence from ours".

I hope that these few remarks may be useful in developing the discussion on the key issue of the ICC's abandonment of the idea of the historic course.

D

Our response

First of all, we would like to warmly commend the effort of comrade D and the reflection he has undertaken on the idea of the "historic course", which will feed and enrich the debate.

The comrade asks, first of all: how is it that the concept of the "historic course", which has always been one of the "cornerstones" of the ICC's analysis since its foundation, is today called into question and abandoned in the "Report on the question of the historic course" from our 23rd Congress? The comrade also asks us: has the ICC abandoned or rectified other positions?

To the first question, we must refer the comrade to what is stated very explicitly in the introduction to the Report in the International Review: "By making the necessary change in our analysis, we were adopting the method of Marx and the marxist movement since its inception, which consists of changing positions, analyses and even the programme as a whole as soon as it no longer corresponds to the march of history; this is fully in line with the goals of marxism as a revolutionary theory. The most celebrated example of this is the important modifications which Marx and Engels made to the Communist Manifesto itself, summarised in the later prefaces they added to this fundamental text, in the light of the historic changes that had taken place. 'Marxism is a revolutionary world outlook which must always strive for new discoveries, which completely despises rigidity in once-valid theses, and whose living force is best preserved in the intellectual clash of self-criticism and the rough and tumble of history' (Rosa Luxemburg, An Anti-critique)

Rosa’s insistence, in this period, on the necessity to reconsider prior analyses in order to remain faithful to the nature and method of marxism as a revolutionary theory was directly linked to the profound significance of the First World War. The 1914-18 war marked a turning point in capitalism as a mode of production, its passage from a period of ascent and progress to a new period of decadence and collapse which fundamentally changed the conditions and the programme of the workers’ movement. But only the left wing of the Second International began to recognise that the previous period had definitely ended and that the proletariat was now entering into the “epoch of wars and revolution”.

It is therefore by adopting the same approach as that of the workers' movement of the past that we have been led to question the concept of the "historic course". A concept which we consider outdated since the collapse of the Eastern bloc in 1989, opening up a new phase within the historic period of the decadence of capitalism, its ultimate phase: that of decomposition, the ultimate phase of the decadence of capitalism. Just as the entry of capitalism into its period of decadence had rendered obsolete the national liberation struggles defended by marxists in the 19th century, the analysis of the "historic course", which allowed us to understand the direction in which society was evolving, became obsolete. The historic alternative today is no longer "World war or proletarian revolution" (as it was in the past) but "Destruction of humanity in generalised chaos or proletarian revolution".

The "historic course" and the balance of forces between the classes in the 20th century

Our article in International Review 164 explains in great detail the difference between the concept of the "historic course" and that of the "balance of forces between classes". We had made the mistake of identifying these two notions in the past when they are two distinct concepts. In the 19th century, in the ascendant period of capitalism, the concept of "historic course" had not been used by revolutionaries because we had not yet entered the "era of wars and revolutions" (as the Communist International said in 1919). Neither the failure of the revolution of 1848 nor the crushing of the Paris Commune in 1871 had led to an imperialist war, although the balance of forces between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat had been reversed in favour of the ruling class.

With the entry of capitalism into its period of decadence, the idea of the "historic course" was adopted by revolutionaries in order to understand in which general direction society was going. In 1914, the ideological defeat of the proletariat (with the voting of war credits by social democracy and the betrayal of the workers' parties) had allowed the recruitment of tens of millions of proletarians in the First World War. The balance of forces between the two fundamental classes of society had swung to the bourgeoisie, which had succeeded in sending the proletariat enthusiastically to the battlefields. For the first time in history, the alternative was posed: "socialism or barbarism", "proletarian revolution or the destruction of humanity in World War I". Then in 1917, with the triumph of the Russian Revolution and its impact in other countries (notably Germany), the balance of forces between classes was reversed in favour of the proletariat, ending the World War. The "historic course" was, for the first time, a course towards the world proletarian revolution, posing the question of the overthrow of capitalism, which manifested itself in a real revolutionary wave that developed throughout the world between 1917 and 1923, and again in 1927 in China. But, with the bloody crushing of the revolution in Germany and the Stalinist counterrevolution under the guise of "socialism in one country", the bourgeoisie was able to regain the upper hand. This physical defeat of the proletariat was followed by a profound ideological defeat that led to its recruitment under the flags of antifascism and the defence of the "socialist homeland". The balance of forces between the classes having been reversed in favour of the bourgeoisie, a new historic course was affirmed in the 1930s: society was inexorably heading toward a Second World War. The ruling class had been able to subject the working class to the dead weight of a long period of counter-revolution by giving itself all the means to prevent the proletariat from repeating the revolutionary undertaking of 1917-18. This period of victorious counter-revolution had therefore not allowed the proletariat to reverse the historic course by affirming once again its revolutionary perspective. Such a situation could therefore only leave the bourgeoisie free to impose its own response to the historic crisis of its system: world war.

It was only after half a century of counter-revolution that the proletariat, by gradually rebuilding its forces, was able to raise its head again: at the end of the 1960s, with the resurgence of the economic crisis and the exhaustion of the post-war economic "boom", the proletariat reappeared on the scene of history. The wave of workers' struggles that shook the world, notably in May 1968 in France and during the "hot autumn" in Italy in 1969, showed that the proletariat was not willing to accept the deterioration of its living conditions. As we have always affirmed, a proletariat that does not accept the sacrifices imposed by the economic crisis is not ready to accept the ultimate sacrifice of its life on the battlefields. With the erosion of the bourgeois mystifications that had allowed its recruitment in World War II (that of anti-fascism and Stalinism), the working class regained the upper hand at the end of the 1960s. By obstructing the outbreak of a new world war, the international resumption of class struggle had put an end to the period of counterrevolution and opened up a new historic course: a course toward widespread class confrontations that put the perspective of proletarian revolution back on the agenda.

The history of the twentieth century has thus shown the dynamics of capitalism and the evolution of society according to the balance of forces between classes. It is this balance of force that determines the "historic course", that is to say in which direction society is heading in the face of the permanent crisis of capitalism: either towards world war or towards proletarian revolution.

Although the "historic course" ultimately depends on the balance of forces between the classes, the two concepts are not identical. For marxists, the "historic course" is not fixed. It is fundamentally determined by the response that the bourgeoisie and the proletariat give, at a given moment, to the crisis of the capitalist economy. "We have tended, on the basis of what the working class experienced during the 20th century, to identify the notion of the evolution of the balance of power between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat with the notion of a “historical course”, whereas the latter indicates a fundamental alternative outcome, the world war or revolution, a sanction of this balance of power. In a way, the current historical situation is similar to that of the 19th century: the balance of power between classes can evolve in one direction or another without decisively affecting the life of society" [1]

The incomprehension of this notion of "historic course" had, moreover, led some revolutionaries of the past to make dangerous mistakes. This was notably the case of Trotsky who, in the 1930s, when the proletariat of the central countries was being recruited under the bourgeois flags of antifascism and the defence of the "workers' gains" in the USSR, did not understand that society was heading irreversibly towards world war. Trotsky did not understand that the War in Spain was the laboratory for World War II. Seeing the uprising of the Spanish proletariat against Franco as a "revolution" following on from the October 1917 revolution in Russia, Trotsky had ended up pushing prematurely for the foundation of a Fourth International, at a time when historic conditions were marked by defeat and when the "task of the hour" was for revolutionaries to draw the balance sheet and lessons from the failure of the Russian revolution and the first revolutionary wave.

Why question the concept of the "historic course" today?

Our reader makes the following criticism: he expresses "a certain astonishment at the appearance now of this questioning […] What event in recent months, internal or external to the ICC, has provoked this calling into question of one of its programmatic cornerstones, 30 years after 1989. The only 'internal' event was the need to take stock of the 40 years of the ICC and to revise an analysis which was no longer appropriate. I remember many discussions in public meetings over the last 30 years where this affirmation of the historic course, against the questioning by sympathisers about the state of the working class, where this was a decisive argument in the argumentation."

The first question we want to answer is: was the collapse of the Eastern bloc in 1989 an event of such historic significance that it justifies our examining the direction in which society is heading? As we have highlighted in our press, the collapse of the Stalinist countries put a definitive end to the myth of the "socialist fatherland". An entire sector of the capitalist world fell apart, not thanks to the revolutionary action of the proletariat, but from the battering of the world economic crisis. The disappearance of the Eastern bloc put an end to the Cold War and to the bourgeois alternative of a Third World War as the only response that the ruling class could give to the crisis of its system. As a result, the Western bloc finally broke up, since the threat of the "Evil Empire" had disappeared. The prospect of a Third World War between the USSR and the US had itself disappeared, without giving way to the alternative of proletarian revolution. How did we explain this "void" left in the course of history? Our analysis was the following: neither the proletariat nor the bourgeoisie having been able to affirm their own response to the economic crisis at the end of the 1980s, the historic alternative "War or world proletarian revolution" was "blocked". If capitalism has entered its phase of decomposition, it is because the working class has not been able to go on the offensive, to politicise its struggles to raise them to the gravity of the stakes of the historic situation. The dynamics of the class struggle can no longer be analysed within the framework of the "historic course". The analysis of the "historic course" therefore had to be re-examined since the prospect of a new world war had receded, as had that of proletarian revolution.

The changing historic situation required us to critically examine the 40 years of ICC in order to determine the validity of our analyses. This is what we began to do at our 21st Congress, which was devoted exclusively to this critical examination. It was therefore on the basis of this Congress that we reflected on the historic course and updated our analysis in the light of the new world situation opened up by the collapse of the Eastern bloc. This major event, the most important since the Second World War, had provoked a decline in the consciousness and combativeness of the proletariat because of the impact of the gigantic campaign of the bourgeoisie claiming that the collapse of the Stalinist regimes meant the "collapse of communism". The bourgeoisie had been able to turn this major manifestation of the decomposition of its system against the consciousness of the working class, thus obstructing its revolutionary perspective and making its forward march towards generalised class confrontations more difficult, slower and more uneven.

Moreover, during this Congress we had affirmed that the reconstitution of new imperialist blocs (which is an indispensable objective condition for a third world war) was not on the agenda. With the end of bloc discipline, the dynamics of imperialism were now characterised by the growing tendency of "every man for himself", a tendency which did not exclude the possibility of alliances between states. But these alliances are marked by a certain instability. This "every man for himself" in the life of the bourgeoisie can only aggravate global chaos, especially in increasingly deadly localised wars. "Every man for himself" is also a manifestation of the decomposition of capitalism. It can be seen today in the calamitous management of the Covid-19 pandemic by each national bourgeoisie, as witnessed by the "war of masks" and the competitive race for vaccines.

It was therefore on the basis of the marxist method of analysing historic evolution that the ICC considered that the concept of "historic course" had become obsolete. The dynamics of class struggle and the balance of forces between the classes can no longer be posed today in the same terms as in the past. Faced with a new historic situation (and one which has not been seen since the beginning of the decadence of capitalism), it was up to us to review an analysis which had been for 40 years, as comrade D says, one of our "programmatic cornerstones". This is not quite right, by the way: the analysis of the "historic course" is not a position that is an integral part of our programmatic platform (as is the analysis of the decadence of capitalism and its implications for national liberation struggles, participation in elections, or the nature of trade unions and the former USSR).

The "theory of decomposition" does not replace "the theory of the historic course", as Comrade D asserts. A new world war is not today a necessary condition for the destruction of mankind. As we highlighted in our "Theses on Decomposition", the decomposition of capitalism can have the same effects as war: it can lead, in the long run, to the destruction of humanity and the planet if the proletariat does not succeed in overthrowing capitalism.

Self-criticism: a vital necessity for revolutionary organisations

To conclude, we must briefly answer the other question raised by Comrade D's letter, still concerning our questioning of the concept of "historic course”: "I have no other example of such a calling into question of a 'cornerstone' position of this importance in the 45 years since the creation of the ICC. Do tell me if there have been any precedents?"

There have indeed been some "precedents". The first is pointed out by the comrade himself: we had questioned the notion of a "course to revolution" to replace it with that of "course to class confrontations" in the 1980s. Indeed, the notion of a "course to revolution" was strongly marked by a certain immediacy on our part. The historic resumption of class struggle at the end of the 1960s did not mean that a new revolutionary wave was going to emerge quickly. It was the analysis of the slow rhythm of the economic crisis in the 1970s that allowed us to understand that this resumption of the class struggle could not yet immediately lead to a revolutionary uprising of the proletariat as was the case with the barbarity of the First World War.

Another example of the necessary rectification of our analyses is the question of the emergence of China as the second world power. In the past, we had indeed defended the idea that, in the period of decadence of capitalism, there was no possibility for the countries of the "Third World" (including China) to emerge from underdevelopment. It was in the light of the consequences of the collapse of the Eastern bloc with the opening up of the countries of the Soviet zone and their integration into the 'market economy' that we were led to revise this analysis, which had become obsolete. Nevertheless, this new analysis in no way called into question the historic framework of the decadence of capitalism.

Like revolutionaries in the past, the ICC has never been afraid to recognise and rectify its mistakes, nor to adapt its analyses to new realities in the world situation. If we were not able to criticise our own mistakes, we would not be an organisation faithful to the method of marxism. As Rosa Luxemburg said in September 1899, "There is probably no other party for which free and untiring criticism of its own shortcomings is as much a condition of existence as for social democracy. As we have to progress in line with social evolution, the continual modification of our methods of struggle and, consequently, the incessant criticism of our theoretical heritage, are the conditions for our growth. It goes without saying, however, that self-criticism in our Party only achieves its goal of serving progress, and we cannot be too pleased about this unless it moves in the direction of our struggle. Any criticism that contributes to making our class struggle more vigorous and conscious in achieving our final goal deserves our gratitude" ("Freedom of Criticism and Science").

It is in this sense that we must also welcome Comrade D's letter and his critical remarks. His questioning contributes to the public debate which we can only encourage. By opening the columns of our press, as we have always done, to any reader who wishes to criticise our analyses and positions, our aim is to develop the culture of debate within the working class and the proletarian political milieu.

Is the prospect of generalised nuclear war on the agenda?

The conditions for the outbreak of a generalised war

Comrade D states in his letter that "the question of war is not at all overcome by the theory of decomposition replacing the theory of the historic course."

Apart from the fact that the ruling class has not been able since 1989 to reconstitute new imperialist blocs, the comrade forgets that the second condition for the outbreak of a new world war is the ability of the bourgeoisie to recruit the proletariat behind national flags, especially in the central countries of capitalism. This is by no means the case today. As we have always affirmed, a proletariat that is not willing to accept the sacrifices imposed by the worsening economic crisis is not prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice of its life on the battlefield. After the long counter-revolutionary period where states were able to send millions of proletarians to their deaths behind the flags of fascism and anti-fascism during the Second World War, the working class returned to the stage of history at the end of the 1960s (May 68 in France, the "hot autumn" in Italy, etc.). The bourgeoisie had been prevented from unleashing a third planetary butchery during the Cold War because it was unable to recruit a proletariat which, although it was unable to develop its struggles on a revolutionary terrain, was both very combative and absolutely unwilling to be killed or to massacre its class brothers. Despite all the difficulties that the working class has faced in massively developing its struggles since 1989, the historical situation is still open. Since the proletariat has not suffered a decisive and definitive defeat, the worsening of the economic crisis can only push it to fight tooth and nail to defend its living conditions, as we have seen again recently with the movement against pension reform in France during the winter of 2019-2020. And in its capacity to resist the attacks of capital, we have also seen a tendency to seek solidarity in the struggle between all sectors and all generations. Of course, this in no way means that the bourgeoisie can never again inflict a historic and decisive defeat on the working class. But, as we affirmed in our "Theses on Decomposition" (International Review 107), social decomposition can destroy any capacity of the working class to overthrow capitalism and lead to the destruction of humanity and the planet.

Towards a reconstitution of imperialist blocs?

In support of his analysis of the current potential for a large-scale military conflict, Comrade D states: "Apart from the question of long-range nuclear weapons, there is at the moment one country that does not need to have formed a united and perfectly controlled and sustained bloc in order to embark on a war which, if not global, will not be confined to a theatre of operations limited in time and space (as in the two wars against Saddam Hussein, for example). It is of course the United States that has the economic power, the military supremacy and the bases nonetheless for intervention anywhere in the world. For a war with battles in different parts of the planet, which take place simultaneously and over a fairly long period of time (several years) to occur, all that is needed is for another power, which has several vassal states through foreign trade and economic investment, to set up military bases abroad in these vassal states, start building aircraft carriers and generally an efficient and numerous navy, so that at some point the risk of widespread conflict becomes a significant probability. This country already exists, it is China which, thanks to the Covid-19 epidemic, may soon overtake the United States economically".

It is true that it is around the conflict between these two superpowers that the strategic battle for a "new world order" is focused. China, with its vast "Silk Road" programme, aims to establish itself as a leading economic power by 2030-50 and to build up by 2050 a "world-class army capable of winning victory in any modern war". Such ambitions are causing a general destabilisation of relations between imperialist states and are pushing the United States to try since 2013 to contain and break the rise of the Chinese power that threatens it. The American response, which began with Obama (taken up and amplified by Trump), represents a turning point in American policy. The defence of its interests as a national state now embraces the "every man for himself" which dominates imperialist relations: the US is moving from the role of policeman of world order to that of principal propagator of "every man for himself" and the chaos and calling into question of the world order established in 1945 under its aegis. On the other hand, the idea inferred by what the comrade says is that there is a tendency towards bipolarisation, since on the one hand the European countries, within the framework of NATO, would take the side of the United States, while China would not only be able to rely on its vassal states but would have a major ally, Russia.

Yet the emergence of China itself is a product of the phase of decomposition, in which the tendency towards bipolarisation is being broken by "every man for himself" reigning between each imperialist power. Similarly, there is a big difference between the development of this tendency and a concrete process leading to the formation of new blocs. The increasingly aggressive attitudes of the two major powers tend to undermine rather than reinforce this process. China is deeply distrusted by all its neighbours, especially Russia, which often aligns itself with China only to defend its immediate interests (as it does in Syria), but is terrified of being subordinated to China because of the latter's economic power, and remains one of the fiercest opponents of Beijing's "Silk Road" project. America, meanwhile, has been actively engaged in dismantling virtually all the structures of the old bloc that it had previously used to preserve its "new world order" and which resisted the shift in international relations towards "every man for himself". It increasingly treats its NATO allies as enemies, and in general has become one of the main actors in aggravating the chaotic nature of current imperialist relations.

Is a nuclear war possible in the current period?

In short, by putting to one side one of the essential conditions for the outbreak of a new world war (the need for the ideological enlistment of the proletariat), comrade D puts forward another hypothesis. He refers to articles in the bourgeois press (L'Obs and Le Canard Enchaîné) to affirm that a nuclear war is quite possible, notably between the US and China (which has become an industrial and imperialist power facing the first world power).

As we have always affirmed, imperialism has its own dynamics and is an integral part of the way of life of capitalism in its period of decadence. And as Jean Jaurès said, "capitalism brings war as the cloud brings the storm". No economic power can compete with others, and assert itself as such on the world stage, without developing ever more sophisticated weapons. The trade war between states is therefore always accompanied by an exacerbation of imperialist tensions. While it is true that nuclear armament is no longer just a means of "deterrence" as it was during the "Cold War", today the arms race is a means of blackmail and bargaining between nuclear-armed states. The exacerbation of imperialist tensions does not always lead to a direct conflagration, as we saw, for example, in 2017 with the military tensions between the US and North Korea (which had moreover given rise to alarmist talk in the bourgeois press). After several months of negotiations, this conflict ended (at least momentarily) with warm embraces between Trump (president of the United States) and Kim Jong-un (president of North Korea).

The more the bourgeoisie is forced to face the bankruptcy of its system and the acceleration of the trade war, the more each power seeks to advance its pawns in the imperialist world arena for the control of strategic positions against its rivals. As capitalism sinks into social decomposition, the bourgeoisie appears more and more as a suicidal class. Uncontrolled slip-ups on the imperialist level cannot be ruled out in the future if the proletariat does not take up the challenge posed by the gravity of the historical situation. But for the moment, the perspective of a nuclear conflagration between China and the US is not on the agenda. Moreover, what interest would these two powers have to gain by massively dropping nuclear bombs on their rival? The destruction would be such that no occupying troops from the victorious country could be sent to the piles of ruins. We have always rejected the vision of the "push-button" war, where the bourgeoisie could unleash a global nuclear cataclysm at the touch of a button, without any need for the proletariat to be recruited. The ruling class is not completely stupid, even if irresponsible and completely insane heads of state can come to power at particular moments. It is not a question of underestimating the danger of imperialist tensions between the great nuclear powers like China and the US, nor of totally ruling out the prospect of a conflagration between these two powers in the future, but of measuring the catastrophic repercussions at the world level: none of the warring powers would be able to take advantage of it. Contrary to the alarmist rhetoric of certain media and the predictions of geopoliticians, we must guard against playing Nostradamus. If the dynamic of imperialism (the outcome of which we cannot predict today) leads to such a situation, its origin will be in the total loss of control by the ruling class over its decomposing system. We're not there yet and we must be careful not to "cry wolf" prematurely.

Revolutionaries must not give in to the pervasive idea of "no future". On the contrary, they must keep faith in the future, in the capacity of the proletariat and its younger generations to overthrow capitalism before it destroys the planet and humanity. By abandoning today our past analysis of the "historical course", we do not now have, as comrade D thinks, a "pessimistic" vision of the future. We still bet on the possibility of generalised class confrontations allowing the proletariat to recover and affirm its revolutionary perspective. We have never, in any of our articles, announced a "defeat" for the proletariat, as our reader's letter maintains.

Sofiane

[1] "Report on the question of the historic course", International Review 164 (first half of 2020).

In the article below we show how, faced with “an accelerated deterioration and precariousness of living conditions”, students in France demonstrated on 21 January 2021, when “hundreds of students took to the streets across France to express their anger and frustration”.

In the UK students have also fought against the same worsening of their living conditions with rent strikes that involved thousands of students at dozens of universities, lasting from October 2020 until February 2021. Besides a rent rebate, at several universities students also demanded a reduction in tuition fees

With regular government guidelines to stay at home over the past year, many students in Britain have found themselves spending less time in student accommodation. But many of them were still expected to pay the full rent on empty rooms.

In this situation students had their backs against the wall. So they decided to take action and started to collectively organise to withhold their rent from universities. After an initial rejection, the spontaneous initiatives of the first rent strikes were then ‘taken over’ by the student unions. Others seem to have been organised by self-appointed leftist committees.

The most combative example was set “by the rent strikes in Bristol and Manchester. These strikes, both large and militant in character, have shown students not only that it is possible to organise a rent strike, but that it is only through collective, militant action that students can win against the marketised university”. (Matthew, Lee Rent Strike Reflections).

The demands put forward by striking students in Manchester in October-November revealed broader concerns, as their demands were not limited to rent alone, but also included other issues such as flooding, rat infestations and lack of access to facilities due to lockdown.

And confronted with “regularly stopped face-to-face classes in universities, leaving students with no other perspective than a face-to-face meeting with a computer screen”, the Manchester students also expressed their grievances against the lack of support for students during isolation and the cancelling of the face-to-face teaching.

Unlike the protest in France, which showed tendencies to question present capitalist society, the rent strikes in the UK were limited to students' specific concerns, but were not of a lesser importance. Firmly anchored on the terrain of the defence of immediate living conditions, it shows the way to the working class as a whole.

The movement in the UK, the biggest wave of university rent strikes in four decades, revealed that the situation of students in Europe is not limited to France. Students in the UK experience the same conditions and, as we have seen in the past few months, are determined to fight for descent living conditions and “the right to study with dignity”.

WR 23/3/21

On 21 January, hundreds of students took to the streets across France to express their anger and frustration. For a year now, in an attempt to cope with the pandemic, the government has regularly stopped face-to-face classes in universities, leaving students with no other prospect than virtual meetings in front of a computer screen. President Macron may have said that a lockdown only for the old and the young was out of the question, but this is one of the main thrusts of French government policy for managing the pandemic. As a result, courses are limited to online meetings for the lucky ones or just reading pdf files for the rest. As for lecturers on sick leave, they are not replaced and students have to try on their own to find the content of their courses on the internet. In addition to this isolation, financial insecurity makes young people among the first victims of increasing poverty. In normal circumstances 40% of students work to try and pay their bills... but student jobs have all but disappeared, leaving a large number of them struggling to make ends meet. 75% of students say they have financial difficulties. Many can no longer afford to pay their rent or even to feed themselves after the middle of the month, which has led to a growing number of students being reduced to using "soup kitchens" and resorting to "food banks".

The few crumbs distributed by the Macron government to pacify people will not change anything. A health voucher to go and see a psychologist?... There's typically only 1 for every 30,000 students on campus! Two meals at a euro per day?... This has led some university restaurants to drastically reduce the portions and quality of meals!

Less money, almost no social life, no prospects, this is the fate that society is "offering" to the younger generation: "One young person in six has stopped studying, 30% has given up access to healthcare, and more than half are worried about their mental health"[1]. Psychological problems have escalated, affecting 30% of students compared to 20% four years ago.[2] The extreme isolation, linked to the pandemic and the atomisation of capitalist society, seems to be affecting a whole generation. Faced with such an unbearable situation, suicide attempts have multiplied in recent months[3], a further sign of despair and the absence of a future among an increasing minority of the population.

"Between fatigue, limbo, anger and loneliness, what do we do?"[4]

If students see themselves as "an abandoned generation", they are not ready to give up and let themselves be trampled by putrefying capitalism. "The life of a student should not end in the cemetery!”[5].

Thus, despite the health risk, the most combative have taken to the streets to denounce their living conditions but also on behalf of those who remain isolated: "that's also why we're here, to speak out for the others", said a student on a demonstration[6].

But the student malaise has existed for years, even decades. Already, in 2017, 20% of students were living below the poverty line and 46% were working for a living. These are telling statistics; students' cost of living has been rising steadily since 2009[7]. In September 2019, as a personification of this endless degradation, a student set himself on fire in front of the CROUS[8] of the University of Lyon. He accompanied his gesture with a message on Facebook in which he denounced the conditions of student life and "the policies carried out for several years" by the various fractions of the bourgeoisie in power, "Macron, Hollande, Sarkozy in particular".[9] In response, students took to the streets to demand the right to study with dignity: "Precariousness kills!" "Decent living conditions for all students"[10], you could already read in the period before Covid.

Today, if the pandemic has certainly reinforced isolation and atomisation, it has only been a catalyst for the continuous deterioration of student living conditions, not only in France but throughout the European Union and in Britain, where an accelerated deterioration and precariousness of living conditions is widespread.[11] A proportion of the new generation of proletarians is suffering. Anger is not only directed against the harmful effects of the Covid crisis such as atomisation and the lockdown imposed by the state. As we could see in the demonstrations, the concerns remained much broader: "students in revolt: against the state and precariousness", "students: isolating us is their weapon, solidarity was, is, and will be our response", "at school, at university, at the factory and everywhere, let's fight precariousness and poverty".[12] Behind these demands, there is an underlying theme: How to fight against this society? How can we imagine a different future?

The student demonstrations of this January in France are in line with the struggles of autumn 2019 and winter 2020. Although initially stunned and unable to react to the outbreak of the pandemic, the will to fight has not been totally broken, nor the ability to struggle together, to discuss and to exchange points of view, even if the path to the development of more massive struggles is still long.

These struggles have been very short-lived because of the health situation and the capacity of the bourgeoisie to defuse actions very quickly by dismissing the "fear" of a new lockdown and by the work of division of the unions. The latter did everything possible to prevent the participation of students in the interprofessional day of action of 6 February by organising alternative rallies and isolated and sterile general assemblies inside the universities themselves or by putting forward slogans such as "forgotten youth: we won't pay for the crisis"!

However, despite these attempts to portray young people as being "sacrificed for the health of the elderly", students aren't swallowing these stories. "70% of 18-30 year olds think that it is shocking to say that their generation has been sacrificed to save the elderly".[13]

No: there is no conflict of interest between generations of the same class! It is in solidarity and from the lessons of past struggles that young proletarians must draw their strength. Capitalism has nothing to offer to any proletarian generation. The slogan coined during the movement against the First Employment Contract (CPE) in 2006 remains fully relevant: "Young bacon, old croutons, all part of the same salad"[14].

Élise, 18 February 2021

We are publishing here a three-part series on the question of education that first appeared in the pages of World Revolution in 2001 (numbers 243-245). While it starts with references to the UK general election of 2001, what the series says is still relevant today. On the views developed by the workers’ movement in the 19th century, on the contradictory approach of the bourgeoise in capitalism's decadence, on the programme of the Bolsheviks when it dealt with education, or on certain traps that revolutionaries have to fight against today, all these questions have not become outdated with the passage of time.

Education remains important for the working class, and we can see how students, whether at school or university, are currently suffering with the impact of the pandemic and the lockdown – from social isolation, disruption to their educational programmes, and, in the universities, exorbitant fees and rents. The bourgeoisie has been cutting education budgets for years, but still needs skilled workers to exploit. Hypocritically it talks about the importance of education while reducing the necessary funding. It's true that education is one of the means for instilling bourgeois ideology, but it's also necessary for workers to be able function in capitalist society. This doesn’t alter the fact that, as the articles conclude, there will need to be a "fundamental reorganisation of education in the post-revolutionary period of transition to a truly human community".

WR, March 2021

Part 1: A class sunk in ignorance may revolt, but it will never make a revolution

Education has always been important to the working class. From the first days of the workers’ movement there were demands for children to attend school as well as attempts at self-education. Today, every part of the ruling class plays on this concern, just as they play on the concern for health care. In reality, the interests of the two classes remain as opposed in the realm of education as they do in every other aspect of life.

During the 1997 general election Labour promised to make education their “number one priority” with increased spending, lower class sizes and improved standards. For their part, the Tories claimed that they had already increased spending by 48% in real terms and guaranteed to set new national standards that would require schools to improve their performance. As the next election gets closer the game has been renewed, with Labour boasting that investment will grow by a third between 1998/9 and 2003/4, with an additional £2bn being spent on school buildings this year alone. The Tories have replied that schools are weighed down by bureaucracy and class sizes have actually increased. Not to be outdone, the leftists have put forward their own promises which, since they will never be put into practice, are limited only by what they think people will fall for. The SWP in its alternative budget last month promised £12bn while the Socialist Alliance went for £22bn to be funded from the sale of mobile phone licences. All of these demands and promises are just so many tricks to divert the real concern of the working class into support for the system of education set up by the ruling class to serve its own interests. They all aim to sow the illusion that, despite the economic crisis, capitalism has the means to provide an education through which the individual can realise his or her potential.

The situation of the working class

As the industrial revolution developed in Britain through the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the ruling class saw no need to educate the ‘hands’ who laboured for them. This was revealed in the various official reports compiled at the time for the government. These found children not only unable to read or write, but also unable to do the most simple maths: “A boy, seventeen years old, ‘did not know how many two and two made, nor how many farthings there were in twopence, even when the money was placed in his hand.’” Their general knowledge was found to be equally poor: “Several boys had never heard of London… Several had never heard the name of the Queen nor other names such as Nelson, Wellington, Bonaparte […] a third, seventeen years old, answered several very simple questions with the brief statement, that ‘he was ne judge o’ nothin’.” These excerpts were drawn together by Engels in The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1842-4 and led him to conclude: “The means of education in England are restricted out of all proportion to the population. The few day schools at the command of the working class are available only for the smallest minority and are bad besides. The teachers, worn out workers and other unsuitable persons who only turn to education in order to live, are usually without the indispensable elementary knowledge, without the moral discipline so needful for the teacher, and relieved of all public supervisions.” It has been estimated that, in 1839, 41.6% of the population were illiterate, with the rate being considerably higher amongst women than men. Expenditure on education was virtually non-existent: Engels gives a figure of £40,000 for 1844 out of a ministerial budget of some £55 million, mainly split between schools run by the established Anglican Church or the smaller dissenting sects, where religious prejudice was the main subject. Many Sunday Schools refused to teach writing, either because it was seen as too worldly an activity for a Sunday or because of the belief that all a working person required was the ability to read the bible. New teaching methods introduced in this period reduced education to the rote learning of chunks of ‘knowledge’ to be answered mechanically in question and answer form. Given this, the rate of literacy suggested by the figures quoted above should be treated with caution. In this period the bourgeoisie were not confident in their ability to use education to control and indoctrinate the working class and feared the spread of knowledge to a class that had already shown a tendency to question the established order in both words and deeds. Consequently, as Engels argues, the main form of education was force and what this taught was class hatred: “There is, therefore, no cause for surprise if the workers, treated as brutes, actually become such; or if they can maintain their consciousness of manhood only by cherishing the most glowing hatred, the most unbroken inward rebellion against the bourgeoisie in power. They are men only so long as they burn with wrath against the ruling class. They become brutes the moment they bend in patience under the yoke, and merely strive to make life endurable while abandoning the effort to break the yoke.”

The efforts of the working class

The working class did not sit idly by, waiting for their betters to condescend to educate them. Nor did they generally oppose education because they wanted their children to work.

During the first decades of the nineteenth century repeated demands were made to Parliament to reduce the working day. This was an essential precondition if children were to learn anything, since working weeks of up to 72 hours left them neither the time nor the energy for schooling. Between 1802 and 1833, five Labour Laws were passed, but no resources were ever made available for their implementation. It was not until the Act of 1833 established Factory Inspectors, raised the age at which children could be employed and restricted their working hours, that any progress was possible. Even then the proposals were so hedged around with exceptions that they had little real effect. This and subsequent legislation allowed children a few hours education a day.

Alongside this struggle, the working class maintained and developed a tradition of self-education. E.P. Thompson, in The Making of the English Working Class, describes some of the weaving communities where the inhabitants had some control over the pattern of work and could intersperse weaving and education both of their children and themselves: “Every weaving district had its weaver-poets, biologists, mathematicians, musicians, geologists, botanists... there are accounts of weavers in isolated villages who taught themselves geometry by chalking on their flagstones and who were eager to discuss the differential calculus.” (p.322). Where such traditional patterns of life had been destroyed by the development of the factory system, the desire for education still emerged amongst the artisans or mechanics who were the direct product of the new system. This was expressed in the building of Mechanics Institutes and Halls of Science, in the proliferation of clubs and the publication of numerous journals and pamphlets. If these partly echoed the bourgeois ideology of self-improvement, they also expressed a class attitude. This could be seen particularly in the political journals that came and went with such frequency in the early 19th century and which were a focus for the discussion of strategy, whether constitutional or revolutionary. This was particularly true of papers like the Poor Man’s Guardian and, above all, the Northern Star. It was common practice for groups of workers to take out a joint subscription and for the paper to be read aloud to the rest of the group and then discussed. Many workers later described this as the foundation of their political education. On the particular question of the education of children, the Chartists explicitly opposed its control by the middle class and attempts were made to set up their own schools.

Education and the workers’ movement

The demand for education featured in nearly every programmatic statement of the workers’ movement throughout the 19th century, from the Communist League in 1847 to the Erfurt Programme of the German Social Democratic Party in 1891. In 1845 Engels argued that the introduction of general education for children was one of the measures “which are bound to result in practical communism” (Collected Works, Vol.4, p.253) since “an educated proletariat will not be disposed to remain in the oppressed condition in which our present proletariat finds itself” (ibid. p.254). At the start of the 20th century, the Bolsheviks called for compulsory education to the age of 16. However, this demand was rarely just for a greater quantity of education, it also included a critique of the role and content of education in class society that went far beyond the demand for increased provision.

Underlying the critique is the recognition that humanity in capitalist society is alienated from itself as a result of the division of labour in which the separate interests of the individual are opposed to the common interests of humanity. “For as soon as the division of labour comes into being, each man has a particular exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood.” (Marx & Engels The German Ideology). This is contrasted with communist society: “whereas in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming a hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.” (ibid).

Consequently, education in capitalist society can never be about the full realisation of the potential of humanity, either individually or collectively, but only about training people to fulfil those tasks necessary for the continuation of capitalism. This point was made by William Morris in 1888: “People are ‘educated’ to become workmen or the employers of workmen or the hangers-on of the employers, they are not educated to become men. With this aim in view the conditions under which true education can go on are impossible. For the first and most necessary of them are leisure and deliberation; and leisure is a thing which the modern slave-holder will by no means grant to his slave as long as he grants him his rations: when the leisure begins the rations end. Constant toil is the only terms on which they are to be had.” (“Thoughts on education under capitalism”, Commonweal, Vol.4, no. 129, in Morris Political Writings p.377).

This did not mean that the struggle for education was useless since, as Engels argued, a class sunk in ignorance may revolt but will never make a revolution. For Marxists in the 19th century, education was not only a reform that could be won and which could improve the immediate situation of the working class, it was also a contribution to the revolutionary struggle against bourgeois society. The Communist League argued in 1847 in the “Principles of Communism”, that education would come with democracy and would in turn help prepare the way for communism. At the time this tended to be seen as the work of the state embodied in the democratic constitution, but later Marx and Engels developed their critique of the role of the state. In 1875, when the SPD adopted the Gotha Programme, which called for “Universal and equal public education by the state”, Marx strongly attacked the uncritical reliance on the bourgeois state: “’Equal education of the people’? What idea lies behind these words? Is it believed that in present day society… education can be equal for all classes? […] ‘Education of the people by the state’ is altogether objectionable… Government and church should rather be equally excluded from any influence on the school.” (Collected Works Vol.24, p.96-7). In Britain socialists stood for election to the local boards which ran schools in order to counter the influence of church and state.

The struggle for education thus moved directly into a struggle over the form and content of education. Here Marx actually argued that the development of capitalism itself, and specifically the educational clauses of the 1864 Factory Act, were the germ of a new form of education: “an education that will, in the case of every child over a given age, combine productive labour with instruction and gymnastics, not only as one of the methods of adding to the efficiency of production, but as the only method of producing fully developed human beings.” (Capital Vol.1, p.454).

The second part of this article will examine the education system actually set up by the bourgeoisie in the 19th and 20th centuries and how the passage of capitalism into its period of decadence influenced the position of the workers’ movement on this question.

Part 2: Education in decadence: the guardian of class rule

The extension of education to the working class by the bourgeoisie was very hesitant. It was not made free and compulsory in Britain until the start of the 20th century and it was only after the First World War that consideration was given to extending secondary education to all children, and then only to the age of 14. The leaving age was raised to 15 after the Second World War and to 16 in the 1970s. It was only in the last decades of the 20th century that tertiary education for workers developed to any significant extent.

Two basic concerns have shaped the bourgeoisie’s educational policy towards the working class.

Firstly, the need to increase productivity in order to remain competitive against its economic rivals. In the first half of the 19th century Britain had no significant rivals and the productive processes were relatively simple and, consequently, there was no real need to educate the working class. However, in the second half of the century competitors began to emerge in Germany and America whose production was based on the most advanced technology. Britain could only compete by adopting the new and more complex production processes. This required a more skilled and developed workforce. “Industry needed operatives who were able to read its rules and regulations, and an increasing supply of skilled workers able to work to drawings and to write at any rate a simple sentence. Commerce needed a rapidly growing army of clerks, book-keepers, shop assistants, touts and commercial travellers. The state needed more Civil Servants and local government employees for the developing tasks of public administration.” (Cole and Postgate, The Common People, p.364).

Secondly, concerns about the ability to control the working class. In the decade following the French Revolution of 1789 the British ruling class adopted some of the most repressive measures in its history. All attempts to organise by the working class were attacked. A wide-spread system of spies and agent-provocateurs was established. Workers were executed, transported and imprisoned. Despite this the strategy failed: “The pamphleteers were gaoled, and from the goals they edited pamphlets. The trade unionists were imprisoned, and they were attended to prison by bands and union banners.” (E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, p.914). The culmination was the Chartist Movement, which organised as a working class party and, at times, threatened the power of the ruling class. Yet the movement also marked a turning point in the strategy of the ruling class. Alongside direct repression ran a more subtle tactic which aimed to pacify and diffuse the working class. One result was the relative leniency shown to many Chartist activists by the courts. Throughout the remainder of the 19th century the British bourgeoisie refined the mixture of flexibility and brutality for which it became famous. It learnt how to use reforms to disarm the working class. Where the extension of the vote threatened the ruling class in 1800, by 1900 it was on the verge of becoming the bedrock of that rule. Where a popular press threatened to drown out the ideology of the ruling class it became its loudest mouthpiece. Where education threatened to be the great leveller it became the guardian of class rule.

The spread of education

Prior to 1870, various pieces of legislation had been passed which permitted the setting up of schools, and grants had been given to two voluntary bodies, one under the control of the Church of England and the other by the dissenting sects. The money granted had grown from £30,000 in 1839 to £813,000 in 1861 but was reduced to £637,000 over the following four years in response to complaints of waste. At the same time teachers’ pay was tied to ‘results’. The Education Act of 1870, which is usually presented as the turning point in the provision of education, actually made it neither compulsory nor free. It only sought to supplement the work of the voluntary bodies by allowing locally elected School Boards to set up schools were none already existed. Nonetheless, the new system advanced rapidly and by 1876 School Boards existed in areas with a total population of 12.5 million. In the same year attendance was made compulsory, although there were some exemptions. In 1891 fees for ‘elementary’ education were abolished except in schools offering ‘higher grade’ education.

The content of this education is not so well documented. Many political autobiographies of the time begin when the author left school. Tom Bell (first of the Socialist Labour Party and then of the Communist Party) went to school in Glasgow between 1889 and 1894. He left at the age of eleven and a half, recalling the difficulty his family had in finding the money each fortnight to pay for school, and the cruelty of some teachers which “led to their being mobbed by the boys after school hours” (Pioneering Days, p.17). More detail is given by Flora Thompson who went to school in rural Oxfordshire at the end of the 19th century: “Reading, writing and arithmetic were the principal subjects, with a scripture lesson every morning, and needlework every afternoon for the girls… Governess taught all the classes simultaneously, assisted only by two monitors – ex-scholars aged about twelve who were paid a shilling a week for their services… The writing lesson consisted in copying copperplate maxims… History was not taught formally; but history readers were in use containing such picturesque stories as those of King Alfred and the cakes, King Canute commanding the waves… and Raleigh spreading his cloak for Queen Elizabeth.” (Lark Rise to Candleford, p.179-80).

The education for most working class children went no further. In 1897 fewer than 7% of children at grammar school came from the working class. When the leaving age was raised to 14 in 1900, two out of 5 working class children still left before this age. The Education Act of 1902 nominally increased the opportunity for children to go on to secondary education but actually reinforced the class divisions in education: “The two systems of education catered for different classes and provided education, different in quality and content, for rulers and ruled.” (A.J.P. Taylor English History 1914-1945, p.226). “The British therefore entered the twentieth century and the age of modern science and technology as a spectacularly ill-educated people.” (E.J. Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire, p.169).

Education in decadence

Paradoxically it is in the period of capitalism’s historic decline that the greatest development of education took place. This is explained by the fact that one of the principal characteristics of decadence is a massively increased role for the state, which more and more has to control all aspects of the nation in order to compete with its rivals. Education became an integral part of state capitalism, and education policy was determined by the economic and political needs of the ruling class. As in many areas, war provided much of the impetus, with three of the major pieces of legislation in the 20th century directly following wars (the 1902 Act after the Boer War, the 1918 Act after the First World War and the 1944 Act towards the end of the second).

The 1918 Act proposed a system of education stretching from nursery schools to adult evening classes. However most of these proposals were swept aside as the economy went into recession. Where spending had increased between 1914 and 1922 from £14.7m to £51m, it was cut by nearly £10m the following year. The attempt to extend secondary education failed with only 7.5% going on beyond Elementary School in 1923. While, by 1938 two in three children were attending ‘modern’ schools which offered a slightly extended education, only some 14% of working class children actually went from elementary to secondary education, ensuring that all of the class distinctions were maintained. At higher levels the numbers dropped away completely, with just 0.4% to 0.5% of Elementary school pupils going on to university.

The attempt to plan a more efficient education system for the needs of capitalism continued, notably with the Hadow Report commissioned by the Labour government of 1924 laying the foundations for the 1944 Act. Education thinking was strongly influenced by pseudo-scientific studies of the child mind and the supposed inherited nature of intelligence which justified the existing division of society. While all children were to go from primary to secondary education only a minority were to go to the elite grammar school with the majority going to Secondary Moderns or, in a few cases, to technical schools. All children, however, were to receive religious instruction, which was made compulsory for the first time by the 1944 Act.

The introduction of comprehensive schools in the 1960s actually made little difference, since ‘streaming’ and ‘setting’ meant that the divisions merely existed within the schools rather than between them. The period also saw a major expansion of the universities and technical colleges which, for the first time, allowed significant numbers of working class children to go on to further education. However, one of the principal aims of this expansion, to increase the number of workers with higher scientific and technical training, met with little success.

As the economic crisis began to hit home in the 1970s and ‘80s both Labour and Tory governments sought to tie the education system more closely to the economic needs of the ruling class. In the late 1970s Labour introduced a ‘core curriculum’ covering literacy and numeracy. This was developed by the Tories in the 1988 Education Act which established a National Curriculum with attainment targets for all children, who were to be tested at the ages of 7, 11, 14 and 16. Further education is also under attack with the replacement of student grants by loans, which inevitably affects working class children the most. Children now go into education under pressure to achieve spurious ‘targets’ that have nothing to do with realising their potential and leave weighed down by a debt that may take years to pay off. Many now avoid education, either by not attending at all or being disruptive when they are there. A recent report by the TUC revealed that half a million children are employed illegally, with many working unsocial hours and receiving extremely low wages. Thus, as capitalism continues to rot, even the limited reforms it once gave are now under threat, although the needs of competition and political control make it likely that the pace of attacks on education will continue to be tightly controlled.

Part 3: Defence of state education is not a workers’ demand

In WR 243 we outlined the marxist critique of education, recalling that the workers’ movement in the 19th century gave a high priority to the struggle for education and also supported self-education by the working class. In WR 244 we examined the system of education set up by the ruling class in Britain in the 19th and 20th centuries, concluding that its fundamental role is to produce workers with the necessary skills to serve the needs of the economy and to reinforce the ideology of the ruling class as a means of controlling the working class. Capitalism is unable to offer an education that meets the needs and potential of humanity. In this concluding article we show the marxist approach and look at the practical lessons from the Russian revolution, as well as the position of revolutionaries today.

The Russian Revolution

The demand for compulsory education had been part of the programme of Russian Social Democracy, as it had of all Social Democratic parties in the period before the revolution. Following the revolution some immediate steps were taken to extend education to the masses. However, the difficult situation in which the revolution developed and the rapid spread of the counter-revolution meant that these could only be first hesitant steps. But this did not prevent the Bolsheviks from setting out a long term perspective for the development of education, which was seen as central to the establishment of communism.

The priority given to education is shown in the setting up of the Commissariat of Public Education in December 1917. Immediate steps included the confiscation of private libraries for collective use, extending opening hours of libraries and the creation of a system to exchange books across the country. In August 1918 the Council of People’s Commissars called for measures to be taken to increase the availability of higher education, concluding that “Priority must certainly go to workers and poor peasants, who are to be given grants on an extensive scale” (Lenin, Collected Works, vol.28, p.48.). The Programme of the Russian Communist Party, adopted in March 1919, set out a series of measures, the majority of which were aimed at overcoming the country’s previous backwardness. It proposed free education for all children up to the age of 17, the provision of food, clothing, footwear and educational materials by the state, the creation of crèches and nurseries to reduce the workload on women and a range of measures for the education of adult workers and peasants. Lenin also argued that education was an important aspect of the struggle to increase production.

One of Lenin’s repeated concerns was to transform the educational system and, in particular, to overcome opposition from teachers and other educationalists. In 1918 Lenin talked of teachers being “slow in making up their minds to work with the Soviet Government” (ibid, vol.27, p.445). The following year he told a conference of the teachers’ union that “I think that now the vast majority of teachers will quite sincerely come over to the side of the government of working and exploited people in the struggle for the socialist revolution” (ibid, vol.28, p.407). By 1920 he spoke of solving “the cultural and educational problem” in “five to ten years” (ibid, vol.30, p.379). At the same time however, he was also warning about the slow pace of the campaign against illiteracy. As the revolutionary wave weakened the situation got worse. By 1922 Lenin was complaining that “five years after the proletariat captured political power, the young people in the proletariat’s state schools and universities are taught (or rather corrupted) by the old bourgeois scientists using the old bourgeois junk” (ibid, vol.33, p.246). As the counter-revolution gathered pace the education system increasingly reverted back to the bourgeois form.

Education and the creation of communism

Unlike the bourgeoisie, communists do not pretend that education is neutral, standing above the clash of class interests. In capitalism education defends the class interests of the exploiters. After the proletarian revolution it will defend the class interests of the exploited in the struggle for communism.

The political role of education was set out bluntly in the Programme of the Russian Communist Party. This called for the transformation of the school “so that from being an organ for maintaining the class domination of the bourgeoisie, it shall become an organ for the complete abolition of the division of society into classes, an organ for the communist regeneration of society…the school must not be merely a means for the conveyance of the principles of communism generally, but a means for the conveyance of the ideology and of the organisation and educational influence of the proletariat to the semi-proletarian strata of the working masses to the end that there shall ultimately be educated a new generation capable of establishing communism” (Bukharin and Preobrazhensky, The ABC of Communism, p.444). At the heart of the programme was the proposal for a “unified labour school…with instruction in the native tongue, co-education, absolutely secular education… an instruction in which theory shall be closely linked with socially productive labour, an instruction which shall produce a many-sided development of the members of communist society”. This echoed Marx’s ideas about education, while the commentary on the Programme contained in the ABC of Communism recalled his description of the realisation of individual potential in communist society: “Every citizen in such a society must be acquainted with the elements, at least, of all crafts. In communist society there will be no closed corporations, no stereotyped guilds, no petrified specialist groups. The most brilliant man of science must also be skilled in manual labour… play should gradually pass into work by an imperceptible transition, so that the child learns from the very outset to look upon labour, not as a disagreeable necessity or as a punishment, but as a natural and spontaneous expression of faculty.” (ibid, p.288. For a fuller discussion of the Programme of the Russian Communist Part see International Review 95).

The same understanding of the political nature of education led revolutionaries of the time, such as the Dutch International Communist Group (GIK), to see the re-introduction of authoritarian regulations in the schools as a sign of the advance of the counter-revolution (see the text of the GIK reprinted in International Review 105).

That the Russian revolution was unable to even begin to translate this aspiration into reality does not in any way lessen its validity. If the proletariat seizes power again it will also take up again the struggle to transform education courageously attempted by the Bolsheviks.

Revolutionaries and education today

If one reads the platforms and manifestos of revolutionary groups today, such as the ICC and the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party (IBRP), no mention will be found of education. This is fundamentally because the demand for education is no longer a revolutionary or even a radical demand since education is essential for bourgeois society today. This applies both to the most developed countries and the least. The limitation of education in the latter stems fundamentally from their weak position within the global economy, even if the lack of education contributes to that weakness in turn.

The ABC of Communism remains a useful starting point for understanding the role of education in capitalism: “In bourgeois society the school has three principal tasks to fulfil. Firstly, it inspires the coming generation of workers with devotion and respect for the capitalist regime. Secondly, it creates from the young of the ruling classes ‘cultured’ controllers of the working population. Thirdly, it assists capitalist production in the application of sciences to technique, thus increasing capitalist profits” (op.cit., p.279). However, important developments mean that this analysis has to be brought up to date. The Bolsheviks’ programme was drawn up at the dawn of the period of revolutions and just after capitalism had entered its period of decadence. Revolutionaries had only drawn out some of the implications of state capitalism, and their analyses were marked by the positions of the previous period. In addition, the Bolsheviks were influenced by the backward nature of education in Russia, where some supporters of tsarism “considered popular ignorance to be the main prop of the autocracy” (ibid, p.280, fn). The explains the failure of the ABC to see that as well as preparing new workers ideologically, bourgeois education also aims to prepare them practically to serve the needs of capitalism and that, in order to do so it must open the doors of secondary and higher education to the working class. The point concerning the close relationship between industry and the education establishment is still true. If anything, this has become even closer, with industry funding much of the research undertaken in universities and paying for many professorial chairs. Above all, what remains valid is the recognition that bourgeois education reflects the class interests of the bourgeoisie.

This analysis does not mean revolutionaries ‘reject education’. But there are certain ideas in the field of education which have to be fought.

Firstly, we reject the call of the leftists to defend state education. It promotes the illusion that the capitalist state could be made to offer a real education to the working class. It is worth recalling the position of Marx and Engels, when they were in the Communist League, that the demand for education is a democratic, not a communist, demand. Today capitalism can give nothing because of the constant threats of a permanent economic crisis. Communists should not join the bourgeoisie in trying to fool the working class that capitalism can meet its needs.

Secondly, we oppose the rejection of education and the identification of teachers as ‘part of the bourgeoisie’. The disaffection of growing numbers of children may be an understandable response to a society that offers no future, but it is an expression of despair that offers no perspective. Ignorance is not revolutionary and history has shown that it is the ally of reaction. The idea that teachers are not part of the working class is quite widespread. For example, in the 80s the British journal Wildcat described teachers as ‘soft cops’ and opposed their strike action. More recently, the Anarchist Federation criticised striking school students in France who called for more teachers, making the same argument as Wildcat: “Did you ever hear of an action by prisoners whose aim was more wardens?” (Organise! 50, Winter ‘98-’99). The fact that teachers are part of an education system that spreads the ideology of the bourgeoisie does not exclude them from the working class. Like all workers, all they have to sell is their labour power. One of the consequences of the spread of education is that teachers are no longer part of the petty-bourgeoisie, but have become proletarians. To be consistent, ‘revolutionaries’ such as Wildcat and the AF, should also exclude workers in the media and publishing industries since they also help to spread bourgeois ideology. Equally, the fact that teachers often have illusions in bourgeois society and advance reactionary demands does not exclude them from the working class, any more than it excludes the Rover car workers who marched behind Union Jacks in Birmingham. The fact is that the working class exists in capitalism and, through its labour, reproduces it day in and day out. The working class has no choice but to live the contradictions of capitalism. To pretend that it can be exploited by capital but untainted by capitalist ideology, is to reject the basic social reality in which all workers find themselves.

Thirdly, we reject the idea of opting out of education, either to send children to ‘alternative’ schools or to indulge in ‘home-teaching’. These are not an option for the working class. They have nothing to do with the attempts by the Chartists and Owenites in the 19th century to establish their own schools, since these were part of the infancy of the workers’ movement when many such utopian ideas flourished. They were left behind as the movement developed and it was understood that capitalism had to be confronted and overthrown. Today, all such efforts are a retreat from the necessary confrontation with capitalist society rather than an honest attempt to go beyond it.

Just as the working class needs health care, so it needs education. It has no choice but to use the health care and education that it can get from the bourgeoisie. This does not require the working class to defend the NHS and the education system any more than requires workers in the car industry to defend Rover, or Ford or BMW. It is not through campaigns to ‘Save the NHS’ or ‘Defend state education’ that it will succeed but through the exercise of its collective strength against the capitalist state. A proletarian revolution will lay the basis for a communist society way beyond the limitations of the bourgeois world. This will require a fundamental reorganisation of education in the post-revolutionary period of transition to a truly human community.

North 14/5/01