On several occasions, we have welcomed the emergence of revolutionary groups and elements in Eastern Europe, and in particular in Russia. They are clearly appearing within an international context. On every continent, the proletarian political groups that represent the tradition of the communist left have in the last few years been making contact with this kind of element. We should therefore understand this as a characteristic medium-term tendency of the present period. Ever since the collapse of the USSR and its imperialist bloc, the bourgeoisie has been triumphantly proclaiming the bankruptcy of communism and the end of the class struggle. Already unsettled by these events, the working class could not but retreat under the hammer blows of the bourgeoisie's ideologica the bourgeoisie's ideological campaigns. But outside period of counter-revolution, a historic class cannot help reacting against attacks which call so deeply into question its own being and perspective. If it is unable to defend itself through the generalisation of its economic demands, then it will do so by strengthening its political vanguard. The isolated elements, discussion circles, nuclei and little groups should not look to themselves or to coincidence to find the reason for their existence. They are a product of the international working class, and a heavy responsibility lies on their shoulders. They must first recognise the historic process of which they are a product, and fight to the utmost for their consciousness and their political clarity, without being put off by the difficulty of the task.
In the countries at the periphery of the great capitalist powers, these small minorities are confronted with innumerable difficulties: geographical dispersal, language problems, economic backwardness. To these material difficulties are added political ones, resulting from the weakness of the workers' movement and the absence of a solid tradition of revolutionary marxism. In Russia, the “land of the great lie” as Anton Ciliga put it (in his book Au pays du grand mensonge, published in 1938), where the Stalinist counter-rhe Stalinist counter-revolution was at its most terrible, the destruction and distortion of the communist programme was pushed to the limit. The potential contained in these new revolutionary energies can be measured by the way in which they strive to overcome these difficulties:
by the assertion of proletarian internationalism, as we can see in their denunciation of the war and all the imperialist camps in the wars in Chechnya and ex-Yugoslavia,
in their search for international contacts,
This has always been the terrain for the development of revolutionary marxism: international, internationalist, and developing a historical viewpoint.
This approach reveals the truly proletarian nature of these groups, which were rapidly confronted with the need to set themselves apart from present-day Trotskyism - which can always find good reasons to invite the workers to take part in imperialist war - and Maoism, that pure offspring of Stalinist “national-communism”. This is a class frontier sepa class frontier separating the internationalist communist left from “leftism” [i].
Obviously, all these proletarian elements, produced by the same situation, are very heterogeneous. To refuse to accept the identification of Stalinism and communism, to denounce the most outrageous assertions of the enemy's propaganda, is not the most difficult, since their bourgeois nature comes quickly to the surface. “It was Lenin that laid the foundations for the regime which was later to be called 'Stalinist'”. For the less subtle journalists, the proof “is that Lenin was the founder of the Communist International, whose aim was 'world socialist revolution'. By his own confession, Lenin only undertook the October revolution because he was convinced of the inevitability of a European revolution, starting with Germany” (from L'Histoire, n°250, p.19). But the bourgeoisie's offensive is not limited to this caricature. We still have to identify and defend the fundamental significance of the Russian revolution and Lenin's work. Here we come up against, not just the subtle degradation of marxist theory by leftism, but also a series of dangerous confusions, or programmatic points which remain th which remain the object of fierce discussion within the proletarian political movement.
There is thus a whole process of clarification to be undergone, which all these elements have not necessarily taken to its conclusion. In order to understand Stalinism, it is necessary to confront the Trotskyist theory of a “degenerated workers' state”, the anarchist idea that this is nothing but the inevitable product of an “authoritarian socialism”, or the perfectly mechanistic marxism of the councilists, which sees Bolshevism as an instrument adapted to the needs of capitalism in Russia. Behind these questions, lies the problem of the communist programme's historic descent and coherence. The rejection of activist impatience, and confrontation with this problem, is a condition for joining the ranks of those anonymous militants, who today continue the struggle for the same communism that Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto presented to the proletariat 150 years ago.
But what is the thread linking the proletarian struggle yesterday, today, and tomorrow? To pick it up, we must always start from the proletariat's last revolutionary experience. Today, this means starting from the revolution of October 1917. It is not a matter of religious respect for the past, but a critical evaluation of the revolution, it of the revolution, its magnificent steps forward but also its errors and its defeat. The Russian revolution itself would have been impossible without the lessons drawn from the Paris Commune. Without the critical balance-sheet of the Commune, drawn up in the “Addresses” to the General Council of the IWA, and Lenin's superb synthesis in State and Revolution, the Russian proletariat could not have conquered. Here lies the profound unity of theory and practice, of the communist programme and action. And it was the Fractions of the Communist Left which undertook the heavy task of drawing up a balance-sheet of the Russian revolution. A balance-sheet which will be every bit as vital for the next revolution as it was in the past.
This is why we warmly welcome, and support with all our strength the efforts aimed at reappropriating this balance-sheet. On our side, we have tried not only to make available all the documents of the communist left that these comrades need, but also to make known their own most important positions when the problems of translation could be overcome, to take part, in a militant spirit, in the controversies on the most important political questions, with that openness and solidarity which characterises discussion among communists.
We have already given an account of the evolution of the he evolution of the proletarian political milieu in Russia, in the International Review n°s 92 and 101, and in our territorial press. In this article, we intend to make public our correspondence with the Southern Bureau of the Marxist Labour Party. The MLP places itself within the continuity of the workers' movement, and in this sense the term “Labour” refers directly to the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. In this correspondence, the comrades are writing in the name of the Southern Bureau, since they cannot commit the whole MLP to all the details of their positions, given that the discussion is still continuing within the MLP itself. But let us leave them to present, themselves, their political struggles since their first congress in March 1990, which decided on the formation of the “MLP - The party of the dictatorship of the proletariat”[ii].
“A general good humour presided at the creation of a new communist party, which clearly distinguished it from Gorbachev's CPSU, which still existed in the USSR at the time. But the ideological make-up of the participants at this first congress was as varied as it was unstable,as it was unstable, and a first split took place, with a small group of 12 people (who thought that Russia was a “feudal state” with a large-scale developed industry, and that the USSR would therefore have to go through a bourgeois revolution before arriving at the socialist revolution); immediately after the split, they met in an adjacent room and set up a committee for the formation of a 'democratic (marxist) labour party'. But they came to nothing and dissolved” (letter of 10/07/1999).
“There were no Trotskyists as this first congress, but there remained a few Stalinists and supporters of the 'industrial feudalism' idea who, unlike the splitters, did not think that a bourgeois revolution was necessary. Nonetheless, all the participants united around the slogans: 'The working class must organise itself' and 'The power of the soviets is the workers' power'. The second congress also took place in Moscow in September 1990. It adopted several texts of the party, including the programme. The idea of the state capitalist nature of the USSR was adopted. It goes without saying that the remaining defenders of “industrial feudalism in the USSR' left the party during this congress, and formed their own 'Party of the dictatorship of the proletariat (Bolshevik)'. The Stalinists, of whom there were very few, there were very few, also left the party” (idem).
“The MLP's first conference in February 1991 dropped the term 'The party of the proletarian dictatorship' from the group's name. In 1994-95, a little fraction formed inside the party, which thought that the mode of production in the USSR had been neo-asiatic. In early January 1996, this fraction split and joined the (Argentine) Morenist Trotskyists of the International Workers' Party, who are quite active in Russia and the Ukraine” (idem).
The programme adopted at the Second Congress included in particular, the following basic principles:
more precisely, the dictatorship of the urban working class is necessary, but not of the party of the proletarian dictatorship or that of 'all the workers', still less of 'all the people';
the ruin of the Russian party of the proletariat in the 1920s, and the necessity for its creation today;
And the comrades end by saying that: “Although the 1990 programme did not contain a criticism of the theory of 'socialism in one country', or the necessity for the world revolution, these ideas for us are a commonplace, and were understood as being self-evident” (idem).
We can see how bitter was the struggle in Russia, how vital it was to break with the defrocked Stalinists who still took themselves for revolutionaries. We can also see the pressure exerted by a whole panoply of Trotskyist sects, each trying to sell its own patented revolutionary recipe. In 1980, the Western trades unions (CFDT in France, AFL-CIO in the USA) hastened to contribute their logistic support to Solidarnosc, against the struggle of the Polish workers. Today, it is the Trotskyists who are rushing eastwards, with their good advice and their subsidies, to prevent the rebirth of a proletarian political milieu. For the moment, this rebirth can only concern a minority, faced with a multitude of expressions of a ruling ideology which is, by definition, omnipresent.
In their letters of the 15th March and 20th March 2000, the comrades took position on our polemic with the IBRP published in International Review n°100, on the class struggle in the countries ofle in the countries of the capitalist periphery, but above all they developed a series of official positions of the MLP's Southern Bureau.
The author of the two letters is explicit: “The other members of the SB of the MLP agree with the main positions of this commentary. You can therefore consider the above as our joint position” (20/03).
Let us explain first of all that the comrades were somewhat disconcerted by the polemic between the ICC and the IBRP, simply because they had not yet had the possibility of examining closely the fundamental positions of each organisation. This is why they had some difficulty in identifying the real disagreements, and saw them as mere squabbles, emphasising one aspect of reality rather than another, “since they are very often two sides of the same dialectical unity”, as they say. In the end, “You are all right”, depending on one's viewpoint. We think that experience and discussion will allow them to get a clearer view of what the proletarian camp has in common, and where the disagreements lie. The comrades write: “We think that the weakness of the Communist Left in Western Europe is this: instead of co-operating successfully as equals, either you ignore each other, or else you 'unmask' the others by 'pulling the blanket to youing the blanket to your side of the bed', as the Russians say (...) For us, the SB of the MLP, all the Left Communists, the 'statecapists' [ie those who recognise the state capitalist nature of the USSR], should work together as scientific collaborators in the same research institute!” (15/03).
We are not afraid of irony, which all the great revolutionaries enjoyed, for our purpose in putting forward the real positions of our adversaries is to show where they lead, and to defend firmly what we consider to be marxism's untouchable principles. Our attack is not directed at any particular person or group, but an opportunist approach or a theoretical error which we will pay for dearly tomorrow. This is why revolutionary intransigence never contradicts the need for solidarity among communists.
On the basis of this first impression, the comrades conclude that the whole Communist Left is weak, as a historic current. And it is above all this idea that we want to criticise. Seeing that the IBRP and the ICC disagree on the questions of imperialism and the decadence of capitalism, the comrades consider that this is an error of method, that it is not a matter of “either ... or”, but of “both ... and”. Indeed, the same reproach is often made of the communist left. It is obvious that we havevious that we have not adopted all the positions of the Communist Left as it began to emerge from the Communist International. By contrast, it has been wrongly accused of being anti-party, characterised by an activist impatience, a facile radicalism unable to make concessions, and leanings towards anarchism, leading in the end to a sterile purism which was unable to see questions other than in terms of black and white: one thing or the other. All the leading members of the Communist Left were profoundly marxist and deeply attached to the idea of the party. Their aim was precisely to defend the party against opportunism. This was the job at hand. “Comrade”, wrote Gorter in his Reply to comrade Lenin, “the formation of the Third International has by no means done away with opportunism in our own ranks. We can see it here and now in all the communist parties, in every country. Moreover, it would have been a miracle, and contrary to all the laws of development, if the disease of which the Second International died had not survived it inside the Third International!”. Bordiga took up the same idea: “It would be absurd, sterile, and extremely dangerous to claim that the party and the International are mysteriously safe from any relapse into opportunism or any tendency to return to it!” (Dn to it!” (Draft Theses of the Left, Congress of Lyon, 1926). This was a sign that it was necessary to work as a fraction, not simply as an opposition, which was to lead Trotsky's current to a dead-end, then to complete bankruptcy. The Left thereby asserted itself as the true heir to the marxist current in the history of the workers' movement. It returned to the task that Lenin had begun in 1903 against opportunism within the 2nd International, which had allowed the Bolsheviks to denounce both imperialist camps in 1914, to remain faithful to the principles of communism, and so allow the party to play its part to the full in the insurrection of October. It was a work for the party, not against the party. They had to fight to the end despite the exclusions, and all the barriers put in their way by the formal discipline of the leadership. This was the true spirit of Lenin, which inspired the left. In 1911, Lenin gave systematic expression to the notion of the fraction, using the experience that the Bolsheviks had gained since the formation of their fraction at the Geneva conference of 1904: “A fraction is an organisation within the party, which is united not by the workplace, nor by language or any other objective condition, but by a system of common conceptions on the problems posed to the party” (On the new fraction of conciliators, the virtuous). Revolutionary intransigence is absolutely not opposed to realism, it alone can really take account of the concrete situation. What could be more realistic than the Italian Left's rejection of Trotsky's position, that 1936 saw the opening of a new revolutionary period?
The fraction is central to the question of a historical heritage. It is the fraction that ensures the link between the old party and the new, provided that it is able to draw the lessons of the working class' experience, and translate them into a new enrichment of the programme. For example, revolutionaries had seen, since the First World War, that the role of the bourgeois parliament had been completely transformed. But it was the communist left which drew the consequences on the level of principles: the rejection of revolutionary parliamentarism and any participation in the elections of bourgeois democracy. It was the Italian Communist Left which worked out the role of the fraction in greatest depth:
The comrades of the MLP remind us that for dialectical materialism, the movement of reality is a complex phenomenon where a multitude of factors enter into motion. But they forget that the system of contradictions that produces reality opens at certain moments onto a clear-cut alternative. Then it is either one thing, or another, either socialism or barbarism, either a proletarian policy or a bourgeois policy. The centrist drift of the leadership of the International, from the slogan of “conquering the masses” onwards, lies entirely in the search for immediatist short-cuts which profoundly altered its class policy; both the councils and the unions, both the extra-parliamentary struggle and revolutionary parliamentarism, both internationalism and nationalism... And it was a disaster. Each political innovation was a step further into defeat. Far from strengthening the parties anning the parties and communist nuclei, the alliances with Social-Democracy did nothing but drain the forces which could only develop on the basis of a clearly communist programme. Lenin's book, Left-wing communism: an infantile disorder, symbolises this centrist turn. He set out to criticise what he considered the inevitable and passing errors of an authentically revolutionary current: “Obviously, the error represented by left doctrinairism in the workers' movement is, at the present moment, a thousand times less dangerous and less serious than the error represented by right doctrinairism...”. But he ends up mixing the positions of the Left with those of anarchism, while at the same time he raises the prestige of the right on the grounds that it still dominates large sections of the proletariat. That is centrism. And the right made extensive use of the authority thus conferred on it to isolate the Left.
The comrades write: “We consider that the 21st century will witness new battles for national independence. Despite capitalism's power (and even decadence, according to you), in the highly developed countries, capitalism in the backward countries continues to develop, to grow at its own pace, so to say. And this is not a question of principles, it's objective reality!” (15/03).
This is indeed an important point of disagreement within the proletarian political milieu. As the comrades know, we think that Lenin was mistaken when he answered Rosa Luxemburg: “National wars in the colonies and semi-colonies are not only likely, they are inevitable in the epoch of imperialism” (On the Junius pamphlet, October 1916). but it is important to insist that this does not lead the comrades to abandon proletarian internationalism, even if - in our opinion - it weakens it. Their concern is to define under what conditions the unity of the international proletariat is possible, not to hide behind Lenin to support one or other imperialist power as the leftists do.
“You have doubtless remarked how little Leninist we are. Nonetheless, we think that Lenin's position was the best on this question. Each nation (attention! Nation, not nationality or national or ethnic group, etc...) has a complete right to self-determination within the framework of its ethnico-historic territory, to the point of a separation and creation of an independent state (...) What interests marxists is the question of the proletariat's free disposal of its self-determination within this or that nation, in o or that nation, in other words the possibility to dispose freely of itself, if it exists already as class for itself, or else the possibility for the pre-proletarian elements to form themselves as a class within the framework of the new bourgeois national state. This is the case in Chechnya. Chechnya-Ingushetia was industrialised under the Soviet power, but more than 90% of the workers were of Russian origin; the Chechens were petty-bourgeois peasants, intellectuals, state functionaries etc. Let the new Chechen bourgeoisie create the national Chechen proletariat, let it begin to exploit its national proletariat, its peasants, its indigenous population (the Russian workers won't come back now to be decapitated by the nationalists), and then we'll see what will become of the 'solid unity of the Chechen nation'! The unity of Russian and Chechen proletarians will become an objective possibility then, and not before” (15/03).
Nonetheless, this position leads to a series of contradictions which the comrades fail to solve simply by declaring that “For us, the recognition of the objectivity of the national struggle does not mean to 'justify' it (and by the way, what does the term 'justify' mean?), or even to call for an alliance with fractions of the national bourgeoisie!” (20/03).
The whole problem is to know what is this objective reality that the comrades are talking about. In fact, it corresponds to a past epoch, the epoch of the formation of bourgeois nations against feudalism. Have the comrades really analysed the nationalist motivation of the Chechen bourgeoisie? If they had, then they would have realised that these national demands no longer have the same content as they did at a previous stage of social development. Rosa Luxemburg sums it up thus: “During the great revolution, the French bourgeoisie had the right to speak as the Third Estate in the name of the 'French people', and even the German bourgeoisie could consider itself, up to a certain point in 1848, as the representative of the German 'people' (...) In both cases, that meant that the revolutionary cause of the bourgeois class, at that stage of social development, coincided with that of the people as a whole, since the latter was still, in relation to the bourgeoisie, an undifferentiated mass opposed to feudal domination” (The national question and autonomy). What the comrades fail to see is that the stage of social development is not determined by the local Chechen situation, but by the social environment, the general situation. Caught up in the bloody game of imperialism, completely depe, completely dependent on the world market, Chechnya has long since shed the main characteristics of a feudal society.
According to the comrades, a progressive bourgeoisie exists in a certain number of countries: “because national capitalism continues to arise spontaneously from the traditional sectors, in conformity with the general laws of the development of peoples in the epoch of the second social super-formation, that of private property. There are three of these formations: the formation of the primitive community (n°1); then the formation of private property - including the slavery of antiquity, feudalism, and capitalism (n°2) - and finally the formation of an authentic communism (n°3). This is the triad according to Marx (see the drafts of his reply to Vera Zassoulitch, 1881). But there are few countries - and there will be fewer and fewer - where a self-developing national capitalism predominates. Where this does happen, the progressive bourgeoisie can come to power with the support of the people (including the workers, especially since they are at a pre-proletarian stage!). But all that is very temporary, since more and more depends on the world imperialist bourgeoisie, as the case of Afghanistan shows us (...) Capitalism can be compared to a wave in the 'sea' ave in the 'sea' of the second super-formation (see above) and not to a wave but to the process of waves! The second super-formation (Marx also called it 'economic') engenders these waves itself from within! But the limits, the boundaries of this 'sea' of the 'economic super-formation' are at the same time the limits of capitalism, they are the coast on which capitalism's undulation 'breaks'.
The essential characteristic of this 'sea' of the economic social formation (the second in the triad) is the law of value. But the 'wave process' begins, is excited by and receives its impetus from... the small owner-producer! He was, is, and will be the active agent of the law of value over the whole extent of the economic social formation (the 'second', that of private capital). This is why capitalism cannot destroy the small producer! And this is why state monopolism cannot be either complete or long-lasting. The wave will ebb! If the Left Communists had analysed things from this point of view, they would have avoided many problems, including in their own relationships! And the place and the role of the world social proletarian revolution would have been much more comprehensible” (20/03).
How are we to explain this perspective of n this perspective of a regression in state capitalism that the comrades defend? Every day confirms the tendency towards the management of the economy by a single collective capitalist, as Engels anticipated in his Anti-Dühring. Everywhere, it is the state that regulates the mergers of the great multinational corporations and imposes on them its orientations. Any state that abandoned such a control would immediately find itself in a position of weakness in the trade war. Their position is doubtless to be explained by the collapse of the USSR. In this case, the comrades are generalising from a specific situation. The USSR was marked by its economic weakness, and what collapsed was not state capitalism, but its most caricatural form, where the vast majority of the economy was nationalised. Direct state ownership of its enterprises is always a sign of weakness. In the most developed countries, state capitalism is just as real, but it is far more flexible since the state only has part ownership in some companies, or else satisfies itself with laying down the economic regulation which every company must obey.
One can understand why the comrades present state capitalism as a passing phenomenon, since for them it is the small independent producer who best symbolises private property and the law of value. It is true thatvalue. It is true that capitalism took off within a society characterised by private property and commodity exchange; indeed capitalism is its logical conclusion, its high point, when commodities are transformed into capital. It is also true that capitalism will never be able to eradicate completely the small producer. But it is equally true that the small producer is constantly under attack from competition. Today, when overproduction has become generalised and permanent, a part of the bourgeoisie is ejected into the petty-bourgeoisie, but at the same time innumerable small proprietors are ruined and become unemployed, or survive with a small business which is often at the limit of legality. The small producer is therefore not characteristic of capitalism, but rather a survival of pre-capitalist societies, or of the first stage of capitalism's development. In bourgeois mythology, the capitalist is always presented as a small producer who has become a big producer thanks to his own efforts. The small artisan of the Middle Ages has become the great industrialist. Historical reality is quite different. In decomposing feudalism, it was not the urban artisans who emerged as the capitalist class, but rather the merchants. Moreover, the first proletarians were often none other than these same artisans subjected to the formal domination of capitmination of capital. The comrades forget that before being a producer, the capitalist is first and foremost a merchant, a trader. He is a merchant who trades mainly in labour power.
It seems that the comrades have drawn their inspiration from a passage in Left-wing communism, an infantile disorder. Lenin explains that the bourgeoisie's power “lies, not only in the strength of international capital, the strength and durability of their international connections, but also in the force of habit, in the strength of small-scale production. Unfortunately, small-scale production is still widespread in the world, and small-scale production engenders capitalism and the bourgeoisie continuously, daily, hourly, spontaneously, and on a mass scale” (published on https://www.marxists.org [1]). Let us remember the context. We are in 1920, and since 1918 a controversy has been developing within the Bolshevik party between Lenin and the Left Communists who published the paper Kommunist. The Left's leading figure, Bukharin, soon rejoined the majority of the party, after finding himself in the minority over the Brest-Litovsk treaty. But the group continued the controversy over the question of state uestion of state capitalism, which Lenin presented as a stage on the way to socialism, and therefore to a step forward. It is true that the victorious proletariat was confronted not just with the fury of the old ruling classes, but also with the dead weight of the vast peasant masses, who had their own reasons for resisting any further advance of the revolutionary process. But these social strata weighed on the proletariat above all through the state which, with its natural tendency to defend the social status quo, tended to become an autonomous power in its own right. All the revolutionaries knew that isolation would be fatal to the Russian revolution. The problem was whether bourgeois power would be re-established through a military victory of the White armies, or under the enormous pressure of the petty-bourgeoisie. From this standpoint, the party was unable to see the process that was to lead to a rebirth of the Russian bourgeoisie through the formation of a state bureaucracy. The Left's criticisms contained many weaknesses (how indeed could it be otherwise in the heat of events?), and Lenin often rightly put his finger on them. But the Communist Left demonstrated its full strength when it denounced the danger of state capitalism. We find the same approach later on, in the German Left which was the first to analyse Stalinist Ruyse Stalinist Russia as state capitalist. In the passage quoted above, Lenin expresses profound confusions on capitalism's nature, which were already present in his 1916 pamphlet Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism. On this point as on others, today it is possible to synthesise the contributions of all the Communist Left, despite its diversity and sometimes contradictory positions, because it remained fundamentally faithful to the marxist method and communist principles: “State capitalism is not an organic step towards socialism. In fact it represents capitalism’s last form of defence against the collapse of its system and the emergence of communism. The communist revolution is the dialectical negation of state capitalism” (International Review n°99).
In our opinion, it is a mistake to present the small independent producer as the agent of the law of value. More generally, it is not the capitalists who make capitalism, but the reverse: capitalism engenders capitalists. Applying this marxist approach to Russia, we can understand why “the state did not function as we intended”, to use Lenin's words. The power that imposed its direction on the Russian state was far greater than the NEP-men, or private capitalism, or small property: it was the vast impersonal power of wimpersonal power of world capital which inexorably determined the course of the Russian economy and the Soviet state. If the comrades have difficulty in grasping the fundamental nature of capitalism, or of state capitalism as an expression of a decadent system, it is doubtless also because they are looking at things in the very long term, at the same level as Marx in his letter to Vera Zassoulitch when he divides humanity's history into three periods: the archaic social formation (primitive communism), the secondary social formation (class society), and modern communism, which re-establishes collective production and appropriation at a higher level. For Marx, the examples of primitive societies were one more proof that the family, private property, and the state are not inherent to human nature. These texts are also a denunciation of a fatalistic interpretation of economic evolution, and of the bourgeois vision of a linear progress, without contradictions. But if we remain on this terrain, then it becomes impossible to examine precisely what is specific about capitalism, and above all to see that capitalism itself has a history, that it changes from being a progressive system to become a serious barrier to the development of the productive forces. Not that the foundations of such an analysis are not already present in the Communist Manifesto, as in other texts by Marx. After the Paris Commune and the end of the great national struggles of the 19th century, Marx was able to see that the bourgeoisie in the major capitalist countries no longer played a revolutionary role on the historical stage, even if capitalism still had a vast field of expansion before it. A new period, of colonial conquest and imperialism, was opening up. This approach made it possible for marxism to anticipate historical evolution, and to foresee capitalism's entry into its period of decadence. This is very clear in this passage in the second draft: “The capitalist system is past its apogee in the West, approaching the point where it will no longer be anything but a regressive social system” (quoted in Tedor Shanin, Late Marx and the Russian road, January 1985)
Marx's reflections on the Russian rural commune were to be travestied by certain leftists. The American Shanin, for example, sees them as the proof that socialism could be achieved through peasant revolutions on capitalism's periphery. Without sharing his admiration for Ho Chi Minh and Mao, Raya Dunayevskaya and the News and Letters group have taken the same approach. They consider that the Marx of the 1880s is looking for a new revolutionary subject, other than the workinother than the working class. A part of leftism thus presents the working class as one revolutionary subject amongst others: primitive tribes, women, gays, blacks, youth, the peoples of the “Third World”.
Such aberrations have nothing in common with the ideas of the Russian comrades. But as we will see, their defence of the possibility of national wars today leads them to an original analysis of the October 1917 revolution.
“As for ourselves [the SB of the MLP], we think that history has already refuted this cornerstone Leninist conception of the 'weak link'! But attention, in a very original manner: it has sown that it was possible to break 'the chain of imperialism' and even to 'build socialism' in backward countries (or 'retarded' as you call them, although I would make a distinction here: socialism began to be 'built' not only in capitalistically retarded countries, in Russia for example, but also in Mongolia, Vietnam, etc, which are really backward). And we see: yes, it is possible to break the chain, to make a 'socialist revolution', it is even possible to build socialism in separate countries and to set it up (in other words, 'finish building it')... But! But all this does not in any way lead to communism! Never and in no way>! Never and in no way [in English in the original]! Why, from a theoretical point of view, were the Bolsheviks able to take this path, why were they able to deceive themselves and many others, including the Left Communists? The cause of all that lies in... just one word (and the question, the problem is not my subjectivism: under this word is hidden a whole incorrect, fundamentally anti-marxist conception!), this word (this 'order' of the day!) is 'the socialist revolution'! When Marx, and above all Engels, accepted such a travesty of the concept of 'the social revolution of the proletariat', of the world communist revolution! As for the 'socialist revolution', it ends sooner or later in 'building socialism', and then it turns out that this 'socialism', whether 'state' or 'market' or 'national', etc, in reality does not break with capitalism!” (15/03).
“Where the exogenous capitalist sector exists, the progressive bourgeoisie plays a role and has an influence inversely proportional to the sector's degree of maturity: the bourgeoisie of the imported capitalist sector weighs on the progressive national bourgeoisie and corrupts it, without speaking of the world (transnational) imperialist bourgeoisie. These two sectors were present in Russia at the beginning oia at the beginning of the 20th century, and Russian marxism was the expression of relationships within the exogenous capitalist sector. But then the Bolsheviks decided to speak for all the exploited: in the sector of imported developed capitalism, in that of national capitalism (and even in the agricultural sector with its surviving rural community). And so, they became 'social-jacobins' and proclaimed the 'socialist revolution'” (20/03).
“You deal with the problem of the objective and the subjective in the world proletarian revolution, and this is correct. But why do you not have the slightest doubt that 'objectively the revolution has been possible since the world imperialist war of 1914', etc? Did not Marx and Engles also, in their time, think that 'the revolution was objectively possible'? Remember the categories of the dialectic: possibility and reality, necessity and eventuality! As we know, it is necessary to distinguish abstract (formal) from practical (concrete) possibility. Abstract possibility is characterised by the absence of the main obstacles to the object's becoming, nonetheless not all the necessary conditions are present for its realisation. Practical possibility possesses all the conditions necese conditions necessary for its realisation: latent in reality, it becomes a new reality under certain conditions. The change in these conditions as a whole determine the transition from abstract to practical possibility, and this latter is transformed into reality. The numerical measure of the possibility is expressed in the notion of probability. Necessity, as we know, is the mode of (the) transformation of possibility into reality, for which there is only one possibility in a certain object, that which is transformed into reality. And, on the contrary, eventuality is the mode of (the) transformation of possibility into a reality for which there are several different possibilities within a certain object (under certain circumstances, of course), which can be transformed into reality, but only one of which will actually be realised” (15/03).
We do not understand why we should say that the construction of socialism in one country is both possible and impossible because it does not break in any way with capitalism. We prefer to stick to the assertion that socialism in one country was a mystification which had no relationship with reality, a weapon of the counter-revolution. What the comrades seem to be saying is that at some point the Bolsheviks ceased to defend the interests of the proletariat. That the proletariat. That was indeed the Stalinist counter-revolution. The whole difficulty of the problem, which many revolutionaries have struggled with since the 1930s, is that the counter-revolution only comes at the end of a whole process of degeneration and opportunist drift. In such a long, and sometimes imperceptible process, we have in some sense a transformation of quantity into quality. What was at first no more than a problem within the workers' movement has become the bourgeois counter-revolution. But the break in the nature of the Soviet regime is no less clear for all that: it takes place through Stalin's elimination of the Bolshevik old guard, the replacement of the perspective of world revolution by the defence of Russian national capital. The weakening of the power of the workers' councils, and of a Bolshevik party undermined by opportunism, followed parallel paths until the establishment of the power of the Russian state bourgeoisie. The memory of the real movement of class confrontations at the end of the 1920s in Russia arms us not only against bourgeois propaganda, but also against any weakening of revolutionary theory such that it might see a continuity, whether objective or subjective, between Lenin and Stalin.
The comrades end up with just such a weakening when they lose sight of the Stalinist counter-revolutiinist counter-revolution, and introduce the idea that “ the Bolsheviks decided to speak for all the exploited”. When and why such a decision? Do the terms “all the exploited” mean all the workers, in other words several classes including non-exploiting classes like the peasantry and the rest of the petty bourgeoisie, which are exploited classes under capitalism, as well as the proletariat? If that is the case, then they are accepting as a reality the talk of Stalin, and Mao in particular, on the “bloc of four classes”. At all events, we cannot follow them in their assertion that Marx and Engels accepted (?) the concept of a socialist revolution which “does not break in reality with capitalism”. It is true that some of Marx and Engels' formulations can lead to a confusion between the nationalisation of capitalism and socialism. This is readily understood, at an epoch when the proletariat could still, under certain circumstances, support the progressive bourgeoisie against the remnants of feudalism. Consciousness and programme are the result of a constant battle against the ideology of the ruling class. When revolutionaries sharpen, make more precise, the letter of the programme, they thus remain, and must remain, faithful to the spirit of the previous generation of marxists. Thation of marxists. The definitive correction of the surviving “state capitalist” errors in marxist doctrine was made possible by the experience of the 1917 Russian revolution. But its premises are already present in Marx, through his definition of capital as a social relationship, and of capitalism as a system founded on wage labour, the extraction and realisation of surplus value. Seen like this, the transformation of individual capital property into collective state property in no way changes the nature of society. Moreover, the germ of their critique of the progressive nature of collective state property is already contained in Marx and Engels' struggle against Lassalle's state socialism, which wanted the workers to use the state against the capitalists, and against the Liebknecht/Bebel current within the German social-democracy, who allowed Lassallean formulations to pass through into the Gotha programme.
We might summarise the comrades' thinking as follows. Bolshevism was at first a marxist current expressing the interests of the proletariat in the framework of developed capitalist relationships. But these were foreign in origin, while there existed within Russia a less developed young capitalism which needed an anti-feudal revolution. Thus, the Bolsheviks did not succumb to the Stalinist counter-revolution: they haer-revolution: they had already succumbed to the charm of national capital, and had decided to become “social-jacobins”. Here we see the difference between their vision and that of councilism. For the latter, the Russian revolution could only end in state capitalism, and the Bolsheviks were a reflection of this destiny from the outset. This discovery came late, since it dates from the 1930s when Pannekoek, who by this time had become a councilist, managed the tour de force of revealing Bolshevism's original sin in Lenin's book Materialism and empirio-criticism, written in 1908: “He is clearly and exclusively in the image of the Russian revolution, for which he exerted all his strength. This book is so far in conformity with bourgeois materialism that, had it been known and correctly interpreted in Western Europe... it would have been possible to foresee that in one way or another the Russian revolution could only finish in a kind of capitalism founded on the workers' struggle” (Lenin as philosopher).
The marxist method is based on the concept of the whole, whence it “rises” to comprehend more concrete situations. By starting from the small independent producer, or from a local situation, the comrades are moving away from the marxist method and end up by mistaking a few vesti mistaking a few vestiges of feudalism for a general characteristic. It is useful to remember that in 1917, Russia was the world's fifth industrial power and inasmuch as capitalism's development had largely by-passed the development of artisan production and manufacture, Russian capitalism had already adopted the most modern and concentrated forms: the Putilov factory for example, with more than 40,000 workers, was the world's largest. It is this tendency which gives the key to the situation in Russia, not the opposition between an exogenous and an endogenous capitalism. The development of economic relationships had arrived at a point which had nothing in common with the epoch of the bourgeois revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries. “Since the Crimean war, and its modernisation through reform, the Russian state apparatus survives largely thanks to foreign, mostly French, capital (...) For the last two decades, French capital has served essentially two aims: railway construction thanks to state guarantees, and military spending. To meet these two needs, a powerful large-scale industry has been born in Russia since the 1870s, sheltered by a system of reinforced customs duties. French capital has given rise in Russia to a young capitalism which in turn needs to be constantly supported by substantial imports of machines and other means of production from the leading industrial nations, Britain and Germany” (Rosa Luxemburg, Introduction to political economy). The example of Poland is equally significant. “The great majority of the Polish bourgeoisie is foreign in origin (it settled in Poland at the beginning of the 19th century), and has always been hostile to the idea of national independence. All the more so in that during the 1820s and 30s, Polish industry was focused on exports, even before the creation of a domestic market. The kingdom's bourgeoisie, instead of seeking a national reunification with Galicia and the Principality, always looked to the East for support, since the massive export of textiles to Russia was the foundation of Polish capitalism's growth” (Rosa Luxemburg: The national question and autonomy). The formation of the world market is a major feature of the capitalist mode of production, it is this process that destroys pre-capitalist relationships. It is this dynamic process that creates the conditions for the unity of the international proletariat, not the autonomous development of a national capital. The 1905 revolution gave the first practical demonstration of this process. By contrast, the slogan of the “right of peoples to self-determinationelf-determination”, which the Bolsheviks tragically supported, has only reinforced the division of the proletariat. Has this not been confirmed in practice during the 1920s?
Neither the Bolsheviks, nor any modern bourgeoisie, can be compared with the Jacobins. The end of the formation of the world market, and the crisis of overproduction, have eliminated the possibility of any real development. The Chechen bourgeoisie will never create a national proletariat. Where would it find an outlet for its commodities? Only the proletarian revolution can lay the foundations for an industrialisation of the backward countries. The Communist Manifesto describes very well how the bourgeoisie creates a world in its own image, by exporting cheap commodities and expanding its commercial relationships. But it reaches its limits long before industrialising the whole planet. Marx and Engels had already shown how the insoluble contradictions springing from the relations of wage labour could only lead capitalism to its decadence. Charles Fourier's penetrating critique had already sketched an outline of this idea: “Fourier, as we see, uses the dialectic method in the same masterly way as his contemporary, Hegel. Using these same dialectics, he argues against the talk about illimitable hbout illimitable human perfectibility, that every historical phase has its period of ascent and also its period of descent, and he applies this observation to the future of the whole human race” (https://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877-ad/p3.htm#c1 [2]). Marx explains this phenomenon. At a certain moment in capitalism's development, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall can no longer be compensated by an increase in the mass of surplus value, due to the saturation of the world market. “Now, [the capitalist] has all the more need to find outlets in that his production has increased. Indeed, the more powerful and costly means of production that he has set in motion allow him to sell his commodities more cheaply, but they also force him to sell more, to conquer an incomparably greater market for his commodities (...) Finally, in the same measure in which the capitalists are compelled, by the movement described above, to exploit the already existing gigantic means of production on an ever-increasing scale, and for this purpose to set in motion all the mainsprings of credit, in the same measure do they increase the industrial earthquakes, in the midst of which the commercial world can preserve itself only by sacrificing a portion of its wealth, its products, and even its forces of production, to the gods of the lowe gods of the lower world -- in short, the crises increase. They become more frequent and more violent, if for no other reason, than for this alone, that in the same measure in which the mass of products grows, and there the needs for extensive markets, in the same measure does the world market shrink ever more, and ever fewer markets remain to be exploited, since every previous crisis has subjected to the commerce of the world a hitherto unconquered or but superficially exploited market” (Marx, Wage labour and capital, https://www.marxists.org [1]). It remained for the Left Fractions, with Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg in the lead, to show how the outbreak of the first imperialist world war was the sign that capitalism had entered into its declining phase. The communist revolution was no longer only necessary, it had at last become possible.
At the end of this first response to the comrades of the MLP, while we regret that we have been unable to translate their texts[iii] from the Russian, we call for the development of the debate and reflection.
We hope that the discussion, and mutual criticism, will continue. But we also urge that this debate should not be limited to ourselves: it should be opened to include be opened to include other comrades in Russia, as well as to the other groups of the proletarian political milieu throughout the world.
Pal
iSince May 1968, the term “leftism” has passed into common usage to describe, not the oppositions within the Communist International which Lenin criticised fraternally and which were expressions of the Communist Left, but all those extra-parliamentary currents which, like the Trotskyists and the Maoists (here we should distinguish the “Maoists” of the western countries which we describe as “leftists” from Mao himself who, in theorising a sort of “peasant national communism” never had anything to do with the workers' movement. His was more an “oriental” version of Stalinism), betrayed internationalism, and critically supported the parties of the bourgeois left (socialists and Stalinists) and the unions. It is therefore a term to describe a political tendency which belongs clearly to the bourgeoisie's political apparatus.
iiThis correspondence was originally written in French. The translations are ours, and we have of course done our best not to distort the comrades' meaning, as we understand it.
iiiMost of the texts that we possess, in English or in French, are letters.
There is not one international organisation of the bourgeoisie World Trade Organisation, World Bank, OECD, IMF which doesnt proclaim its intention to do everything it can for sustainable development, so concerned are they for the future generations. Theres not one state which doesnt proclaim its deep respect for the environment. Theres not one ecologically-oriented Non-Government Organisation (NGO) which hasnt organised all sorts of demonstrations, petitions or memorandums. Theres not one bourgeois newspaper which hasnt featured a pseudo-scientific article on global warming. All these fine people, with all their fine intentions, had their representatives at the conference in The Hague from the 13 to the 25 November 2000, which had the aim of defining the ways in which the Kyoto protocol (1) would be put into effect. No less than 2000 delegates, representing 180 countries, surrounded by 4000 observers and journalists, had the job of concocting the miracle recipe for putting an end to climatic abnormalities. Result: Nothing. Strictly zero. Or rather, there was one result: one more proof that for the bourgeoisie, considerations about the survival of humanity fall a very long way behind the defence of the national capital.
Ten years ago, in our article Ecology: Its capitalism thats poisoning the Earth (International Review n°63), the ICC declared: The ecological disaster is now tangibly threatening the very life-support system of the planet. Today we have to say that capitalism is carrying out this threat. Throughout the 90s, the plundering of the planet has continued at a frenzied rhythm: deforestation, soil erosion, toxic pollution of the air, water tables and oceaables and oceans, pillage of natural fossil resources, dissemination of chemical or nuclear substances, destruction of animal or plant species, explosion of infectious diseases, and finally the steady increase in average temperatures over the surface of the planet (seven of the hottest years for millennia were in the 90s). Ecological disasters are becoming more combined, more global, often taking on an irreversible character, with long term consequences that are hard to predict.
And while the bourgeoisie has proved itself incapable of doing the slightest thing even to slow down this destructive folly, it has done a great deal to hide its own responsibility for it behind a multitude of ideological covers. What the ruling class has to do is present ecological calamities when it cannot purely and simply ignore them as outside the sphere of capitalist social relations, outside the class struggle. It thus produces all the false alternatives, from government measures to the anti-globalisation speeches of the NGOs, to obscure the only real perspective for taking humanity out of this nightmare: the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist mode of production by the working class.
For revolutionaries, the real issue here is capitalism's own productionist logic, as Marx analysed in Capital: sed in Capital: Accumulation for accumulations sake, production for productions sake: by this formula classical economy expressed the historical mission of the bourgeoisie, and did not for a single instant deceive itself over the birth-throes of wealth. But what avails lamentations in the face of historical necessity? (Vol 1. Chapter XXIV). Here lies the logical and the unlimited cynicism of capitalism: the accumulation of capital and not the satisfaction of human needs is the real goal of capitalist production, and therefore the fate of the working class, or of the environment, is of little import. With the saturation of markets which became evident in 1914, capitalism entered into decadence. In other words, the accumulation of capital increasingly became a source of conflict and convulsions. During this period, capital's ruthless destruction of the environment takes on a different scale and quality This is the epoch in which all the capitalist nations are forced to compete with each other over a saturated world market; an epoch, therefore, of a permanent war economy, with a disproportionate growth of heavy industry; an epoch characterised by the irrational, wasteful duplication of industrial complexes in each national unit, the rise of the megacities the development of forms of agriculture that have been no less ecologically damaging than most forms of industry (International Review n°63). This tendency has taken a further step in the final phase of capitalist decadence, the phase of decomposition, in which the system has been rotting on its feet for two decades because neither the proletariat nor the bourgeoisie has been able to impose their solution to the crisis: proletarian revolution or generalised war.
Capitalism has put chaos and destruction on the agenda of history. The consequences for the environment are catastrophic. This what we are going to illustrate (in a very partial way, because there are so many examples of the damage being done), while also showing how at every stage the bourgeoisie sets up ideological firebreaks to head off all those who are legitimately asking the question of whether this barbaric cycle of destruction can be stopped.
Capitalism throws the ecosystem out of joint
Because of its global character and implications, the question of climate change is of primary importance. Its no accident that the bourgeoisie has made it one of the major axes of its media campaigns. The pedants may claim that in matters of meteorology and climatology, man has a decidatology, man has a decidedly short memory (Le Monde 10.9.2000), or talk about classic millenarian fears, but such an attitude which the bourgeoisie itself doesnt wholly share anyway is an implicit defence of the status quo, of a dominant position in which one feels oneself to be well-protected. The proletariat cant afford such a luxury. Physically, its always the workers and the poorest sections of the world population who are hit the hardest by the apocalyptic consequences of the disruption in the cycles of terrestrial life which the capitalist apprentice sorcerer has brought about.
The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), which is in charge of synthesising scientific work on climatic change, in its Report to the Decision-makers dated 22 October 2000, summarised the basic elements which had been observed, all of which show a qualitative rupture in the evolution of the climate: Average surface temperature has increased by 0.6% since 1860 New analyses indicate that the 20th century has probably seen the most significant warming in all the centuries for the last thousand years in the northern hemisphere The area of snow cover has diminished by about 10% since the end of the 1960s and the period in which lakes and rivers are under ice inrivers are under ice in the northern hemisphere has diminished by about two weeks in the 20th century ..the thickness of the Arctic ice has diminished by 40% .Average sea levels have risen by between 10 and 20 cm during the 20th century the rhythm of these rising sea levels during the 20th century has been about 10 times higher than in the previous three thousand years Precipitation has increased by between 0.5 and 1% by decade during the 20th century on most continents in the middle and higher latitudes of the northern hemisphere. Rain has diminished in most of the inter-tropical regions
This rupture is even clearer when we look at the concentration of so-called greenhouse gases (2), seeing that since the beginning of the industrial era, the chemical composition of the planet has been through an unprecedented evolution (3), a point that the IPCC doesnt deny: Since 1750, the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide has grown by a third. The present concentration has never been superseded for 420,000 years and probably not for 20 million years The level of concentration of methane in the atmosphere has multiplied by 2.5 since 1750 and continues to grow. s to grow. In fact its essentially in the 20th century, especially in the last few decades, and not since 1750, that these changes have been observed.
The simple fact that you can place in one column the period of the decadence of capitalism, and in the other column periods lasting hundreds of thousands, even millions of years, is in itself the most striking condemnation of the insane irresponsibility of capitalism as a mode of production. It is an undeniable fact that these mutations are the direct result of the savage and anarchic activity of industries and transport systems based on the burning of fossil fuels. It goes without saying that although in the same period capitalism has considerably developed its productive capacities, the working class and the majority of the planets population has not reaped the fruits. From this point of view, the overall human and social balance-sheet of capitalist decadence, with all its accompanying war and poverty, is far more sombre than the climatic balance-sheet in itself, and therefore cannot provide any attenuating circumstances (4).
Furthermore, the IPCC report points out that the proofs of human influence on the global climate are stronger today than at the time of the second report in d report in 1995. This is further evidence against the bourgeoisie, which has not ceased manipulating scientific discourse throughout the 90s, always trying to pose the wrong questions. Thus, once global warming was admitted (still very late in relation to the scientific studies), the bourgeoisies question has been: what is the formal proof that global warming is linked to industrial activity and not to a natural cycle? Posed in this direct manner, it is difficult to respond scientifically. On the other hand, what has always been particularly flagrant is that we have this qualitative rupture in the observed evolution of the climate as described above, at a time when the cyclical tendencies in the climate (which are well known and can be easily modelled because they are determined by astronomical parameters such as the variations in the terrestrial orbit, the inclination of the Earths axis, etc.) place us in a period of relative glaciation over the last 1000 years and for the next 5000 years. And if that werent enough, two other parameters would also point towards things getting colder: the cycle of solar activity and the increased amount of particles in the atmosphere an increase also due to industrial pollution (but also to volcanic eruptions). This says quite enough about the hypocrisy of the bourgeois of the bourgeoisie waiting for proof! Now that it is difficult to deny the capitalist origin of global warming, the new question occupying the media is: can it be demonstrated formally that there is a link between global warming and the extreme climatic phenomena we have seen recently (cyclones Mitch and Eline, storms in France, floods in Venezuela, Britain, etc)? Again, the scientific community is hard placed to answer this not very scientific question, whose sole aim is to instil the idea that perhaps global warming wont have very tangible consequences. Official organisms like Météo-France have come up with some delectably Jesuitical formulations: It has not been shown that the recent extreme events are signs of climatic change, but when this climatic change is fully perceptible, there is no doubt that it will be accompanied by extreme events!
And between now and 2100 the expected climatic change are extremely grave. Again according to the IPCC: the average rise in surface temperature is estimated to be between 1.5 and 6% such an increase is without precedent in the last ten thousand years; meanwhile the rise in sea levels will be an average of 0.47 meters, which is two to four times the rate observed during the 20th century
century. Again, these predictions dont take into account the real rhythm of deforestation (at its present rate, all the forests will have gone in 600 years). The probable consequences of these climatic variations and will be terrible and murderous: floods and cyclones in some regions and drought in others; scarcity of drinking water, the disappearance of animal species, and more. But for Dominique Frommel, the research director at INSERM, the main danger is not there. It resides in mans dependence on the environment. Migrations, the over-concentration of human beings in the urban milieu, the diminution in water supplies, pollution and poverty have always [but capitalism has developed mega-cities, poverty and pollution far more than any other system!] created conditions which facilitate the diffusion of infectious micro-organisms. We know that the reproductive and infectious capacities of insects and rodents, the vectors of parasites or viruses, is connected to the temperature and humidity of their surroundings. In other words, a rise in temperature, even a modest one, gives the green light to the expansion of numerous agents which are pathogenic to man and animals. This is why parasitic diseases such as malaria, schistosomiasis) and sleeping sickness, or viral infections like dengue ions like dengue fever, certain forms of encephalitis or haemorrhaging fevers have gained ground in recent years. Either they are reappearing in areas from where they had previously disappeared, or they are now hitting regions which had previously been spared The projections for the year 2050 show that malaria will menace 3 billion human beings In the same way, the number of diseases transmitted by water is also spiralling. The warming of fresh waters facilitates the proliferation of bacteria. The warming of salt waters particularly when they are enriched by human effluent - allows phytoplanctons, which are the real breeding grounds for the cholera bacillus, to reproduce at an accelerating rate. After virtually disappearing from Latin America around 1960, cholera claimed 1,368, 053 victims between 1991 and 1996. Meanwhile, new infections are appearing or have begun to advance beyond the ecological niches in which they had previously been confined Medicine remains disarmed, despite the progress that has been made, faced with this explosion of so many unexpected pathologies. The epidemiology of infectious diseases .could in the 21st century take on a new visage, notably with the expansion of zoonoses, those infections which can be passed from vertebrate animals to humans, and vice versad vice versa (Manière de Voir, no.50, p77).
At this level of historical responsibility, the ideological response of he bourgeoisie has been to organise gigantic media rodeos, from the Earth Summit at Rio in 1992 to The Hague via Kyoto and Berlin, aimed at making us believe that the ruling class has finally become aware of the dangers menacing the planet. The mystification operates at several levels.
First it aims to give the impression that if the objectives fixed at Kyoto had been attained, that would be a significant first step. But by all the evidence, not only have these objectives not been attained, but, even if they had, the targets were quite derisory and would not have much effect on global warming. All the NGOs and all the ecological parties who take part in the discussions about how to apply the Kyoto protocol are thus part of this mystification. Not even a step sideways has been achieved, let alone a step forwards.
Secondly, to make us believe that if the states still dont understand each other, its because they have a different vision of the way to reach the common goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, each state knows quite well what its doing when it defends its natwhen it defends its national interests and thus uses the negotiations to impose production norms which best suit its own levels of production, technological capacities, energy sources, etc. For example, neither France nor the USA have kept to the Kyoto agreements (since 1990 carbon emissions have gone up by 11% in the US and 6.5% for France), but when president Chirac declared that it is above all to America that we look for hope for an effective limitation on greenhouse gases ( Le Monde 20.11.2000), we should translate this as: in the trade war between us, we would really like to put a ball and chain around your feet. Its the same when it comes to setting up an observation system as demanded by the European Union, involving taxes on those who exceed their pollution quotas (here again, its not a question of preventing pollution). You might as well ask the USA to finance the European Airbus and to limit the production of Boeings! For the countries of the third world, its even more simple: the weight of the crisis, of debt and of poverty result in the systematic pillage of natural resources and a laissez-faire attitude to the big western companies, who feed local corruption. All this is the unavoidable reality of capitalism. In this framework, any support for one measure against another boils down to plther boils down to playing the game of one or several states.
Finally, the last mystification, one dear to reformists of all stripes: the idea that we should struggle for a clean capitalism that respects the environment, a capitalism without competition an imaginary capitalism. This holy crusade is being carried on today in the name of anti-globalisation and addresses its humble supplications to the state, asking it to legislate against, tax, and otherwise reign in the nasty multinationals. But just as labour legislation does not in any way limit capitalist exploitation, unemployment and poverty, and above all does not prevent such legislation being bypassed when needs must, so any legislation, fiscal constraint or other measure which claims to have an ecological value can only do things which are perfectly acceptable to capitalism, in fact which are favourable to the modernisation of the productive apparatus. Either this, or its purely and simply a disguised form of protectionism or a convenient justification for anti-working class measures (lay-offs when you close polluting factories, wage cuts to absorb the cost of anti-pollution measures, etc). From this point of view, eco-taxes (I pollute, but I pay for it .a bit) and the market in greenhouse gas emission permits, whose principle has beenose principle has been accepted, show the way forward for capitalist realism when it comes to fighting pollution and global warming!
Its for this reason that the most coherent ideologues of political ecology always try to justify the measures they advocate in terms of capitalist profitability; and thats why you often see them working as consultants in the centres of bourgeois decision making. This is clear with the Green parties which participate in a number of governments (France, Germany) but also for the NGOs like the World Conservation Monitoring Centre which has become an antenna of the UN and argues that policies and measures concerning climate change must have a relationship with efficiency and cost so that they ensure global benefits at the lowest possible cost. In the same way, the main peddler of anti-globalisation (concretely, anti-US) ideology in France, Le Monde Diplomatique, is outraged that the combined impact of the social cost of automobile transport noise, air pollution, traffic congestion, use of space and lack of safety could represent up to 5% of Gross National Product (Maniere de Voir no. 50, p70). This conversion to ecological realism can also take the form of an effective aid to the state, as we saw when Greenpeace offew when Greenpeace offered its services after the sinking of the chemical transport ship Levoli-Sun off the French coast in November 2000.
Its characteristic of all the ecological currents, parties or NGOs to make the capitalist state the guarantor of common interests. Their mode of activity is fundamentally a-classist (since we are all concerned) and democratic (they are in particular champions of local democracy, and insist that through popular pressure, citizens action, we can oblige the state, which is imagined to be sincerely moved by such demonstrations, to take measures in favour of the environment). It goes without saying that such a form of protest, which puts into question neither the foundations of the capitalist mode of production nor the power of the ruling class, can be totally assimilated by the bourgeoisie. And for those who dont believe in such fairytales, their demoralisation is also a victory for the bourgeoisie.
We have seen that its quite illusory to think that there can be mechanisms within capitalism that would enable us to put an end to ecological disasters (5), since the latter are the result of the most basic functioning of capitalism. It is therefore the social relations of capital which have to be wiped out if we are to estabout if we are to establish a society in which the satisfaction of human needs, which would become the motive of production, is not achieved at the expense of the natural environment, since the two are intimately connected. Such a society, communism, can only be brought about by the proletariat, the only social force that can develop a consciousness and a practise that can revolutionise the existing world, practically transform the present state of affairs (Marx, The German Ideology).
Since its appearance as the revolutionary theory of the proletariat, marxism affirmed itself against bourgeois ideology, including its most advanced materialist conceptions, which saw nature as an object external to man, and not as a historical nature. The mastery of nature , for the proletariat, has thus never meant the pillage of nature: At every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all the other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly (Engels, Dialectics of Natls, Dialectics of Nature).
It remains the case that the development of an awareness about the gravity of the ecological situation cannot in itself be a factor for mobilising the struggles which the working class has to wage between now and the communist revolution. As we said in IR 63, and as has been confirmed over the past 10 years: the issue as such doesnt allow the proletariat to affirm itself as a distinct social force. Indeed it provides an ideal pretext for the bourgeoisies inter-classist campaigns The working class will only be able to deal with the ecological issue as a whole when it has conquered political power on a world scale. But the aberrations of this decomposing capitalist system also directly touch the workers (health, food, housing, etc) and at this level can serve to radicalise future economic struggles.
As for all the elements from outside the proletariat who are sincerely rebelling against the horrible spectacle of the massacre of the planet, the only constructive way forward for their indignation is to make a critique of ecologist ideology, and, as the Communist Manifesto invites them, to raise themselves to a general understanding of the history of the class struggle and to join the combat of the proletariat in its revolutionary organisations. organisations.
The destruction of the environment is not a technical problem, but a political one: more than ever, capitalism is a mortal danger for the survival of humanity; more than ever the future of humanity is in the hands of the proletariat. This is in no way a mechanical or abstract vision. Its a necessity which has its roots in the reality of the capitalist mode of production. To cut the knot between communist revolution or a plunge into barbarism, the proletariat must act quickly. The more time passes, the more the accelerating decomposition of capitalist society will leave an apocalyptic inheritance to the communist society of the future.
BT
Notes
1. The Kyoto protocol (December 97) is the list of principles agreed by the states which signed the convention of climate change at Rio in 1992, committing themselves to a 5.2% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2010
2. The greenhouse effect is a process which brings about a considerable role to gases which are a minority in the atmosphere (water vapour, carbon dioxide, methane, ozone): by preventing infrared radiation from leaving the planet freely, they retain enough of the suns heat to make the planet habitable (otherwise it would have an average temperature of 18 e temperature of 18 degrees centigrade) (Herve Le Treut, research director at the Laboratoire de Meteorologie Dynamique in Paris Le Monde 7.8.00
3. Herve Le Treut, ibid
4. See the article The most barbaric century in history in IR 101
5. We don't have the space here to develop on the other facets of the ecological disaster: uncontrolled desertification and deforestation, disappearance of animal species with the potential medicinal losses that this implies (between now and 2010 20% of known species will have disappeared, a third of them domestic species), poisoning of food as in the dioxin scandal, massive use of toxic pesticides, scarcity of drinking water (a child dies every 8 seconds because of lack of water or because of poor quality water), military and civil nuclear contamination, pillage of entire regions for oil exploitation, exhaustion of marine resources, all the damage created by local wars, etc. As for global warming, the solutions of the bourgeoisie are aimed at hiding reality, while things continue to worsen.
The article by Josep Rebull on “The May Days of 1937”, which we are publishing here, is a contribution to reflection about the war in Spain1. In particular, it contains important elements of clarification about the political attitude of the anarchists and the POUM2 during these tragic events.
The 1937 May Days were a new and dramatic experience for the working class. They provided the opportunity for the Stalinists and “official” anarchists to carry out an anti-working class policy and showed that they had become ardent defenders of the interests of capitalism.
During these struggles, only a few Trotskyists around G Munis and the anarchist group The Friends of Durruti clearly placed themselves on the side of the workers of Catalonia.
Rebull’s article shows a lot of foresight about the result of the May Days and on the general course of the class struggle. It is to be saluted above all because of its political courage, especially considering that the violent criticisms of the POUM leadership are made from the inside, by a militant of the party.
Josep Rebull3 was a member of the POUM during the 1930s. We should recall that this party was created in 1935 on the basis of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Bloc4 led by Joaquin Maurin5, in conjunction with elements like Andres Nin6. The latter had broken with the International Left Opposition, and thus with Trotsky, in 1934. In the POUM, Maurin held the post of general secretary while Nin became the political secretary7. During the war in Spain, while Maurin festered in Franco’s jails, Nin was Minister of Justice in the Generalidad government in Catalonia along with the CNT and the parties of the Republican and Catalan nationalist bourgeoisie, such as Josep Tarradella’s Esquerra Catalana.
Despite profound disagreements with the policies of the POUM during the war in Spain, and although afterwards he had a certain rapprochement with the positions of the communist left, Josep Rebull was never able to make a formal break with this party.
During the period between the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1940s, revolutionary energies were particularly reduced and isolated from the working class. Among these was the Italian Left, which had the huge merit of understanding the real dynamic of the situation. In doing so, they found themselves at odds with other revolutionary political tendencies. The Italian Left had a marxist, historical grasp of the real balance of forces between the classes and its evolution; this was at the core of its analysis of the historic course. It saw that the course was not favourable to the working class, that it had definitively changed at the end of the 1920s and that, since that point, the international political situation had been determined by the triumph of the counter-revolution and the march towards a generalised imperialist war.
This general vision is the main lack in Rebull’s approach, and it means that his article has serious political limitations. The most important of these is his illusion that the proletarian revolution was possible in Spain in 1936 and even in 1937. In effect he defends the view that if there had been a real revolutionary leadership during the May Days of 1937, the situation could have gone in a different direction. But these political confusions aside, we want to salute Rebull’s article and point to a number of elements of political clarification which go well beyond the simple understanding of the Barcelona events in May 1937.
In May 1937, the Spanish and international bourgeoisie definitively succeeded in putting down the last vestiges of proletarian resistance in Spain. After May 1937 the repression really got underway and crushed the Spanish working class before the outbreak of the Second World War. Rebull shows that the May Days had ended in a grave defeat for the working class and “a triumph for the pseudo-democratic bourgeoisie”.
Rebull moves towards a historic vision of flux and retreat in the class struggle. Like Marx at the time of the Paris Commune8, like Lenin during the Russian revolution9, or Rosa Luxemburg during the German revolution10, he analyses the actual situation of the class struggle. He is one of the only elements in the POUM, but also among other Spanish revolutionaries, to warn about the imperious necessity to pass into clandestinity after the 1937 May Days. The appreciation of “where is the class struggle”, which is always the most complex for a revolutionary to diagnose, is something that only marxists can develop. It is their role and function to understand the rhythm of the class struggle and to explain it to their class. No one else can do it in their place, and if they don’t do it, they lose all usefulness.
Rebull criticises not only the Spanish Communist Party but also the CNT which acted as a support for the Republican power dominated by the Stalinists and the ‘left’ fraction of the Republican bourgeoisie. On the CNT leadership, he writes that “the May movement has shown the real role of the anarcho-syndicalist leaders. Like reformists in any era, they have been – consciously or unconsciously – instruments of the enemy class in the workers’ ranks”.
He draws the lessons about the real function of the Popular Fronts: “In the future, the working class will not be able to have any doubts about the function reserved for the Popular Fronts in every country”.
Rebull shows a way forward in the new situation created by the failure of the May Days. Unlike the POUM, which saw in these events a victory for the working class, he sees the reality of the defeat and thus the necessity for revolutionaries to take measures of clandestinity in order to survive.
Rol.
Once the second power had disappeared in its organised form, that is to say, once the organs born in July in opposition to the bourgeois government had disappeared, the counter-revolution - presently represented by the petty-bourgeois and reformist parties - attacked the proletariat’s revolutionary positions one by one, principally in Catalonia, because it is the region which has given the most momentum to the revolution. This was done cautiously at first and then aggressively.
The power of the working class had partly been neutralised before these attacks, on the one hand by the counter-revolutionary dictatorship of the leaders of the UGT12 in Catalonia and, on the other, by the CNT’s collaboration in the governments in Valencia and Barcelona.
In spite of this handicap13, the proletariat was convinced bit by bit – separating itself from the reformist leaders, collaborators of the bourgeoisie - that only its energetic action in the street could hold back the advances of the counter-revolution. The armed clashes that took place in various parts of Catalonia during the month of April, were in fact the prelude to the May events in Barcelona.
The struggle was posed (and continues to be posed) in general terms, between the revolution and the counter-revolution, in the following conditions, as regards Catalonia.
Since July the revolutionary sectors of CNT-FAI and the POUM had the support of most of the armed proletariat, but they lacked concrete objectives and an effective tactic. The revolution therefore lost its initiative.
The counter-revolutionary forces of the PSUC-Esquerra, which had an almost non-existent developed base in July – have followed clearly defined objectives since the beginning and thus been able to carry out a consistent tactic. Whilst the CNT – the numerically most decisive force - has become embroiled in the labyrinth of bourgeois institutions; all the time talking about nobility and loyalty in its relationships [with the other component parts of these institutions – translators’ note], its enemies and collaborators have step-by-step carefully prepared and carried out a plan of provocation and denigration, whose first phase was the elimination of the POUM. The POUM as much as the leadership of the CNT have found themselves on the defensive faced with these at first sly and then brazen attacks. They have thus allowed the counter-revolution to go onto the offensive.
It was in these conditions that the May events took place.
The struggle that began on (Monday) the 3rd May was provoked, in the immediate, by the reactionary forces of the PSUC-Esquerra, who tried to capture the Barcelona telephone exchange. The most revolutionary part of the proletariat responded to this provocation by taking hold of the streets, thus increasing its strength. The strike spread like wild fire and was total.
Despite its headless birth, this movement can in no way be seen as a “putsch”. All the armed workers were on the barricades. The movement was sympathetically received, during its first two days, by the working class in general – this is proved by the extent, rapidity and unanimity of the strike – and it threw the middle class, which was of course terrified, into an attitude of expectant neutrality.
The workers brought all of their combativity and enthusiasm into play, until due to a lack of coordination and final objectives for the movement, vacillation and demoralisation spread amongst the various sectors of combatants. Only these psychological factors can explain why these same workers, against the orders of their leaders, stopped with within a few meters of the Palacio de la Generalidad.
On the government side was to be found only a part of the forces of Public Order, the Stalinists, Estat Català, Esquerra – these latter forces were hardly combative. Some Public Order companies declared themselves neutral, refusing to repress the workers, whilst others allowed themselves to be disarmed. The Control Patrols were overwhelmingly on the side of the proletariat.
The revolutionary organisations did not createa coordinating and directing centre. However, the city was in the hands of the proletariat, to the point where by Tuesday the different concentrations of workers were perfectly able to link up. Only some of these remained isolated, but overall there was enough force to carry out an offensive concentrating on the official centres for the city to fall, without great effort, completely into the workers’ hands14.
In general, on both sides of the struggle, the attitude was one of “wait and see”. The government forces had not the forces necessary to take the initiative. The workers’ forces lacked leadership and objectives.
As for forces outside of the city and which could at one moment or the other be incorporated into the struggle, there were the forces at the front, willing to march on the capital – the forces of the revolutionary sectors had already begun to cut the road against the Karl Marx Division – and the forces sent by the government in Valencia, were not certain to arrive. By Wednesday various French and English boats appeared off Barcelona, probably ready to intervene.
The proletarian forces controlled the streets for four and a half days: from Monday afternoon to Friday. The organs of the CNT participated in the movement for one day – the Tuesday. The organs of the POUM participated for three days. Each considered the movement over as soon as they gave the order to withdraw. But in reality it was only WELL AFTER these orders were issued, that the workers withdrew, due to a lack of a leadership capable of ordering a progressive withdrawal and, above all, faced with the treason of the leaders of the CNT: some of whom made pathetic statements over the radio whilst other collaborated with Companys, according to whose own statement “In the face of this indescribable attack on the government, the latter found itself with small means of defence; very small, not because it had not foreseen this development, but because of the impossibility of forestalling it. In spite of this the government put down the subversive movement without hesitation, utilising the small forces at its disposal, aided by popular fervour, and by conversations held in the Generalitat with different trade union representatives, and with the assistance of several delegates from Valencia, commencing thus the return to normality” (Hoja Oficial 17th May).
Such were the general lines of the May insurrection.
The proletariat spontaneously and instinctively launched this movement, without firm leadership, without a positive concrete aim for decisively advancing it. The CNT-FAI had already decapitated the movement before it was born, because it had not explained clearly to the working class the meaning of the April events.
At first not all the CNT leaders were against the movement. The Barcelona committees not only supported it, but also tried to coordinate it at the military level. But without having already agreed realisable political aims, they could not do this. Caught between the will of the base and the capitulation of the higher committees, the doubts and vacillations of these committees led in practice to a series of ambiguous and equivocal instructions.
The only thing the National and Regional Committees expressed firmly was the decision to withdraw. This retreat, ordered unconditionally, without gaining control of Public Order, without obtaining the guarantee of the Security Battalions, without practical organs of the workers’ front, and without a satisfactory explanation to the working class, putting all those involved in the struggle – revolutionary and counter-revolutionary - into the same sack, remains one of the greatest capitulations to the bourgeoisie and treasons against the workers’ movement.
The leaders and the led were not long in suffering the grave consequences of the Revolutionary Workers’ Front not becoming reality15 .
Faithful to its line of action since July 19th, the leadership of the POUM went along with events. At the same time as these events were unfolding, our leaders were endorsing them, despite not having anything whatsoever to do with either with the declaration of the movement or its subsequent dynamic. It cannot present itself as putting forewards (late and in bad conditions for distributing it) the demand for defence committees, since it did not say a single word about the antagonistic role of these committees faced with the bourgeois governments.
From the practical point of view, all of the merit for the action belongs to the lower committees and the base of the party. The leadership did not edit a single manifesto or leaflet in order to orientate the armed proletariat.
When our leading comrades understood – as did those struggling on the barricades - that concretely the movement was not going to achieve any final objective,they gave the order to retreat16. Given the course of events, without the decision to lead it from the beginning and faced with the capitulation of the CNT leaders, the order to retreat was clearly necessary in order to avoid a massacre.
In spite of the lack of orientation on the part of our leaders, reaction presents them as directors and initiators of the movement. This of course is an honour they do not deserve, even though they reject it and call it a slander17.
For all those who believed that the Popular Front was the salvation of the working class, this movement has been very enlightening. This movement was deliberately provoked by components of the Popular Front (PF) and has been used to strengthen the bourgeoisie’s repressive apparatus. It is also convincing proof that the PF is a counter-revolutionary front which, when it stopped the overthrow of capitalism – the cause of fascism - prepared the way for the latter. It has also repressed all efforts to take the revolution forwards.
The CNT which was a-political until 19th July, fell into the trap of the Popular Front when it entered the political arena. The cost of this unfortunate experience has been a new blood-letting in the proletarian ranks.
As for the political positions of the POUM before 19th July, this violent evolution of the Popular Front was clearly a theoretical victory, since they had forecast and warned against it.
As for Stalinism, for the first time it was unmasked as an open enemy of the proletarian revolution, placing itself on the other side of the barricades, struggling against the revolutionary workers and in favour of the bourgeois Popular Front, of which Stalinism is the creator and main defender.
{In the} future the working class cannot have any doubts about the role of the Popular Front in any country.
The fear amongst certain sectors during the May events concerning the danger of armed intervention by England and France, shows a lack of understanding of the role played by these powers up until now.
Anglo-French intervention against the Spanish proletarian revolution has been going on, more or less openly, for months, This intervention is carried out by means of the domination exercised by these imperialisms, through Stalinism, over the governments in Barcelona and Valencia. This was seen in the recent struggle – as always involving the Stalinists - within the government in Valencia which ended with the elimination of Largo Caballero18 and the CNT. It can also be seen in the “non intervention” agreements which have only been observed and carried out in order to weaken the Spanish proletariat. The open intervention of war ships and occupying troops will only change the form of the intervention. This open or hidden intervention will have to be defeated or it will defeat us.
Like any workers’ revolution, our’s will have to eliminate our national exploiters, but it will also have to wage the inevitable struggle to defeat all the interventionist efforts of international capitalism. No revolution can be victorious without confronting and overcoming this aspect of the war. Trying to avoid this, amounts to renouncing victory, because the imperialists will never willingly stop trying to intervene in our revolution.
A correct international policy on the part of revolutionary Spain could arouse in our favour the proletariat of those countries which want to mobilise against the Spanish proletariat, and even turn them against their own government, as in the example of the 1917 Russian revolution.
Faced with the spontaneous movement, there were two principle positions that can be taken (we exclude inhibition):
Consider it as a protest movement, in which case it was necessary to rapidly show its short term nature and take the necessary measures to avoid useless sacrifices. In July 1917, the Bolshevik leaders exerted themselves to stop the premature movement of the proletariat of the capital and this didn’t lessen their prestige, since they knew how to justify their decision.
Consider the movement as decisive for the conquest of power, in that case the POUM, since it was the only revolutionary Marxist party, should have firmly, resolutely, and unswervingly taken the leadership of the movement in order to lead and coordinate it. Naturally, in this case it was not enough to hope to become the revolution’s leadership by accident: it was necessary to act quickly, extending the struggle, spreading it to the whole of Catalonia, unhesitatingly proclaiming that the movement was to be directed against the Reformist government, making it clear from the outset that Defence Committees and their Central Committee had to be formed without delay, organising them so that at all costs they became organs of power against the government of the Generalitat, and attacking the strategic places without delay taking full advantage of the long hours of disorder and panic that afflicted our adversaries.
However, the POUM leadership’s fear of confronting the CNT leaders from the beginning - afterwards it was too late - was a surrender to the detriment of the Party, that is to say, it went against the initial measures taken up when the movement broke out and against the political independence of the POUM. The possible excuse that the party was not in a condition to take up the leadership, is no less against the interests of the party, since the POUM could only play the role of a real Bolshevik party, taking up the leadership and precisely not declining the resolute orientation of the working class movement out of "modesty". It is not enough for the party which calls itself revolutionary to be on the side of the workers in struggle, rather it must be in the vanguard.
The POUM would have come out of the battle enormously strengthened if it had not vacillated and waited, once again, for the opinion of the “Trentist” (the openly reformist – translator’s note) elements of the CNT’s leadership, even in the case of defeat, persecution and illegality.
The only group that tried to take a vanguard role was the Friends of Durruti, which without adopting totally Marxist slogans, had and has the indisputable merit of having proclaimed that they were struggling - and calling on others to struggle - against the government of the Generalitat.
The immediate results of this workers' insurrection represent a defeat for the working class and a new victory for the pseudo-democratic bourgeoisie19.
Nevertheless, if the leadership of our party had carried out a more effective and practical activity, this could have led to at least a partial workers' victory. In the worst case, it could have organised a Central Defence Committee, based on representatives from the barricades. For this it would have been enough to first have held an assembly of delegates from the POUM and some of CNT-FAI barricades, in order to elect a provisional Central Committee. This Central Committee, through a short manifesto could have called a second meeting inviting delegations from the groups not represented at the first assembly, and so establish a central defence organ. In a situation where it was thought there was a need to call a retreat, it would have been possible to conserve this Central Defence Committee as an embryonic organ of dual power, that is to say, as a provisional committee of the Revolutionary Workers' Front, which through its democratisation by means of the creation of Defence Committees in the work place and the barracks, could have continued the struggle with better advantage than now against the bourgeois governments20.
But we cannot exclude an infinitely more favourable situation. Once a Central Defence Committee had been constituted, in the manner indicated, it could have perhaps taken political power. The forces of the bourgeoisie - demoralised and surrounded in the centre of Barcelona - could have been defeated through a rapid and organised offensive.
Naturally, this proletarian power in Barcelona, would have repercussions throughout Catalonia and many places in Spain. All the forces of national and international capital would have been used to defeat it. Its destruction would have been inevitable, however, if the following measures to strengthen it were not carried out: a) the unhesitating determination of the POUM to act as a revolutionary Marxist vanguard, capable of orientating and leading the new power in collaboration with the other active sectors of the insurrection; b) the organisation of the new power on the basis of worker's, peasants' and soldiers' councils, or at a minimum, based on the democratically and properly centralised Defence Committees; c) the extension of the revolution throughout Spain, by means of a rapid offensive in Aragón; d) the solidarity of workers in other countries. Without these measures the Catalonian working class would not be able to maintain themselves in power for long.
In order to finish this part, we want to say that the hypothesis put forward here are a contribution to the general discussion that May Days are going to cause in the revolutionary milieu for a long time to come.
1. The working class is still in a defensive situation but is now in worse conditions than before the May insurrection. It could have begun its offensive in May, if it had not been for the partial defeat caused by the betrayal and capitulation, though this is not [yet] a definitive defeat for the present revolution. The workers now have more arms than before May, and if they can avoid being pulled into a premature struggle caused by provocation, they could once again be in a condition, within a few months, to could take the offensive.
2. The class didn't know how to take power in July 1936, in May 1937 it undertook a second insurrection. The defeat suffered now, has made a new armed struggle inevitable and we have to prepare for this. As long as the bourgeois state has not been overthrown, against which we have to direct our revolutionary struggle, the armed proletarian insurrection remains something for the future.
3. The May movement demonstrated the real role of the Anarcho-syndicalist leaders. Like all the other reformists, in all epochs, they are - consciously or unconsciously - tools within the workers’ ranks of the enemy class. The revolution in our country can only triumph through a simultaneous struggle against the bourgeoisie and the reformist leaders of all colours, including the CNT-FAI.
4. We have seen that a real vanguard Marxist party doesn't exist in our revolution and that this indispensable instrument for the definitive victory still remains to be forged. The party of the revolution cannot have a vacillating and continually waiting leadership; it has to have a firmly convinced leadership which will go to the head of the working class, orientating it, impulsing it, conquering with it21. It cannot base itself only on accomplished facts, but has to have a revolutionary political line that will act as the basis for its activity and stop opportunist and capitulatory tendencies22. It cannot base its activity on empiricism and improvisation, but has to use to its advantage modern principles of organisation and technique. It cannot allow the slightest shallowness at the top, because this will spread painfully throughout the base, leading to indiscipline, a lack of abnegation and a loss of faith amongst the least strong, in the triumph of the proletarian revolution.
5. Once more the inevitable necessity of the Revolutionary Workers' Front has been demonstrated; this can only be formed on the basis of a profound struggle against the bourgeoisie and its state, and against Fascism on the fronts. If the leaderships of the workers' revolutionary organisations don't accept these bases23 - which would certainly clash with their actions since July - it will be necessary to push for its formation through pressure from below.
6. None of the lessons that have been learnt will be of any use, if the proletariat and above all the marxist revolutionary party, do not enter into an intense practical work of agitation and organisation. It is the same for the struggle against the threats and restrictions of clandestinity, this requires an untiring activity, if we don’t want to be hopelessly defeated. The idea that the party must not be plunged into clandestinity, this can only be understood as the expression of the intention once again to adapt and renounce the revolutionary struggle in these moments24, an intention which may prove decisive.
J. Rebull
1 Cf the book the ICC has brought out in Spanish: Espana 1936: Franco y la republica masacran a los trabajadores, Valencia, April 2000, 159 pages.
2 See for example Histoire du POUM, Victor Alba, editions Champ Libre, Paris, 1975. A history written by an old member of the POUM.
3 See for example the work on Rebull done by A. Guillamon in Balances no. 19 and 20, October 2000.
4 El Bloque Obrero y Campesino was founded in March 1931 in Terrassa, a town in the industrial outskirts of Barcelona.
5 Born in 1896 in Bonanza, in the province of Huesca, Maurin was influenced by the Russian revolution and by anarcho-synicalism. In 1919 he was a member of the CNT. He participated in the second congress of the CNT where he met Andres Nin and along with him pronounced in favour of joining the Communist International. The congress approved this position. Maurin was then a member of the Spanish Communist Party and one of its leaders until his expulsion in 1930 together with the Catalan-Belearan Communist Federation, which represented about a third of the party.
6 Nin was born in 1892 in Vendrell in Catalonia. He followed the same political trajectory as Maurin. He became one of the secretaries of the Red Trade Union International in Moscow until 1928. Having expressed sympathy for Trotsky, he was relieved of his post. When he succeeded in leaving the USSR and getting back to Spain in 1930, he became part of the International Left Opposition. After his break with the Opposition, he was part of the group which called itself the Communist Left. Nin’s proposal to fuse with the Workers’ and Peasants’ Bloc was rejected by the latter in 1934, but on 29 September 1935 it went ahead and the new party called itself the POUM. Nin was assassinated in 1937 by agents of Stalin’s NKVD.
7 Nin did not assume the post of general secretary in order to make it clear that Maurin still had this position.
8 Marx was able to salute the Commune but he also recognised that because of its isolation it could only end in a bloody defeat. For Marx, the workers had “stormed the heavens”.
9 During the July Days in 1917, Lenin was able to say that the moment was not favourable for the working class; from September however he pushed for the preparation of the insurrection.
10 In “Order reigns in Berlin”, Luxemburg recognised that after the failure of the uprising in Berlin, the bourgeoisie would unleash repression. She was not able to draw all the conclusions from this, and the error cost her dear because she was murdered along with Karl Liebknecht.
11 There are two versions of this text by Josep Rebull. The first was published in the Bulletin of the Local Committee of the POUM, and was dated 29th May 1937. The second was published in the Discussion Bulletin edited by the Defence Committee of the Congress (of the POUM), Paris, 1st of July 1939. The parts of the text that correspond to the 1939 text appear within brackets: ( ). The most relevant modifications are indicated in footnotes. The rare remarks by the editor of this text are indicated by: {}
12 The UGT was the second trade union in Spain, after the anarchist CNT. It was under the leadership of the PSOE, the Spanish Socialist Party, but in Catalonia it was under the control of the Stalinist PSUC.
13 In the 1939 text the English word “handicap” is substituted for the Spanish word “desventaja”
14 {Rebull’s first note was suppressed in the version published in 1939}: Cell 72 has a plan of Barcelona with the barricades and positions of both sides during the struggle. It is very interesting to examine this. It is at the disposal of all comrades.
15 {The distinction that Josep Rebull makes between the local Committees of Barcelona and the higher national and regional committees should be noted. Within the CNT, in Barcelona, there was an informal organisation of factory and neighbourhood defence committees, coordinated by Manuel Escorza. Cf in agreement with Abel Paz: Viaje al pasado (1936-39). Ed. Autor, Barcelona, 1995.}
16 {“Since the workers struggling in the streets had neither concrete aims nor a responsible leadership, the POUM could do nothing else than order and coordinate a strategic retreat…” (Resolution of the CC on the May days, point 3) }. {This note did not appear in the 1937 version}
17 [“Part of the national and foreign press have made the most extraordinary efforts – and they needed to be extraordinary- to present us as the ’agent provocaters’ of the events that unfolded in Barcelona last week… If we had given the order to begin the movement of 3rd May we would not have hidden it. We are always responsible for our words and our actions… What our party did – we have already said this on several occasions and we repeat it clearly today – was to take part in it. The workers were in the street and our party had to be alongside the workers…” (Editorial of La Batalla, 11th May 1937. The emphasis is ours)]. {This not was not published in 1937}.
18 Left wing socialist leader, described by some as “the Spanish Lenin”
19 {Note added by Rebull in 1939}: [The POUM leadership, on the contrary, understood the order to retreat as a workers’ victory. The epilogue to this "workers' victory"was bloody repression]
20 {A note that already existed in the first text published in 1937}: [During the Tuesday evening the L(ocal) C(ommittee) of Barcelona worked for this coordination, but the leadership’s lack of enthusiasm meant they were not able to carry it out]
21 {Josep Rebull argued that the POUM was not a revolutionary party, nor could it become so with the political strategy of the then EC}
22 {This is a direct criticism of the then EC of the POUM}
23 {Note added by Rebull in 1939} : (Bases that form part of the political counter-theses which we mentioned at the beginning)
24 {Note added by Rebull in 1939}. (In fact, the leadership didn’t take the necessary measures in order to work illegally and organise clandestinely. Unfortunately, the same leaders, as we have seen, were the first victims of their mistake.) {This is the first warning issued by one of the leaders of the POUM on the imminence of repression against revolutionaries and therefore the urgent necessity to prepare for clandestinity, which began on the 16th June with the banning of the POUM, the arrest of its leaders, the kidnap and killing of Nin, and the persecution of its militants}
Whether for or against "globalisation", whether reassuring or alarming, all the commentaries on the international situation and its perspectives are unanimous on one point: democracy is the only system which will allow society to progress and prosper, and capitalism is the final form of humanity's social, political, and economic organisation. "2000 was not really the first year of the 21st century. In substantive terms, the 21st century began in 1991 with the fall of Soviet communism, the collapse of the bipolar order and the rise of global capitalism as the uncontested ideology of our age" ("Ideas: No, Economics Isn't King", F. Zakaria, Newsweek Jan. 2001).
But what about the spread of local wars and massacres? What about the undeniable spread of poverty throughout the world? Why the rise in unemployment and the degradation of the proletariat's living conditions? How are we to understand the famines, the reappearance of epidemics, the growing corruption and insecurity? Why the so-called "natural disasters", and what about the threat hanging over the planet's environment? Where do all these catastrophes come from, if not from the survival of capitalism, of those social and production relations which care not a jot for human needs, and have only one aim: the pursuit of profit: "not just the pursuit of tangible profit, but of ever-growing profit" (Rosa Luxemburg, "Critique of the critiques: what the epigones have done to marxist theory", published with L'accumulation du capital, Maspéro).
There are a whole series of attempts to explain this situation
From liberal capitalism's supporters, the usual answer is that all this is nothing but the exaggerations of a few Cassandras, refusing to recognise the benefits of the present system. The disastrous consequences of capitalism's survival are the normal price the normal price to pay in this social system, the inevitable result of a law of nature which determines the elimination of the weak, and salvation only for the strong.
For the left wing of the bourgeoisie's political apparatus - the social-democrats, the one-time Stalinists, the ecologists - all these scourges of the modern world at the dawn of the 21st century are real enough, but seen above all as excesses or imperfections, the consequences of errors committed by rulers too eager for gain, too unconcerned for the general welfare of all. They are the result of "uncontrolled" capitalism. What is needed, then, is control: well thought out regulations, organised by the appropriate governments, states, local, national, or international bodies (by the famous NGOs - non-governmental organisations - for example). This would be enough to eradicate the system's devastating effects, to make it a real organisation of "citizens", a haven of peace and prosperity for all. This is the conception of the "anti-globalisation" movement, where we also find leftist currents who tone down their traditional revolutionary phrase-mongering to make a radical contribution to the concert in defence of democracy. It is the case with all kinds of Trotskyists, ex-Maoists, anarchists or libertarians: all the more or: all the more or less defrocked currents of the socialist, communist, and libertarian leftism of the 1970s and 80s. Irrespective of their differences, everybody today, from the extreme right to the extreme left, defends democracy.
Those who once contested the parliamentary circus have revealed their true nature as ardent defenders of the bourgeois democracy they used to decry. Indeed, many are now at the helm of state, in positions of responsibility in honourable institutions, organisms, and enterprises, thoroughly integrated into the system. Those who have kept up a more or less radical opposition to the governments and institutions[i], denounce the system's errors and excesses, but fundamentally they never pose the question of its real nature.
One of the best examples of this ideology is regularly offered us by the French monthly Le Monde Diplomatique. In its January 2001 issue, we are told that "The new century is beginning in Porto Alegre [the town in Brazil where the 1st World Social Forum is being held at the end of January, in a sort of answer to the Davos meeting]. All those who, in one way or another, contest or criticise neo-liberal globalisation will meet there (...) Not to prhere (...) Not to protest, as at Seattle, Washington, Prague or elsewhere, against the injustice, inequality, and disasters that the excesses of neo-liberalism are causing around the world. But to try, this time in a positive and constructive spirit, to propose a theoretical and practical framework which would make it possible to envisage a new kind of globalisation, and to declare that another world, with more solidarity and less inhumanity, is possible[ii].
In the same issue, we find an article by Toni Negri, the leading light of Potere Operaio[iii], who develops the idea that today there is no longer any imperialism, but rather a capitalist "Empire"!? The words seem faithful to the "class struggle" and "the battle of the exploited against the power of capital". But this is only in appearance. Above all, the article claims to invent a sort of new perspective for the class struggle. This leads it straight onto the tired old theme of the necessary defence of democracy, instead of "revolution"; the identification of citizens instead of the class entity of the proletariathe proletariat. "These struggles demand, apart from a guaranteed wage, a new expression of democracy in the control of the political conditions of the reproduction of life (...) most of these ideas were born during the Parisian demonstrations of the winter of 1995, the 'Paris Commune in the snow' [sic!!] which exalted (...) the subversive self-recognition of the citizens of the great towns".
Whatever the subjective intentions of these protagonists of the contestation of the capitalist system, these defenders of the democratic perspective, all this serves objectively, first and foremost, to maintain illusions in the possibility of reforming this system, or of transforming it gradually.
What the working class needs to understand, against these old reformist ideas dressed up in more fashionable guise, is that imperialism, this "highest stage of capitalism" as Lenin said, still reigns supreme. That it affects "every state, from the greatest to the smallest", as Rosa Luxemburg said. That it underlies the proliferation of local wars and massacres all over the world. Faced with a multitude of questions as to the insanity and absurdity of the world today, with the absence of any perspective which colours the whole society, faced with the individaced with the individualist attitude of "look after number one", the decomposition of the social fabric, the disintegration of collective solidarity, the working class needs to understand that capitalism's perspective is not a world of citizens living in peace, abundance, and prosperity under a good democracy. It needs to understand that the present society is and will remain a class society, a system of exploitation, whose motive force is profit and whose functioning obeys the dictates of capital accumulation. That democracy is bourgeois democracy, the most developed form of the dictatorship of the capitalist class.
What has changed since 1991 is not that capitalism has triumphed and imposed itself as the only viable system possible. What has changed is that the capitalist and imperialist regime in the Soviet bloc has collapsed under the blows of the economic crisis, and faced with the military pressure of its enemy, the Western bloc. What has changed is the imperialist configuration which has dominated the planet since World War II. It was not communism that collapsed in the East, or even a system in transition towards communism. Real communism, which has never yet existed, remains on the historical agenda. It can only be created by the revolutionary overhe revolutionary overthrow of capitalist rule by the international working class. This is the only alternative to what capitalism's survival promises us: a plunge into indescribable chaos, which could eventually lead to humanity's definitive destruction.
The Year 2000 celebrations were held under the auspices of "new economy" euphoria. The year 2001 starts with a serious concern for world capitalism's economic health. The new and prodigious profits we were promised never turned up. On the contrary, after a year of trip-ups and disillusionment, the champions of "e-business" and the "net-economy" have produced nothing but bankruptcies and unemployment, in a context of widespread gloom. A few examples: "As the new economy has cooled, there has been a steady drumbeat of layoff announcements. More than 36,000 dotcom employees were cut in the second half of last year, including some 10,000 last month" (Time, January 10, 2001, "This Time It's Different").
We have already analysed the situation of the economic crisis several times in these columns[iv]. We will not return in detail to theurn in detail to these analyses, whose conclusions are once again being confirmed today. Last December, two major reviews of the international press were headlined "Chaos"[v] and "A hard landing?"[vi]. Whatever its reassuring, grandiloquent talk, the bourgeoisie needs to the truth about the profit it can expect from investment. And there is no getting away from the fact that the "new economy" is nothing but an avatar of the "old economy", in other words a product not of growth, but of the capitalist economy's crisis. The development of telecommunications via the Internet is not the "revolution" we have been promised. The widespread use of the Internet, both for commerce and financial transactions, as well as inside companies and administrations, changes nothing in the laws of capital accumulation, which demand profitability, net profit, and market competitiveness.
As with any other technical innovation, the competitive advantage gained from the use of the Internet disappears very quickly as soon as its use becomes generalised. Moreover, in the domain of electronic transactions ronic transactions and telecommunications, for the technique to work it is necessary for every company to be connected, so that the innovation of the Internet itself puts an end to the advantage that it is supposed to confer!
At first, the great Internet "technology revolution" was supposed to allow a colossal development of the "B2C" (ie "Business to Consumer" - shopping on the Internet) model. In fact, this is nothing but looking up electronic catalogues and placing orders over the Internet rather than by post. Some revolution! B2C was soon abandoned in favour of "B2B" ("Business to Business" - electronic transactions between companies). The first "model" counted on the profits to be made from catalogue shopping by e-mail, whose profitability is limited because it is essentially directed towards household consumption. The second was supposed to put companies directly in touch with each other, and the gains were supposed to come from two "outlets". On the one hand, companies could make profits - or rather reduce their costs - by eliminating intermediaries from their relationships. Already, this is not a real outlet but merely a reduction in costs! On the other hand, this was supposed to open a fabulous "market", made up of the need to provide all the neco provide all the necessary services over the Internet (directories, lists, catalogues, computer software, payment processing, etc); which in fact meant that... the intermediaries who had just been kicked out the door came straight back in through the window. Thank you Internet! There again, there is no getting away from the facts that the profits simply didn't turn up. These economic "models" were quickly abandoned: 98% of the last three years' start-ups, these companies of the new economy supposed to exemplify the glorious future of capitalist development, have gone bust. In those that have survived, there is disenchantment among the workers, who were once so euphoric at their (virtual!) enrichment by generous stock options that they worked round the clock. Significantly, the trade unions, which until lately ignored this sector of the work force, are now arriving in force. Not that they have suddenly become defenders of the working class[vii]. Rather it is because it would be dangerous to allow any reflection to develop amongst workers so abruptly disenchanted.
This ideology of the "net-economy" is a clear illustration of the dead end in which the bourgeois economy finds itself, of the historic decline in capioric decline in capitalist relations of production. According to this ideology, profit was henceforth supposed to be driven by the development of trade, and no longer directly by the development of production. In a sense, the merchant had become more important than the producer. But this ideology is nothing but an aspiration to return to the mercantile capitalism which existed at the end... of the Middle Ages. At that time, capitalism was beginning to develop thanks to the blossoming of commerce, which broke down the barriers of feudal relations of production that restricted the productive forces within the straitjacket of serfdom. Today, it is more than a century since capitalism completely conquered the world market, and world production is gorged with a generalised overproduction unable to find adequate outlets. Capitalism's salvation will not come from a new blossoming of trade, which is completely impossible in today's historic conditions.
In this article, we have only considered the "net-economy", because its collapse during 2000 was the aspect of the capitalist crisis to receive the greatest media attention. But as the article in Time goes on to say "the firings went well beyond dotcomland. There were more than 480,000 layoffs through November. General Motors is laying off 15,000 workers with the corkers with the closing of Oldsmobile. Whirlpool is trimming 6,300 workers; Aetna is letting go 5,000". Indeed, 2001 has begun with a considerable acceleration in the crisis. In the USA, Alan Greenspan, head of the Federal Reserve, has had to adopt emergency measures to try to banish the spectre of recession. The "new economy" is long gone, and the crisis of the "old economy" continues its inexorable advance. Gigantic debts at every level, ever-increasing attacks on working class living conditions internationally, inability to integrate the growing masses of unemployed into capitalist relations of production, etc: these are the fundamental consequences of the capitalist economy. States, central banks, stock exchanges, the IMF, all the financial and banking institutions and all the "actors" of world politics in general are try to regulate the chaotic functioning of this casino economy[viii], but facts are stubborn and capitalism's laws always end up imposing their rule.
Just as in the economic domain, where differences of language only serve to hide capitalism's historic decline and the depth of the crisis, in the imperialist domain, so all the talk about peace only hides a growing chaos ans a growing chaos and antagonisms proliferating at every level. The present situation in the Middle East is a clear illustration.
By the time this International Review is published, the plan that Clinton has been trying to push through at any cost will have remained a dead letter, as forecast.
The protagonists of the “peace process” do not themselves know how to deal with the situation. Each is trying to defend his positions without any of them being capable of proposing a stable and viable way out of the endemic warfare dragging on in the region. The Israeli state is determined to give up as little as possible of its prerogatives, while the Palestinian Authority under Arafat cannot accept anything that would look as if it were abandoning its ambitions.
Israel is defending a position of strength gained since its foundation in 1947, through several wars against its Arab neighbours (Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt), and with the unfailing support of the United States. Thanks to its role as bastion of the Western imperialist bloc's resistance to the 1950s offensive by the Russian imperialist bloc, via the Arab states that had declared allegiance to the USSR, Israel has won a position as regional policeman which it is not ready to give up in a hurry.
But since the collapse of the Russian imperialist bloc ten years ago, the situation has changed. The United States has modified the orientation of its policy towards the Middle East. The 1991 Gulf War aimed to impose the recognition of the USA's world super-power status, to discourage its allies in the Western bloc - Britain, France, but above all Germany - from leaving the orbit of their overbearing godfather. The discipline of the bloc was no longer so easily tolerated once the threat of the opposing bloc had disappeared. But the Gulf War's second objective was to impose a total US control on the Middle East.
When the world was divided into two great imperialist blocs, the US could tolerate its allies occupying influential positions on the imperialist scene in certain regions of the world. It could even delegate to some of them a foreign policy which, though it sometimes opposed American interests, was always obliged to remain within the orbit of the Western bloc. In the Middle East, Britain could thus have a preponderant influence in Kuwait and certain Gulf Emirates, France in Lebanon and Syria, Germany and France in Iraq, etc. In 1991, the Gulf War gave the signal that the US intended to take complete control of the enforcement of the pax Americana. The Madrid conference in 1991, then the Oslo ne991, then the Oslo negotiations at the beginning of 1993 were to lead to the signature of the Israeli-Palestinian declaration of principles in Washington in September 1993, under the sole authority of the US, without any help from its old allies. In Cairo in May 1994, Arafat and Rabin signed the agreement on the autonomy of Gaza and Jericho, and the Israeli army began its withdrawal, to allow Yasser Arafat's triumphant arrival in Gaza in July 1994.
But this turn of events caused a significant fraction of the Israeli bourgeoisie to break with US policy, for the first time in the country's short history. In November 1995, Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish “extremist”. The elections that followed brought the Likud party led by Benjamin Netanyahu to power, and the new government began to be a serious hindrance to the plans of American diplomacy. The US took things in hand with the return to power of the Labour Party, with Ehud Barak as Prime Minister, and this led to the Sharm-el-Sheikh agreement between Arafat and Barak in September 1999. Nonetheless, the July 2000 Camp David summit, which was supposed to crown the USA's ability to impose a peace settlement on the Middle East, fell apart and ended without agreement. During this episode, French policy was an open attempt to sabotage the policy of its American ex-ally - whican ex-ally - which the latter moreover openly denounced as such. In Israel itself, resistance to the peace process returned to the fore in September 2000, with the provocative visit to the esplanade of the el-Aqsa mosque by Ariel Sharon, a long-standing hawk of the Likud party; this was to be the signal for new and violent confrontations, which spread rapidly through the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. In October, a new summit at Sharm-el-Sheikh was supposed to put an end to the violence, create a commission of enquiry, and restart the negotiations. It had no effect on the ground, where the Intifada and the repression continued.
The situation today is thus not the same as it was during the Six Day war of 1967, or the Yom Kippur war of 1973, when the Israeli army directly confronted the armies of the Arab states, within which were included units of the various Palestinian liberation movements. Nor is it the same as during the 1982 war, when Israel invaded the south Lebanon and encouraged the massacres (more than 20,000 dead in a few days) perpetrated by its allies in the Christian militias. Then, the situation was still dominated by the fundamental division between the two great imperialist blocs, whatever the secondary divisions that might exist within each one. And even if Yasser Arafat, ever since his first appearance at the tst appearance at the tribune of the United Nations in 1976, had been trying to attract American diplomatic support, in US eyes he remained forever suspect of conniving with the USSR.
Today, there is division everywhere. The Israeli bourgeoisie is no longer unswervingly loyal to the US. During the 1991 Gulf War, a significant fraction, especially in the army, protested at the Americans' ban on Israeli counter-attacks against Iraqi missiles. For the Israeli army, the most operationally effective in the region, the humiliation of being forced to remain passive and rely on the US High Command for its defence, was a bitter pill to swallow. The “peace process”, which virtually put Israel and the Palestinians on an equal footing, forced the Israeli army to withdraw from the south Lebanon, and envisaged the abandonment of the Golan Heights, was not at all to the taste of the most “radical” fraction of the Israeli bourgeoisie. Nor was this “peace process” easy for Barak's Labour Party to accept. The Labour Party is closer than Likud to the United States, and above all has a more realistic long-term view of the Middle East situation; it is nonetheless the war party, the party which has led the army and conducted the main military campaigns. It is even the Labour Party which has presided over the greatest extener the greatest extension of Jewish colonies in the Occupied Territories! Contrary to what is commonly supposed, the Labour Party is not more in favour of “peace” than the Likud right. There may be differences of opinion, but there is no fundamental disagreement between the two fractions of the Israeli bourgeoisie. National unity has always been maintained in both war and “peace” (it was the right that signed the peace agreements with Egypt at the end of the 1970s).
Israel is not the only country tempted to play its own game, and free itself from American tutelage. Syria was able to lay hands on Lebanon in exchange for its “neutrality” during the Gulf War in 1991. Nonetheless, it is not prepared to accept Israel's annexation of the Golan Heights, conquered in 1967. Here too there is cause for friction. Within the Palestinian bourgeoisie itself, Arafat's Fatah and the more radical organisations are far from being in agreement amongst themselves. Like the rest of the world, the whole region is prey to a rise in unbridled self-interest. The wholly dominant influence of American diplomacy is in fact thoroughly superficial, since it is trying to keep a lid down on a whole series of powder kegs just waiting to explode, in a region whose protagonists are all heavily armed.
As for the other great As for the other great imperialist powers, they cannot openly sabotage the US initiatives if they are not to be completely excluded from the game - as is the case currently with France's diplomacy. Officially, they are all toeing the line in support of the “peace process”. However, this does not exclude the possibility of them acting underhand to sabotage the Clinton plan, or any other American plan. Arafat himself sometimes calls for the European Union's involvement in the negotiations, since he would like to avoid a complete dependence on the US for his political survival. That being said, it is not with the EU that he is discussing, but with the US administration.
In today's world where each is “looking after number one”, only two of the great powers are capable of a long-term vision: the United States, which is doing its utmost to maintain its status as the planet's only military super-power; and Germany, which is pursuing in the background a discreet imperialist policy aimed at increasing its influence, completely straitjacketed ever since the end of World War II. The less powerful states are less capable of long-term vision. Each tries to defend its national interests, to defend itself when it is attacked, in particular by undermining its adversaries and sowing disorder in their camp. None today are capable of aoday are capable of a constructive, long-term policy. The Middle East situation is not likely to stabilise. Even the kind of “armed peace” that Eastern Europe experienced during the Cold War is no longer possible today.
As for the possibility of creating a Palestinian state, the fantastic absurdity of its proposed frontiers almost makes the South African Bantustans look like a rational project! There are territories under exclusive Palestinian control - the Gaza Strip, and a few big blots on the map of the West Bank; then there territories under joint control - a few more blots on the West Bank - where Israel is responsible for security. And the whole thing is situated within the environment of the West Bank Territories under exclusive Israeli control, with special roads to protect the Jewish settlements... How could anybody believe that such an aberration contains an ounce of progress, an iota of satisfaction of the needs of the population, anything whatever to do with any kind of “right of peoples to self-determination”?
The whole history of capitalism's decadence has shown that the national states which failed to reach maturity during capitalism's ascendant phase have been unable to constitute a solid and viable political and economic framework in the long term; the disintegration of the USSR andgration of the USSR and Yugoslavia is a demonstration. In Africa, the states inherited from the period of decolonisation are in tatters. War rages in Indonesia (Aceh...). Terrorism is rife in southern India and Ceylon is riven by civil war. There is extreme tension on the frontier between India and Pakistan, between Myanmar (Burma) and Thailand. In South America, Columbia suffers from permanent destabilisation. War is endemic between Peru and Ecuador. Frontiers everywhere are in dispute, since they have never really been recognised and accepted since the 19th century.
In this context, not only will “the Palestinian state never be anything but a bourgeois state in the service of the exploiting class, oppressing the same masses with its cops and prisons”[ix], it will never be anything but an aberration, a rump state, the symbol not of a nation but of the decomposition caused by capitalism's survival in the present historic period. Sharing out sovereignty over an indescribable entanglement of zones, towns, villages, roads attributed to one or the other is not a “peace process”, but a minefield for today and tomorrow, where any incident can at any moment provoke a new conflict. It is the irratiot is the irrationality of the world today pushed to the extreme.
The 21st century is beginning with a new acceleration of the dramatic consequences for humanity of the capitalist system's continued survival. Neither the promised prosperity of the “new economy”, nor the promised peace in the Middle East have put in an appearance. Nor could they, for capitalism is a decadent system, a sick body politic whose decomposition can only bring chaos, poverty, and barbarism in its wake.
MG
iThough in reality, they are mostly in "unofficial" positions (en France for example, Krivine is leader of the Trotskyist Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire, while Aguiton is one of the founders of the rank-and-file union SUD in the Post Office), or even occupied as discreet advisers in the bourgeoisie's left-wing administrations.
iiLe Monde Diplomatique of January 2001, the article being written by its editor Ignacio Ramonet.
iiiItalian far-left extra-parliamentary group during the 1960s-70s.
ivSee the articles "The new economy: a new justification for capitalism" (no.102), "Capitalism's fake good health" (no.100), "The abyss that hides behind 'uninterrupted growth'" (no.99), and the series of articles on "Thirty years of capitalism's open crisis" (nos.96-98).
vNewsweek, 18th December 2000.
viThe Economist, 9th December 2000.
viiSee our pamphlet Unions against the working class
viiiSee "A casino economy" in International Review no.87
ix“Neither Israel, nor Palestine: the workers have no country”, position adopted by the ICC and published in World Revolution (Britain) and Internationalism (USA), as well as on https://www.internationalism.org [15]
Eighty years ago in March 1921, four years after the successful seizure of power by the working class in the October Revolution in Russia in 1917, the Bolshevik Party forcibly suppressed an insurrection at the Kronstadt garrison of the Baltic Fleet on the small island of Kotlin in the Gulf of Finland 30 kilometres from Petrograd.
The Bolshevik Party had had several years’ experience in fighting a bloody civil war against the counter revolutionary armies of the Russian and foreign bourgeoisies. But the revolt of the Kronstadt garrison was new and different: it was a revolt from within by the working class supporters of the soviet regime, who had been in the vanguard of the October Revolution, and were now raising class demands to correct various intolerable deformations and abuses of the new power.
The violent crushing of this struggle has ever since provided a reference point for understanding the meaning of the revolutionary project. Never more so than today when the bourgeoisie is doing all it can to prove to the working class that there is an unbreakable thread linking Marx and Lenin to Stalin and the Gulag.
Our intention is not to go over all the historical details. Previous articles in the International Review have already encompassed the event in detail (International Review n°3 “The lessons of Kronstadt” and International Review n°100 “1921: The proletariat and the transitional state”).
By contrast, we will take the opportunity of this anniversary to concentrate polemically on two kinds of argument about the Kronstadt revolt:firstly the anarchist use of the events to prove the authoritarian counter-revolutionary nature of Marxism and the parties that act in its name; secondly the idea, that still exists in the proletarian camp today, that the crushing of the rebellion was a “tragic necessity” to defend the gains of October.
According to the anarchist historian Voline:
"Lenin understood nothing - or rather, did not want to
understand anything - about the Kronstadt movement. The essential
thing for him and his party was to maintain themselves in power at
all costs. (...)
As Marxists, authoritarians and statists, the Bolsheviks could not permit any freedom or independent action of the masses. They had no confidence in the free masses. They were convinced that the fall of their dictatorship would mean the destruction of all the work that had been done, and the endangering of the Revolution, which they confused with themselves. (...)
Kronstadt was the first entirely independent attempt of the people to liberate itself from all yokes and achieve the Social Revolution, an attempt made directly, resolutely, and boldly by the working masses themselves without political shepherds, without leaders or tutors. It was the first step towards the third and social revolution.
Kronstadt fell. But it had accomplished a task and that was the important thing. In the complex and shadowy labyrinth which opens out to the masses in revolt, Kronstadt is a bright beacon that lights up the right road. It matters little that in the circumstances in which they found themselves the rebels still spoke of power (the power of the Soviets) instead of he Soviets) instead of getting rid of the word and the idea altogether and speaking instead of co-ordination, organisation, administration. It was a last tribute paid to the past. Once full freedom of discussion, organisation and action have been completely won by the working masses themselves, once the true road of in independent popular activity is found the rest will come automatically and inevitably” (p534-538 The Unknown Revolution, Black Rose Books, 1975).
For the anarchists then, whose views Voline expresses succinctly, the suppression of the Kronstadt revolt was the natural, logical consequence of the Marxist conceptions of the Bolsheviks. The substitutionism of the Party, its identification of the dictatorship of the proletariat with the dictatorship of the party and the creation of a transitional state was the expression of a overriding lust for power, authority, over the masses in whom they had no confidence. Bolshevism, according to Voline, meant the replacement of one form of oppression by another.
But for him, Kronstadt was not merely a revolt but a model for the future. If the Kronstadt soviet had restricted itself to economic and social tasks (co-ordination, organisation, administration) and forgot about political tasks (its talk of the powets talk of the power of the soviets) it would have completed a picture of what the true social revolution should be: a society without leaders, without parties, without a state, without power of any kind, a society of immediate and complete freedom.
Unfortunately, for the anarchists, the first of the lessons coincides very closely with the prevailing ideology of the world bourgeoisie, that a communist revolution can only lead to a new form of tyranny.
This coincidence of views between the anarchists and the bourgeoisie isn't accidental. Both measure history according to the abstractions of equality, solidarity and fraternity against hierarchy, tyranny and dictatorship. The bourgeoisie used these moral principles cynically and hypocritically against the October Revolution to justify the brutality of the counter-revolutionary forces between 1918 and 1920 when it led armed interventions against Russia and blockaded it economically. The anarchists' practical alternative to Bolshevism on the other hand is a naive utopia where the historical difficulties that the proletarian revolution had to confront have mysteriously melted away.
But as the events of Spain in 1936 confirm, anarchist naivety, after rejecting the Marxist historical conception of revolution, is obliged to capitulate before the bourgeoisie's practical counter-revolution.
If the Bolsheviks were fundamentally motivated by a mania for complete power, as Voline claims, anarchism by contrast is incapable of answering a whole series questions that emerge from the historical reality. If the Bolsheviks’ ultimate objective was power why - unlike the majority of Social Democracy - did it condemn itself to a period of ostracism between 1914 and 1917 by denouncing the imperialist war and demanding that it be turned into a civil war? Why did it refuse to join, unlike the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, the provisional government with the Russian liberal bourgeoisie after the February 1917 revolution, and call for all power to the soviets instead?
Why did it trust in the capacities of the Russian working class to begin a world proletarian revolution in October, unlike most of the rest of international Social Democracy who deemed it too backward and small in numbers to overthrow the bourgeoisie ?
Why did it trust in, win, and retain the support of, the working class to make all the sacrifices necessary to survive the allied blockade and resist arms in hand the counter-revolutionary armies?
Why did it inspire the world working class to follow the Russian lead in revolutionary attempts throughout Europe and the rest of the world? How could the Bolshevik Party take the initiative in the creation of a new Communist International on a world scale?
Finally why did the process of the integration of the party into the state machine, and its usurpation of the mass organs of workers’ power - the soviets and the factory committees - and finally the use of force against the class struggle, not occur overnight, but only after a protracted period?
The theory of the Bolsheviks’ inherent nastiness does not explain the degeneration of the Russian Revolution in general nor the Kronstadt episode in particular.
By 1921 the revolution in Russia, and the Bolshevik Party which led it, was confronted by a very difficult situation. The spread of the revolution to Germany and other countries looked much less likely than it had in 1919. The world economic situation had stabilised relatively and the pivotal Spartacist uprising in Germany had failed. Inside Russia, despite victory in the civil war, the situation was dramatic, due to the repeated assaults by counter-revolutionary armies, and the economic strangulation consciously organised by the international bourgeoisie. The industrial infrastructure was in ruins and the working class was decimated by its sacrifices on the battlefields first of the world and then of the civil war, or because it had been forced to leave the cities in droves for the countryside, in order to survive. The Bolsheviks were also faced with the growing unpopularity of the regime not only amongst the peasantry who launched a series of insurrections in the provinces, but above all within the working class that unleashed a strike wave in Petrograd in mid-February 1921. And then came Kronstadt.
How could Russia remain a bastion of the world revolution, survive the working class disaffection and economic disintegration, while waiting for the delayed help from working class revolution in other countries, and especially in Europe? The anarchists have no explanation for the degeneration of the revolution, except to close their eyes to the problem of the political supremacy of the proletariat, the centralisation of its power, the international extension of the revolution, and of the transitional period to a communist society. This does not alter the fact that the Bolsheviks made a catastrophic error by giving a military answer to the Kronstadt revolt, and treating working class resistance to them as an act of treachery and counter-revolution. But the Bolshevik Party did not have the benefit of hindsight as revolutionaries need to have today. It could only make use of the acquisitions of the workers' movement of the time: a movement that had never before had to confront the immensely difficult task of holding onto power in a hostile capitalist world. The relationship of the soviets to the party of the working class after the successful seizure of power was not understood, nor was the relationship of both these class organs to the transitional state that would inevitably succeed the smashing of the bourgeois state.
In taking the helm of the state, and gradually incorporating into it the workers’ councils and factory committees, the Bolshevik Party was stumbling in the dark. And, according to prevailing opinion within the workers’ movement at the time, the main danger to the revolution came from outside the new state apparatus: from the international bourgeoisie and from the peasantry and the Russian bourgeoisie in exile. None of the tendencies in the communist movement at the time, not even the left wing, had an alternative perspective, although there were those, including inside the Bolshevik Party who warned against the bureaucratisation of the regime. But their prescriptions were limited and contained other dangers. The Workers' Opposition of Kollontai and Shliapnikov called for the trade unions to defend the workers against the excesses of the state, forgetting that the workers’ councils had transcended them as mass organs of the revolutionary proletariat.
There were some inside the Bolshevik Party who opposed the crushing of the revolt: the Party members in Kronstadt who joined the movement and elements like Gavriil Miasnikov who would later form the Workers’ Group and opposed the military solution. But the existing left tendencies in the party, and in the Communist International, despite their critiques of the Bolshevik regime, nevertheless supported the use of violence. The Workers’ Opposition even volunteered for the assault force. The German Communist Workers Party, the KAPD, which opposed the dictatorship of the party, nevertheless agreed with the military action against the Kronstadt rebellion (this does not prevent some anarchists today, like the Anarchist Federation in Britain, from trying to claim the KAPD for their ancestry!).
Finally the demands of the Kronstadt Soviet, contrary to Voline's opinion, did not provide a coherent alternative perspective either, since they are framed mainly within an immediate and local context and don't take up the wider implications of the proletarian bastion and the world situation. In particular they don't give an answer to what the role of the vanguard party should be (1)
It was only later, much later, that revolutionaries, trying to draw all the lessons from the defeat of the Russian Revolution and the revolutionary wave that it initiated, could point to the real lessons of this tragic episode.
"It may be that in certain circumstances the proletariat - and we will even concede that they may be the unconscious victims of manoeuvres by the enemy - enters into struggle against the proletarian state. What is to be done in such a situation? We must start from the principle that socialism cannot be imposed on the proletariat by violence and force. It would have been better to have lost Kronstadt than to have kept it from the geographical point of view, since substantially this victory could only have one result: that of altering the very bases, the substance of the action carried out by the proletariat." (Octobre, 1938, published by the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left).
The Communist Left had put its finger on the essential problem: the Bolshevik Party, in using the violence of the state against the working class was putting itself at the head of the counter-revolution. The victory at Kronstadt accelerated the tendency for the Bolshevik Party to become an instrument of the Russian state against the working class. From this insight, the communist left was able to draw another daring conclusion. The communist party, in order to remain a vanguard of the proletariat, must protect its autonomy from the post-revolutionary state that reflects an inevitable tendency to preserve the status quo and prevent the advance of the revolutionary process.
However, in today's communist left, this conclusion is far from universally held. In fact, some parts of it, especially the Bordigist current, have returned to the justifications of Lenin and Trotsky for the repression of Kronstadt, in complete contradiction to the position of the Italian fraction in 1938:
"It would be pointless to discuss the terrible circumstances that obliged the Bolsheviks to crush Kronstadt with someone who refused on principle that a proletarian power in the process of birth or consolidation can fire on the workers. The examination of the terrible problem the proletarian state must confront reinforces the critique of a vision of the revolution through rose tinted glasses and the understanding that the crushing of this rebellion was, according to Trotsky, 'a tragic necessity', but a necessity and even a duty" (“Kronstadt: a tragic necessity”, Programme Communiste n°88, theoretical organ of the International Communist Party, May 1982).
Bypassing the tradition that they claim to belong to, the Bordigist current may defend the intransigent internationalism of the Bolshevik Party, but it also defends, just as vehemently, its mistakes, and so is left unable to learn from all the reasons for the degeneration of the party and the revolution (2).
According to them the relationship of the party to the class and to the post-revolutionary state in the revolutionary process doesn't pose a problem of principles but only of expediency, of how best in each situation the revolutionary vanguard carries out its function:
“This titanic struggle can only provoke within the proletariat itself terrible tensions. In effect, it is obvious that the party cannot make the revolution nor direct the dictatorship against nor even without the masses, the revolutionary will of the proletariat is not manifested by electoral consultations or opinion polls to find a 'numerical majority' or, even more absurd, a unanimity. It expresses itself by a rise and ever more precise orientation of the struggles where the most determined fractions draw along the hesitant and undecided, and sweep aside its opponents if necessary. In the course of the vicissitudes of the civil war and the dictatorship, the positions and relationships of the different layers may change. And far from recognising by virtue of some 'soviet democracy' the same weight and the same importance to all the layers of workers, semi-workers or petit-bourgeoisie, explains Trotsky in Terrorism or Communism, their right even to participate in the soviets, that is the organs of the proletarian state, depends on their attitude in the struggle.
No 'constitutional rule' no 'democratic principle' can harmonise relations within the proletariat. No recipe can resolve the contradictions between the local needs and the demands of the international revolution, between the immediate needs and the demands of the historic struggle of the class, contradictions which find their expression in the opposition of various fractions of the proletariat. No formalism can codify the relations between the party, the most advanced fraction of the class and organ of its revolutionary struggle, and the masses who are affected to different degrees by the pressure of local and immediate conditions. Even the best party, that which can 'observe the spirit of the mass and influence it' as Lenin said, must sometimes demand the impossible from the masses. More exactly, it only finds the ‘limit’ to what is possible by trying to go forward.” (ibid.).
In 1921 the Bolshevik Party chose the wrong path without any previous experience or parameters to guide them. Today, the Bordigists, absurdly, make a virtue out of Bolsheviks' mistakes and declare: “there are no principles”. The Bordigists conjure away the problem of the exercising of proletarian power by deriding formalistic and abstract methods for arriving at a common position of the whole class. While it is very true there can never be a perfect means for establishing a consensus in an extremely fluid situation the workers’ councils or soviets have been shown to be the most adequate means of reflecting and carrying out the evolving revolutionary will of the proletariat as a whole, even though the experience of Germany in 1918 and elsewhere shows that they can be vulnerable to recuperation by the bourgeoisie. Although the Bordigists are generous enough to admit that the party cannot make the revolution without the masses, the masses then have no means of expressing their revolutionary will as an entire class, except through the party and with the permission of the party. And the party can, if necessary, correct the proletariat with machine guns, as at Kronstadt. According to this logic the proletarian revolution has two contradictory slogans: before the revolution “All power to the soviets”; after the revolution: “All power to the party”.
The Bordigists, unlike Octobre, have forgotten that, contrary to the bourgeois revolution, the tasks of the proletarian revolution cannot be delegated to a minority, but must be carried out by the self-conscious majority. The emancipation of the workers is the task of the working class itself.
The Bordigists reject both bourgeois democracy and workers democracy as though they were the same fraud. But the soviets or workers' councils - the means by which the proletariat mobilises itself for the overthrow of capitalism - must be the organs of the proletarian dictatorship that reflect and regulate the tensions and differences within the proletariat and retains its armed power over the transitional state. The party, the indispensable vanguard, however clear and in advance of the rest of the proletariat at a particular time, cannot substitute itself for this power
However, having demonstrated the right of the party - in practice, if not “in principle” - to shoot down workers, the Bordigists, as if shrinking from the horror of this conclusion, then proceed to deny that the Kronstadt revolt had a proletarian character anyway. Following one of Lenin's definitions of the time, the Kronstadt was a ”petty-bourgeois counter-revolution” that opened the door to white guard reaction.
It was certainly true that all sorts of confused and even reactionary ideas were expressed by the rebels of Kronstadt, and some were reflected in its platform. It is also true that the organised forces of the counter-revolution were trying to use the rebellion for their own ends. But the workers of Kronstadt continued to consider themselves in continuity with the revolution of 1917 and as an integral part of the proletarian movement on a world scale:
“Let the workers of the entire world know that we, the defenders of the power of the soviets, protect the conquests of the social revolution. We will win or perish on the ruins of Kronstadt, fighting for the just cause of the proletarian masses” (the Kronstadt Pravda , p82).
Whatever confusions were expressed by the Kronstadt rebels, it is absolutely undeniable that their demands also reflected the interests of the proletariat faced with terrible living conditions, the growing oppression of a state bureaucracy and the loss of its political power in the atrophied soviets. The attempt at the time by the Bolsheviks to brand them as petty-bourgeois and potential agents of the counter revolution was of course a pretext to solve a situation of terrible danger and complexity within the proletariat by force.
With the advantage of historical hindsight and the theoretical work of the communist left, we can see the basic error of their reasoning: the Bolsheviks crushed the Kronstadt revolt and nevertheless an anti-proletarian dictatorship still massacred the communists - Stalinism, the absolute power of the capitalist bureaucracy. In fact, in crushing the efforts of the workers of Kronstadt to regenerate the soviets, in identifying themselves with the state, the Bolsheviks were paving the way for Stalinism without knowing it. They helped the acceleration of a counter-revolutionary process which was to have far more terrible and tragic consequences for the working class than the restoration of the Whites. In Russia the counter-revolution won, proclaiming itself communist. The idea that Stalinist Russia was the living embodiment of socialism, and in direct continuity with the October revolution sowed a terrible confusion and an incalculable demoralisation in the ranks of the working class all over the world. We are still living with the consequences of this distortion of reality as the bourgeoisie since 1989 continues to equate the death of Stalinism with the death of communism.
But the Bordigists, despite this experience, are still identifying with the tragic mistake of 1921. It is hardly a “tragic” necessity for them but a communist duty that will have to be repeated !
Like the anarchists, the Bordigists don't see any contradiction between the Bolshevik Party in 1917, that led but also deferred to and depended on, the armed will of the revolutionary proletariat organised in the soviets, and the Bolshevik Party of 1921, that had reduced the soviets to a shadow of their former power and turned the violence of the state against the working class. But while the anarchists help the bourgeoisie in their present campaigns by portraying the Bolsheviks as machiavellian tyrants, the Bordigists celebrate this fraudulent image as the very acme of revolutionary intransigence.
But a Communist Left, worthy of the name, while identifying with the Bolshevik heritage must be also able to criticise its mistakes. The crushing of the Kronstadt revolt was one of the most harmful and terrible of these.
Como 8.1.2001
1) See International Review n°3, p51, for the platform of the Kronstadt revolt.
2) The International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party , another branch of the Communist Left has an ambiguous position on Kronstadt. An article published in Revolutionary Perspectives No 23 (1986) reaffirms the proletarian character of the October Revolution and the Bolshevik Party that led it, and rejects the anarchist idealisations of the Kronstadt revolt, underlining that the revolt reflected profoundly unfavourable conditions for the proletarian revolution and that it contained many confused and reactionary elements. At the same time the article criticises the Bordigist idea that the assault on Kronstadt was a necessity to preserve the dictatorship of the party. It affirms that one of the basic lessons of Kronstadt is that the dictatorship of the proletariat must be exercised by the class itself, through its workers' councils, and not by the party. It also shows that the errors of the Bolsheviks concerning the relation between the party and the class, in the overall context of the isolation of the proletarian bastion, accelerated the internal degeneration of the both the party and the soviet state. Nevertheless the article doesn't characterise the revolt as proletarian and doesn't answer the fundamental question: is it possible that a proletarian dictatorship uses violence against the discontent of the working class? They even say that as a result of the manipulation of the counter-revolution - even if it opened up a chapter of slow agony in the workers movement - the repression of the revolt was more than justified.
The coming century will be decisive for human history. If capitalism continues to rule the planet, then before 2100 society will be plunged into such barbarism that it will make the 20th century look like a minor headache and either reduce human-kind to the stone-age, or destroy it altogether. If humanity does have a future, then it is wholly in the hands of the world proletariat, whose worldwide revolution alone can overthrow the domination of the capitalist mode of production whose historic crisis is responsible for today's barbarity. But to do so, the proletariat must find in the future the strength to carry out its task, which has been lacking up to now.
In the first part of this article, we tried to understand why the proletariat's past revolutionary endeavours failed, and above all its greatest, the revolution that began in Russia in 1917. We showed that the terrible defeat it suffered at the end of this attempt caused it to miss the appointment with history that followed: capitalism's great crisis in the 1930s, and World War II. In particular, we showed that at the end of the last war, "The proletariat had reached rock bottom. What it was told, what it thought, was its greatest victory - the triumph of democracy over fascism - was in fact its most utter historic defeat. Capitalist order was guaranteed by the workers' euphoric belief in their "victory", and their resulting belief in the "sacred virtues" of bourgeois democracy: the same democracy which had led them twice into imperialist butchery and crushed their revolution in 1920".
In Europe, the main battleground of both the war and the revolution, the Allied victory paralysed the class struggle for several years. The workers' bellies were empty, but their heads filled with the euphoria of "victory". Moreover, the state capitalist policies of every government in Europe provided a further means of mystification. These policies corresponded to the fundamental needs of European capital with its economy laid to waste by the war. Nationalisations, and a certain number of "social" measures (such as the state's taking charge of the health system), were all completely capitalist measures. They allowed the state better to plan and co-ordinate the reconstruction of a productive potential in ruins. At the same time, they allowed a more efficient management of labour power. For example, the capitalists had every interest in the good health of the workforce, especially when the workers were being asked to make an exceptional effort, in difficult conditions and with a shortage of labour power. But these capitalist measures were presented as "workers' victories", not only by the Stalinist parties whose programmes included the complete nationalisation of the economy, but also by the social-democrats, in particular the British Labour Party. This explains why throughout Europe, the left parties, including the Stalinists, were to be found in government after the war, either in coalitions with parties of the democratic Right (such as the Christian Democracy in Italy), or alone (in Britain, the Labour leader Attlee replaced Churchill as prime minister, despite the latter's immense popularity and his inestimable services to the British bourgeoisie).
Two years after the war, the promises of a better future, with which the socialist and Stalinist parties had persuaded the workers to accept the most terrible sacrifices, had been broken. The workers undertook a series of struggles. In the spring of 1947, a strike at Renault, the biggest factory in France, forced the Stalinist party (whose leader Maurice Thorez constantly called on the workers throughout industry to "work first, make demands afterwards") to leave the government. The party, through the CGT union which it controlled, then launched a series of strikes both to allow the workers to "let off steam" before they got out of hand, but also to put pressure on the other fractions of the bourgeoisie in order to force their way back into the government. But the other bourgeois parties turned a deaf ear. They had no doubts about the Stalinists' loyalty in defence of the national capital - but the Cold War had begun, and the bourgeoisie's ruling fractions throughout Europe had lined up behind the United States. Wherever the Stalinists took part in government, they either seized power completely if they were in the Russian zone, or were thrown out altogether in the Western zone.
From this time on, workers' conditions in the Western zone slowly began to improve. Needless to say, this had nothing to do with any bourgeois generosity. The billions of dollars of the Marshall Plan, which had just begun to arrive, were designed to tie the West European bourgeoisie firmly to the US bloc, and to undermine the influence of the Stalinist parties, which were henceforth at the head of the workers' struggles.
In Eastern Europe, the Stalinist parties under Moscow's orders refused the American manna, and the situation took longer to improve slightly. However, the workers' anger could not be expressed in the same way. At first, the workers were called to support the communist parties, which promised them the moon, all the more so because the communists not only took part in the governments set up after the "Liberation" (as in most of the Western countries), but also took the lead in these governments thanks to the support of the Red Army, and eliminated the "bourgeois parties". The workers were presented with the mystification of the "construction of socialism". This mystification had a certain success, as for example in Czechoslovakia, where the February 1948 "Prague coup" - in other words the Stalinists' seizure of government power - was carried out with the support of many workers.
Nonetheless, in the "people's democracies" the main instrument of control over the working class soon became brute force and repression. The workers' uprising of June 1953 in East Berlin and many other towns in the Soviet occupation zone was bloodily crushed by Russian tanks[1]. In Poland, the workers' anger, which first found expression in the great Poznan strike of June 1956, was defused by the return to power on 21st October of Gomulka (a Stalinist leader expelled from the party in 1949 for "Titoism", and imprisoned between 1951 and 1955). In Hungary, however, the workers' rising which began a few days later was savagely put down by the Russians from 4th November onwards, leaving 25,000 dead and 160,000 refugees[2].
The workers' risings in the "socialist countries" between 1953 and 1956 were clear proof that these countries had nothing "working class" about them. But every sector of the bourgeoisie spoke the same language to prevent the workers from drawing the real lessons from events.
In the Eastern bloc, the "communist" propaganda, and the Stalinist leaders' constant references to "marxism" and "proletarian internationalism" were the best means to turn the workers' anger away from a class perspective and increase their illusions in bourgeois democracy and nationalism. On 17th June 1953, an immense procession of East Berlin workers headed down the great avenue Unter den Linden towards the West. Their aim was to seek the solidarity of the West Berlin workers, but they were also under the illusion that the Western authorities would help workers in the East. These same authorities closed off their sector, and with their usual cynicism changed the name of Unter den Linden to the Avenue of 17th June. Similarly, while the Polish workers' demands in June 1956 obviously included many class economic demands, they were also strongly coloured with democratic, and above all nationalist and religious illusions. This is why Gomulka, who presented himself as a patriot who had stood up to the Russians, and who freed Cardinal Wyszynski (interned in a monastery since 1953) immediately after his return to power, was able to regain control of the situation by the end of 1956. The workers' insurrection in Hungary, despite organising in workers' councils, remained strongly marked by democratic and nationalist illusions. Indeed, the insurrection itself had been sparked off by the bloody repression of a students' demonstration demanding that Hungary adopt the "Polish way". The measures decided by Imre Nagy (an old Stalinist sacked from his post as party leader by the hard-liners in April 1955) were intended to exploit these illusions in order to regain control of the situation: he announced the formation of a coalition government and Hungary's withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact. This last measure was unacceptable for the USSR, and it intervened with tanks.
The intervention of Russian troops gave nationalism a further impetus in the East European countries. At the same time, it was abundantly exploited by the "democratic" and pro-American fractions of the West European bourgeoisies, while their Stalinist parties used this very propaganda to portray the Hungarian workers' insurrection as a chauvinist, even a fascist, movement, in the pay of US imperialism.
Throughout the Cold War, even when it was tempered by the policy of "peaceful co-existence" after 1956, the division of the world into two opposing blocs was thus a primary mystification of the working class. As we saw in the first part of this article, during the 1930s the identification of the Stalinist USSR with communism provoked a profound demoralisation in some sectors of the working class, who wanted nothing to do with a "Soviet-style" society and turned back to the social-democrats. At the same time, most workers continued to hope for a proletarian revolution and followed the Stalinist parties in their claims to defend the "socialist fatherland" and the "anti-fascist struggle", thus making it possible for the latter to enrol them in World War II. During the 1950s, the same kind of policy continued to divide and disorientate the working class. A part of the class wanted to hear no more of communism (identified with the USSR), while the rest remained under the ideological domination of the Stalinist parties and trade unions. Thus, during the Korean War the confrontation between East and West was used to set different sectors of the class against each other, and to enrol millions of workers behind the Soviet camp in the name of the "anti-imperialist struggle". For example, on 28th May 1952, the French Communist Party (PCF) and the Peace Movement which it controlled organised a great demonstration in Paris against a visit by the American general Ridgway, commanding US forces in Korea. Ridgway was accused (wrongly as it turned out) of using bacterial weapons, and was greeted by a demonstration of tens of thousands of workers (mostly PCF militants) denouncing "Plague Ridgway" and demanding France's withdrawal from NATO. There were violent confrontations with the police, and the PCF's number two, Jacques Duclos, was arrested. The PCF's determination in confronting the police, and the arrest of its "historic" leader renewed the "revolutionary" image of a party which only five years earlier had occupied the palaces and ministerial positions of the bourgeois Republic. At the same time, the colonial wars provided a further opportunity to turn the workers away from their class terrain, once again in the name of the struggle against imperialism (not capitalism), against which the USSR was presented as the champion of "the peoples' rights and freedom".
This kind of campaign continued in many countries throughout the 1950s and 60s, especially with the USA's growing commitment to the war in Vietnam from 1961 onwards.
If there was one country where the world's division into two opposing blocs weighed especially heavily, and where the counter-revolution had been particularly crushing, it was Germany. For decades, the German proletariat had been the vanguard of the world working class. Workers all over the world knew that the fate of the revolution would be determined in Germany. And this was proved true between 1919 and 1923. The German proletariat's defeat determined the defeat of the world proletariat. And the terrible counter-revolution that followed, in the hideous guise of Nazism, was, with Stalinism, the clearest expression of the counter-revolution that battened on the working class in every country.
After World War II, Germany's division between the two great imperialist blocs made possible, on both sides of the iron curtain, a thorough destruction of consciousness within the working masses, leaving the German proletariat, no longer the vanguard but the rearguard of the European working class, in terms both of its combativeness and its consciousness.
However, what really paralysed the working class throughout this period, and maintained its ideological submission to capitalism, was the system's apparent prosperity as a result of the reconstruction of Europe's war-shattered economies.
Bourgeois economists and politicians call the period between 1945 and the serious world recession of 1975 the "glorious thirty years", since they ignore the difficulties that the world economy was already undergoing in 1967 and 1971.
We will not go into the causes here, either of the rapid economic growth during this period, or of its end; we have already dealt with both at length in the International Review[3]. What is important is that the open crisis which began to develop from 1967 onwards (with a slowdown in the world economy, recession in Germany, devaluation of sterling, rise in unemployment) was a new confirmation of marxism, which has always:
- declared that capitalism is unable to overcome definitively its economic contradictions, which in the final analysis are responsible for the convulsions of the 20th century (and in particular for the two World Wars);
- considered that capitalism is at its strongest politically and socially during its periods of prosperity[4];
- based the perspective of a proletarian revolution on the bankruptcy of the capitalist mode of production[5].
In this sense, the working class' ideological subjection to capitalism, and all the mystifications which kept the workers from any idea of putting capitalism into question, could only be overcome with the end of the post-war boom.
This is precisely what happened in 1968.
The end of the counter-revolution
In 1967, the bourgeoisie's ideologues were still singing the praises of the capitalist economy; some, who claimed to be revolutionaries and even marxists, talked of nothing but bourgeois society's ability to "integrate" the working class[6]; even the groups of the Communist Left which had emerged from the degenerating Third International could see no light at the end of the tunnel. Yet that year, a small review called Internacionalismo (later to become the ICC's publication in Venezuela) published an article entitled "1968, a new convulsion of capitalism is beginning", which ended thus:
"We are not prophets, and we do not claim to guess when and how future events will unfold. But we are certain and conscious that the process in which capitalism is engaged today cannot be stopped with reforms, devaluations, or any other kind of capitalist measures, and that this process is leading directly to the crisis. And we are equally sure that the inverse process of developing class combativeness, which can be seen all around us today, will the lead the working class to a direct and bloody struggle for the destruction of the bourgeois state".
The one great merit of our comrades who published this article, was to have remained faithful to the teachings of marxism which were to be strikingly verified a few months later. May 1968 in France saw the outbreak of the biggest strike in history, involving the largest ever number of workers (almost 10 million) stopping work at the same time.
An event of such size was the sign of a fundamental change in society: the terrible counter-revolution which had fastened on the working class at the end of the 1920s, and continued for two decades after World War II, had come to an end. And this was soon to be confirmed throughout the world by a series of struggles such as had not been seen for decades:
- the Italian "hot autumn" of 1969 saw massive struggles in all the main industrial centres, and an explicit questioning of trade union control;
- the uprising, during the same year, of the workers of Cordoba in Argentina;
- the massive strikes by the workers of the Baltic coast in Poland during the winter of 1970-71;
- a series of other struggles in the years that followed in virtually all the European countries, and especially in Britain (the world's oldest capitalist country), Germany (the most powerful country in Europe and the leading light of the workers' movement since the second half of the 19th century), and even Spain (still at the time in the grip of the ferocious Francoist dictatorship).
At the same time as this awakening of the workers' struggle, the idea of revolution returned in strength. It was discussed by many workers in struggle, particularly in France and Italy where the struggles had involved the greatest numbers. This proletarian reawakening was also expressed by a growing interest in revolutionary thought, for the writings of Marx and Engels, and of other marxists such as Lenin, Trotsky, and Rosa Luxemburg, but also of the militants of the Communist Left like Bordiga, Gorter, and Pannekoek. This interest was concretised in the emergence of a whole series of little groups trying to renew the links with the Communist Left, and drawing their inspiration from its experience.
We will not deal here, either with the evolution of the workers' struggles since 1968, nor of the groups which claim the heritage of the Communist Left[7]. What we will try to do, is to show why the 1967 forecast by our comrades in Venezuela has still not come to fruition, three decades later, in "the direct and bloody struggle for the destruction of the bourgeois state".
Our organisation has highlighted the obstacles encountered by the proletariat throughout the last thirty years. What follows is thus essentially no more than a summary of what we have said on other occasions.
The first cause of the length of the road that leads today to the communist revolution is an objective one. The revolutionary wave, which began in 1917, and spread to many other countries, was a response to a sudden and terrible drop in working class living conditions: the world war. It took only three years for the proletariat, which had gone to war with a light heart and completely blinded by the bourgeoisie's lies, to open its eyes and raise its head against the barbarism confronting it in the trenches and the terrible exploitation on the home front.
The objective reason for the development of workers' struggles after 1968 was the aggravation of capitalism's economic situation, bringing workers' living conditions increasingly under attack. But contrary to the 1930s, when the bourgeoisie had completely lost control of the situation, the present open crisis did not develop over a period of a few years, but in a process covering several decades. The slow rhythm of the crisis' development was a result of the ruling class' ability to learn the lessons of its past experience, and systematically put into operation a whole series of measures which have allowed it to "manage" the descent into the abyss[8]. This does not alter the insoluble nature of the crisis, but it has allowed the ruling class to spread out over a whole period, both geographically and temporally, its attacks on the working class, and so to hide even from itself the fact that the crisis has no way out.
The second factor that explains the length of the road to proletarian revolution, is the ruling class' deployment of a whole series of political manoeuvres aimed at exhausting the struggle, and preventing the development of working class consciousness.
We can summarise the main features of the bourgeoisie's different strategies since 1968 as follows:
- faced with the first upsurge of workers' struggles, which took it by surprise, the bourgeoisie played the card of the "left alternative", calling on the workers to end their struggles in order to allow the left-wing parties to put in place a different economic policy which was supposed to put an end to the crisis;
- this policy paralysed the workers' combativeness for a while, until a new wave of struggles that began in 1978 (in 1979, for example, Britain went through the highest period of workers' struggle since the General Strike of 1926, with 29 million strike days lost); the bourgeoisie in the most advanced countries (particularly Germany, Britain, the USA, Italy) played the card of the left in opposition: the so-called workers' parties and the unions under their control adopted a more radical language aimed at sabotaging the workers' struggles from within;
- this policy largely explains the ebb in workers' struggles from 1981, but failed to prevent a renewal of large-scale combats that began in the autumn of 1983 (strikes in the public sector in Belgium, then in Holland, the British miners strike of 1984, the Danish general strike of 1985, massive strikes in Belgium in 1986, a series of strikes in Italy during 1987, notably in the education sector, etc).
The most striking characteristic of these movements, which expressed a profound development in working class consciousness, was the growing difficulty that the classic union apparatus had in controlling the struggle, which led to the more and more frequent use of organs that presented themselves as outside, or even against, the unions (such as the "coordinations" in France and Italy during 1986-88), but which in fact were nothing other than "rank-and-file" union structures.
Throughout this period, the bourgeoisie used a whole series of manoeuvres designed to contain workers' combativeness, and retard the development of their consciousness. But this anti-proletarian policy was given a powerful boost by the development of the decomposition of capitalist society. This was the result of the fact that although the proletariat's historic resurgence at the end of the 1960s had prevented the bourgeoisie from answering its systemic crisis in its own way - by world war, just as the crisis of 1929 had been the prelude to World War II - the working class could not prevent the continued development of the characteristics of capitalism's decadence without overthrowing the whole of capitalism itself.
"The world situation may be in a temporary stalemate, this does not mean that history has come to an end. For two decades, society has continued to suffer the accumulation of all the characteristics of decadence, exacerbated by a plunge into the economic crisis which the ruling class shows every day it is unable to overcome. The bourgeoisie's only project for society is to resist, on a day-to-day basis and with no hope of success, the irretrievable collapse of the capitalist mode of production.
Deprived of the slightest historic project capable of mobilising its strength, even the suicidal project of world war, capitalist society can only rot on its feet, plunging ever further into an advanced social decomposition and generalised despair"[9].
Capitalism's entry into decomposition, the final phase of its decadence, weighed more and more heavily on the working class throughout the 1980s:
"At the outset, ideological decomposition obviously affected first and foremost the capitalist class itself, and by rebound the petty-bourgeois strata which have no real autonomy. We can even say that the latter identify particularly well with this decomposition, inasmuch as their specific situation - the absence of any historic future - echoes the major cause of ideological decomposition: the absence of any immediate perspective for society as a whole. Only the proletariat bears within itself a perspective for humanity, and in this sense it is within the ranks of the proletariat that the greatest capacity for resistance to decomposition lies. However, the proletariat itself is not immune from decomposition, all the more so in that the workers live in close proximity to the petty-bourgeoisie, which is decomposition's main vehicle. The elements which constitute the proletariat's strength are in direct opposition to the various aspects of ideological decomposition:
- collective action, solidarity, confront atomisation, ‘"every man for himself', and the search for individual solutions;
- the need for organisation confronts social decomposition, the destruction of the relationships which form the basis of life within society;
- the proletariat's confidence in the future and in its own strength is constantly undermined by the general despair invading society, of nihilism and 'no future';
- consciousness, lucidity, coherence and unity of thought, the taste for theory, have to make their way with difficulty through the mirages of drugs, sects, mysticism, the rejection of reflection and the destruction of thought characteristic of our epoch.
An aggravating factor in this situation is obviously the fact that a growing proportion of the young generations of the working class suffer the devastating effects of unemployment even before they have had the opportunity to experience the collective life of the class, in the workplace and in the company of their comrades in work and struggle. Unemployment, is a direct result of the economic crisis, and not in itself an expression of decomposition. Nonetheless, its effects in this phase of decadence make it a major element of decomposition. Although in general it helps to unmask capitalism's inability to offer a future to the proletariat, it is also today a powerful factor that tends to "lumpenise" certain sectors of the class, particularly amongst the young workers, which weakens correspondingly its present and future political capacities. Throughout the 1980s, which saw a sharp rise in unemployment, this situation was expressed in the absence of significant movements or attempts at organisation by unemployed workers. The contrast with the proletariat's ability during the 1930s, notably in the US, to organise the unemployed, illustrates only too well decomposition's effect in preventing unemployment becoming a factor in the development of proletarian consciousness"[10].
In 1989, in a situation where the working class was finding great difficulty in developing its consciousness, came an immense historical event, itself a sign of capitalism's decomposition: the disintegration of the East European Stalinist regimes, which the entire bourgeoisie had always presented as "socialist":
"The events presently shaking the so-called ‘socialist' countries, the de facto disappearance of the Russian bloc, the patent and definitive bankruptcy of Stalinism on the economic, political and ideological level, constitute along with the international resurgence of the proletariat at the end of the sixties, the most important historic facts since the end of the Second World War. An event on such a scale cannot fail to have its repercussions, and indeed is already doing so, on the consciousness of the working class, all the more so because it involves an ideology and a political system that was presented for more than half a century by all sectors of the bourgeoisie as ‘socialist' or ‘working class'.
The disappearance of Stalinism is the disappearance of the symbol and spearhead of the most terrible counter-revolution in history.
But this does not mean that the development of the consciousness of the world proletariat will be facilitated by it. On the contrary. Even in its death throes, Stalinism is rendering a last service to the domination of capital: in decomposing, its cadaver continues to pollute the atmosphere that the proletariat breathes. For the dominant sectors of the bourgeoisie, the final collapse of Stalinist ideology, the ‘democratic', ‘liberal' and nationalist movements which are sweeping the Eastern countries, provide a golden opportunity to unleash and intensify their campaigns of mystification.
The identification which is systematically established between Stalinism and communism, the lie repeated a thousand times, and today being wielded more than ever, according to which the proletarian revolution can only end in disaster, will for a whole period gain an added impact within the ranks of the working class. We thus have to expect a momentary retreat in the consciousness of the proletariat; the signs of this can already be seen in the unions' return to strength. While the incessant and increasingly brutal attacks which capitalism cannot help but mount on the proletariat will oblige the workers to enter the struggle, in an initial period this will not result in a greater capacity in the class to develop its consciousness. In particular, reformist ideology will weigh very heavily on the struggle in the period ahead, greatly facilitating the action of the unions"[11].
Our forecast in 1989 was wholly confirmed during the 1990s. The ebb in consciousness within the working class could be seen in a loss of confidence in its own strength, provoking a general ebb in its combativeness whose effects can still be felt today.
In 1989, we defined the conditions which would make it possible for the working class to recover:
"Given the historic importance of the events that are determining it, the present retreat of the proletariat - although it doesn't call into question the historic course, the general perspective of class confrontations - is going to be much deeper than the one which accompanied the defeat of 1981 in Poland. Having said this, we cannot foresee in advance its breadth or its length. In particular, the rhythm of the collapse of Western capitalism - which at present we can see accelerating, with the perspective of a new and open recession - will constitute a decisive factor in establishing the moment when the proletariat will be able to resume its march towards revolutionary consciousness.
By sweeping away the illusions about the ‘revival' of the world economy, by exposing the lie which presents ‘liberal' capitalism as a solution to the historic bankruptcy of the whole capitalist mode of production - and not only of its Stalinist incarnation - the intensification of the capitalist crisis will eventually push the proletariat to turn again towards the perspective of a new society, to more and more inscribe this perspective into its struggles"[12].
And indeed, the 1990s were marked by the ability of the world bourgeoisie, especially its most important fraction in the United States, to slow the rhythm of the crisis and even to create the illusion of "light at the end of the tunnel". One of the fundamental causes of the low level of combativeness in the working class today, as well as its difficulty in developing its self-confidence and consciousness, lies in the illusions that capitalism has succeeded in fostering as to its economic "prosperity".
This being said, there is another, more general element which explains the difficulties in the proletariat's politicisation, which would allow it to understand, even embryonically, what is at stake in its struggles, in order to increase their extent:
"To understand all the data of the present period, and the period to come, we must also take account of the characteristics of the proletariat which is in struggle today:
- it is made up of workers' generations which have not suffered defeat, unlike those which grew up in the 1930s and during World War II; consequently, unless they suffer a decisive defeat, which the bourgeoisie has not yet succeeded in inflicting on them, they will keep their reserves of combativeness intact;
- these generations benefit from the irretrievable exhaustion of those great themes of mystification (the fatherland, democracy, anti-fascism, the defence of the USSR), which were used in the past to enrol the proletariat in imperialist war.
It is these essential characteristics which explain why today's historic course is towards class confrontations and not imperialist war. However, the proletariat's present strength is also its weakness: precisely because only undefeated generations have proved capable of finding the road to class struggle once again, an enormous rift lies between this generation and the one that fought the decisive battles of the 1920s, for which the proletariat is paying a heavy price:
- a great ignorance about its own past and the lessons of that past;
- backwardness in the formation of the revolutionary party.
These characteristics explain the extremely uneven nature of the present course of workers' struggles. They allow us to understand the moments of the proletariat's lack of self-confidence, because it is unaware of its potential strength against the bourgeoisie. They also show the long road that stretches before the proletariat, which will only be able to make the revolution if it has concretely integrated the experience of the past, and created its class party.
The proletariat's historic resurgence at the end of the 1960s put the formation of the party on the agenda. It did not happen, because:
- of the half-century gap that separates us from the old revolutionary parties;
- of the disappearance, or the more or less pronounced atrophy of the left fractions which emerged from them;
- of many workers' distrust towards any political organisation (whether bourgeois or proletarian) ... an expression of the proletariat's historic weakness faced with the need to politicise its struggle"[13].
We can see, then, just how long is the proletariat's road to communist revolution. The length and depth of the counter-revolution, the almost total disappearance of the communist organisations, capitalism's decomposition, the collapse of Stalinism, the ruling class' ability to control the collapse of its economy, and to sow illusions in it: it would seem that during the last thirty years, indeed since the 1920s, nothing has been spared the proletariat on its road to revolution.
The fundamental nature of the proletariat's difficulties on the road to revolution
At the end of the first part of this article, we mentioned the different appointments with history that the proletariat has missed during the 20th century: the revolutionary wave which put an end to World War I, but which ended in defeat, the collapse of the world economy in 1929, the Second World War. We have seen that the proletariat did not miss its appointment with history at the end of the 1960s, but at the same time we have measured how many obstacles it has encountered since, which have slowed down its road towards proletarian revolution.
The revolutionaries of the last century, Marx and Engels first among them, thought that the revolution would take place during their century. They were mistaken, and were the first to recognise their mistake. In reality, the conditions for proletarian revolution only came together at the beginning of the 20th century, to be confirmed by the first worldwide imperialist slaughter. In their turn, the revolutionaries of the early 20th century thought that, now the objective conditions for communist revolution were met, the revolution would take place during their century. They too were mistaken. When we go back over all the historic events which have prevented the revolution from taking place to date, we might be left with the impression that the proletariat has suffered from "bad luck", that it has been confronted with a series of catastrophes and unfavourable circumstances, none of which were inevitable. It is true that history was not written in advance, and that it could have evolved differently. The Russian revolution, for example, could have been crushed by the White armies, which would have prevented the development of Stalinism, the proletariat's greatest enemy during the 20th century, the spearhead of history's most terrible counter-revolution, whose negative effects are still with us, thirty years after it came to an end. Nor was it inevitable at first sight that the Allies would win World War II, thus relaunching for a long time to come the ideology of democracy which, in the developed countries, has been one of the most effective poisons against the development of working class consciousness. Similarly, another outcome to the Second World War could have been the disappearance of the Stalinist regime, which would have avoided the antagonism between two blocs being presented as a struggle between capitalism and socialism. We would never have experienced the collapse of the "socialist" bloc, whose negative ideological consequences weigh so heavily on the working class today.
That being said, the accumulation of obstacles that have confronted the proletariat during the 20th century cannot on the whole be considered as a mere succession of "misfortunes". Fundamentally they are an expression of the enormous difficulty of the proletarian revolution.
An aspect of this difficulty is the bourgeoisie's ability to make use of the different situations it finds itself in, and to turn them systematically against the working class. This is the proof that the bourgeoisie - despite the long death agony of its mode of production, despite the barbarism whose development all over the world it is quite unable to prevent, despite the rot eating away at its society and despite its ideological decomposition - remains vigilant and capable of great intelligence when it comes to preventing the proletariat's advance towards revolution. One reason that the predictions of past revolutionaries as to the timing of the revolution failed to come about, is that they under-estimated the strength of the ruling class, and particularly its political intelligence. Revolutionaries today will only really be able to contribute to the proletarian struggle for revolution if they are able to appreciate this political strength of the bourgeoisie - and notably the Machiavellianism it is capable of when necessary - and warn the workers against the traps laid by the enemy class.
But there is another, still more fundamental reason for the proletariat's immense difficulty in carrying out the revolution. It has already been pointed out in this oft-quoted passage from Marx's 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: "Proletarian revolutions (...) constantly engage in self-criticism, and in repeated interruptions of their own course (...) they shrink back again and again before the indeterminate immensity of their own goals, until the situation is created in which any retreat is impossible, and the conditions themselves cry out: Hic Rhodus, hic salta! Here is the rose, dance here!"[14].
And indeed, one reason for the great difficulty for the vast majority of workers in turning towards the revolution lies in the vertigo that seizes them when they think that the task is so enormous as to be impossible. The task of overthrowing the most powerful class that history has ever known, the system which has allowed humanity to take gigantic steps forward in its material production and mastery of nature does indeed seem to be impossible. But what makes the working class dizzier still is the immensity of the task of building a radically new society, liberated at last from the woes which have crushed human society ever since it existed, from scarcity, exploitation, oppression, and war.
When prisoners and slaves constantly wore shackles on their feet, they sometimes became used to the constraint to the point where they felt as if they would be unable to walk without their chains, and sometimes even refused to have them removed. What has happened to the proletariat is not dissimilar. It bears within itself the ability to free humanity, and yet it lacks the self-confidence to march consciously towards that goal.
But the time is coming when "the conditions themselves [will] cry out: Hic Rhodus, hic salta!". If it remains in the hands of the bourgeoisie, human society will never reach the next century, other than in shreds, nothing human any longer left in it. As long as this extreme has not been reached, as long as a capitalist system survives, there will necessarily be its exploited class, the proletariat. And there will therefore remain the possibility that the proletariat, spurred on by capitalism's total economic bankruptcy, will at last overcome its hesitations and take on the enormous task that history has confided to it: the communist revolution.
Fabienne
[1] See our article on the 1953 insurrection published in the International Review no.15
[2] See our article on the class struggle in Eastern Europe between 1920 and 1970, in the International Review no.27.
[3] See also our pamphlet on The Decadence of Capitalism
[4] "Thereby what he had hitherto deduced, half a priori, from gappy material, became absolutely clear to him from the facts themselves, namely, that the world trade crisis of 1847 had been the true mother of the February [Paris] and March [Vienna and Berlin] revolutions, and that the industrial prosperity, which had been returning gradually since the middle of 1848 and attained full bloom in 1849 and 1850, was the revitalising force of the European reaction" (Engels, Introduction to Marx's ‘The Class Struggles in France', 1895, in Marx-Engels, Lawrence and Wishart, p.643).
[5] "A new revolution is only possible as the result of a new crisis; but it will come, just as surely as the crisis itself" (Marx, The class struggles in France, in Surveys from exile, Pelican, p.131).
[6] This was particularly the case with Herbert Marcuse, ideologue of the 1960s student revolts, who considered that the working class could no longer constitute a revolutionary force, and that the only hope for the overthrow of capitalism lay in the marginal sectors such as the blacks and students in the US, or the poor peasants in the Third World.
[7] We have already done so in many articles in the International Review. See in particular the report on the class struggle to the ICC's 13th Congress, published in International Review no.99.
[8] See our series of articles "Thirty years of capitalism's open crisis", in International Review nos.96 and 98.
[9] Communist revolution or the destruction of humanity, Manifesto of the 9th ICC Congress. On this question, see in particular our article "Decomposition, the final phase of capitalist decadence", in International Review no.62
[10] ibid.
[11] "Theses on the economic and political crisis in the Eastern countries", in International Review no.60
[12] Ibid.
[13] Resolution on the international situation at the ICC's 6th Congress, published in International Review no.44.
[14] In Marx, Surveys from Exile, Pelican. The Latin phrase comes from one of Aesop's fables. It is the reply made to a boaster who claimed he had once made an immense leap in Rhodes: "Here is Rhodes: leap here and now". But the German phrase, "Hier ist die Rose, hier tanze!" (here is the rose, dance here) is Hegel's variant, in the Preface to the Philosophy of Right. The Greek Rhodos can mean both Rhodes and rose.
Links
[1] https://www.marxists.org
[2] https://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877-ad/p3.htm#c1
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/russia-caucasus-central-asia
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/communist-left-influenced
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/anti-globalisation
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/32/decomposition
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/spain
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/history-workers-movement/1936-spain
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/official-anarchism
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/1993/poum
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/2000/joseph-rebull
[12] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/2001/cnt
[13] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/2002/friends-durrutti
[14] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/2003/andres-nin
[15] https://www.internationalism.org
[16] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/262/environment
[17] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/general-and-theoretical-questions/war
[18] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/history-workers-movement/1917-russian-revolution
[19] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/14/proletarian-revolution
[20] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/27/dictatorship-proletariat
[21] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/28/revolutionary-organisation
[22] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/third-international
[23] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/italian-left
[24] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/128/historic-course