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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pandemic, decadence, decomposition.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The pandemic and the state.

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

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

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

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

At the International level

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At the national level

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Report also remarked in a prescient way that:

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

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

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

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

 

16.7.20

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

2) The impact of the pandemic on the class struggle

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

   A) An unprecedented situation for the proletariat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

C) The loss of confidence in the capitalist state

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

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

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

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

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

D) What prospects for the working class?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

d) The pandemic as a factor of consciousness?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

a) The danger of decomposition

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

(b) The impoverishment of other classes or social strata

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

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

- against inter-classist struggles;

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

July 2020

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Report on the Economic Crisis

Preamble

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

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

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

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

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

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

The seriousness of the crisis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The crisis of the "multilateral" phase of state capitalism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The brutal irruption of decomposition into the economic terrain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How will the bourgeoisie respond?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Volume of world trade

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

National withdrawal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Counter tendencies to national withdrawal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

High-speed pauperisation.

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

Mass unemployment.

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

Generalised precariousness.

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

Attacks on all levels

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

14 02 2021

 

ICC Introduction

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

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

I. General working conditions of the Public Hygiene Commissariat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

II. A year of work

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In order that all the tasks concerning the preservation of children’s health, tasks which the Soviet Republic has set itself, are accomplished according to a definite plan, twelve model medico-educational institutions were organised in the center, close to the Section, to inform the provinces of scientific and practical developments of issues and measures in the conservation of children’s health. In October 1918, a physical education institute with experimental schools (urban and suburban) was opened for physically and morally healthy children. This institute is a laboratory for children's work and physical exercises (sports and gymnastics) and at the same time an instructor of socialist workers' education for the younger generations. All experiments on schoolchildren are carried out at this institute where work processes are practically developed in the unique school of work of Soviet Russia. Courses for physical education instructors are also given there.

Children's (school) ambulances are bodies for investigating children as well as treatment bodies. These ambulances classify children whose condition requires treatment or relief from the education programme: a) sick children are placed in hospitals and sanatorium schools; b) weak and tuberculous children are directed to open-air schools (forestry schools, steppe schools); c) another part is sent to auxiliary schools and to medico-educational colonies. Where there are sufficient resources, dental treatment is given in special children's ambulances. In a special ambulance, children with tuberculosis are examined by a group of doctors (tuberculosis control group). Dispensaries: we study the family life of the proletarian child at the same time as we give them the care they need; food (refectory clubs are installed for this purpose), clothes, shoes, medicines, cod liver oil, etc.

The Section for the Conservation of Childhood Health takes as an unchanging principle of its action that no child who has fallen ill should remain without receiving an educational direction in a corresponding medico-educational institution. All the institutions intended to fight against defects, physical (deafness, blindness), intellectual and moral, are united around a general centre - the Institute for weak and retarded children. This institute has an experimental observation section and five other institutions, namely: an auxiliary school for minor intellectual defects, a school-hospital for profound intellectual defects, a school-sanatorium for psychiatrically ill and neurotic children, a medical and educational colony, and a deaf-mute institute. In these institutions, doctors and specialist teachers educate future teachers about the education of abnormal children.

For the first time in the whole world, and only in Soviet Russia, it was decreed from the beginning of 1918 that children under the age of 18 who had broken the law could not be recognised as criminals, although they may be socially dangerous or even harmful to society. These children are the tragic victims of the abnormal conditions of the past, of bourgeois society, and simply need re-education. The offenses of these juvenile delinquents cannot be judged by ordinary judges and must be submitted - exclusively - to the Commission for juvenile delinquents, with the obligatory participation of a psychiatrist and a teacher, having the same rights as justice representatives. Such Commissions with a staff of home educator-inspectors are now being created everywhere, both in government towns and in district towns. Distribution and evacuation points are placed near these Commissions. Child delinquents are, from these points, returned to their parents or sent to medical and educational colonies. In general, like all other medico-educational institutions, establishments for debilitated and retarded children are opened in government towns and in district towns.

Currently there are in many government cities: infant ambulances (schools), auxiliary schools and colonies for morally defective children. Forest schools and sanatorium schools are found more rarely. The infant (school) ambulance is the most common type of medico-educational institution in district towns.

How can we achieve the preservation of children's health in the food crisis that Russia is going through at the moment? The Child Health Conservation Section attached to the Public Hygiene Commissariat paid the most serious attention to the solution of this question from the outset. At the beginning of 1918, the first convoy of children from Petrograd was sent by this section to the colonies. The Section started from the principle that in urban conditions it was necessary above all to ensure food for the child and then to place them in hygienic conditions. Three Commissariats were called on to collaborate in this great task by the Soviet power. They are: the Commissariat of Public Instruction, the Commissariat of Supply and the Commissariat of Public Hygiene (organisation of dietary canteens for sick children and those recovering from serious illnesses). The Council of People's Commissars instituted free food for infants by its decree of 17 May 1919. Free food for children under 10 is in force in the two capitals and in the industrial districts of non-producer governments. This decree gave birth to the socialist distribution of products among children. But without waiting for this decree, the Section for the Conservation of Child Health had received 50,000,000 roubles in 1919 for free feeding of children.

In November 1918 the Section obtained for this purpose the levying of a special tax.

If we take a look back at what had been done before the revolution in Russia for the conservation of children’s health, we can say that it all boiled down to nothing or almost nothing. The state budget did not even have a special paragraph. After the revolution, the young socialist country set about organising this new action with energy. Over the course of two years, in the centre as well as in the provinces, the need for the most careful preservation of children's health was recognised. This result was achieved despite the difficult conditions created by economic disorganisation. Children’s health should be the work of the workers themselves - this is the principle of Soviet Russia, and it is no less dear to the workers than to the peasants. The Workers’ and Peasants State’ takes the preservation of the health of children to the highest degree, realising fully that the young communists are the pledge of the future Socialist Russia - and that only a generation healthy in body and mind can preserve the conquests of the Great Socialist Revolution of Russia and bring the country to a complete realisation of the communist regime.

We are publishing this international statement of the ICC on the current Covid-19 crisis in the form of a "digital leaflet" because under the conditions of the lock-down it is clearly not possible to distribute a printed version in large numbers. We are asking all our readers to use all the means at their disposal to disseminate this text - social media, internet forums, and so on - and to write to us with information about any of the reactions and discussions that this provokes, and of course with their own views on the article. It is more than ever necessary for all who fight for the proletarian revolution to express their solidarity with each other and maintain their connections. While we have to isolate ourselves physically for the time being, we can still come together politically!

Thousands are dying every day, the hospitals are on their knees, there is a horrible “triage” between the young and the old among the sick, health workers are exhausted, infected, and some are dying. Everywhere a lack of medical equipment. Governments involved in a terrible competition in the name of the “war against the virus” and the “national economic interest”. Financial markets in free fall, surreal heists in which states are robbing each other of deliveries of masks. Tens of millions of workers thrown into the hell of unemployment, a torrent of lies from the state and its media…this is the awful spectacle offered by the world of today. This pandemic represents one of the most serious health catastrophes since the Spanish flu of 1918-19, even though, since that time, science has made extraordinary steps forward. Why such a disaster? How did it come to this?

We are told that this virus is different, that it’s much more contagious than the others, that its effects are much more pernicious and deadly. All that is probably true but it doesn’t explain the scale of the catastrophe.  The underlying responsibility for this planet-wide chaos, for the hundreds of thousands of deaths, lies with capitalism itself. Production for profit and not for human need, the permanent search for cost effectiveness at the price of ferocious exploitation of the working class, the increasingly violent attacks on the living conditions of the exploited, the frenzied competition between companies and states – it is these basic characteristics of the capitalist system which have come together to culminate in the present disaster.

The criminal negligence of capitalism

Those who run this society, the bourgeois class with its states and its media, tell us with a concerned air that this epidemic could not have been predicted. This is a lie on the same level as those put forward by the climate change deniers. Scientists have been warning about the threat of pandemics like Covid-19 for a long time now. But governments have refused to listen to them. They even refused to listen to a report by the CIA in 2009 (“What will tomorrow’s world be like?”) which describes with startling accuracy the characteristics of the present pandemic. Why such blindness on the part of the states and the bourgeois class they serve? For a very simple reason: investments have to produce profits, and as quickly as possible. Investing in the future of humanity doesn’t pay, and just depresses share prices. Investments also have to reinforce the positions of each national bourgeoisie against others on the imperialist arena. If the crazy sums which are invested into military research and spending had been devoted to the health and well-being of the populations, such an epidemic would never have been able to develop. But instead of taking measures against this predictable health disaster, governments have not stopped attacking health systems, both at the level of research and of technical and human resources.

If people are dying like flies today, at the very heart of the most developed countries, it is in the first place because everywhere governments have cut budgets destined for research into new diseases. Thus in May 2018 Donald Trump got rid of a special unit of the National Security Council, composed of eminent experts and created to fight against pandemics. But Trump’s attitude is only a caricature of what all the leaders have been doing. Thus, scientific research into the coronavirus were abandoned everywhere 15 years ago because of the development of a vaccine was judged not to be “cost effective”!

Similarly, It is totally disgusting to see the bourgeois leaders and politicians, on the right and the left, weeping over the saturation of the hospitals and the catastrophic conditions in which health workers are forced to work, when the bourgeois states have been methodically imposing the norms of profit  over the last 50 years, and particularly since the great recession of 2008. Everywhere they have been limiting access to health services, reducing the number of hospital beds, and intensifying the work load of health workers. And what are we to make of the generalised scarcity of masks and other protective garments, disinfectant gel, testing equipment, etc? Over the last few years, most states have got rid of stocks of these vital items in order to save money. In the last few months, they have not been anticipating the rapid spread of Covid-19, even though, since November 2019, some of them have been claiming that masks are of no use to non-carers – in order to hide their criminal irresponsibility.

And what about chronically deprived regions of the world like the continents of Africa or Latin America? In Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, 10 million inhabitants can count on 50 ventilators! In Central Africa, leaflets were given out giving advice on how to wash your hands when the population doesn’t have enough water to drink! Everywhere the same cry of distress: “we lack everything in the face of this pandemic!”

Capitalism is the war of each against all

The fierce rivalry between each state in the world arena is blocking the minimum cooperation to contain the virus. When it first got going, the Chinese bourgeoisie judged it more important to do all it could to hide the gravity of the situation, in order to protect its economy and its reputation. The state didn’t hesitate to persecute the doctor who tried to sound the alarm, and left him to die. Even the semblance of international regulation which the bourgeoisie has set up to deal with the lack of equipment has fallen apart: the World Health Organisation has been unable to impose its directives while the European Union has been incapable of introducing concerted measures. This division is considerably aggravating the chaos and the loss of control over the evolution of the pandemic. The dynamic of “every man for himself|” and the exacerbation of generalised competition have become the dominant feature of the reactions of the ruling class.

The “war of the masks”, as the media call it, is an edifying example of this. Each state is grabbing the material it can through speculation, bidding wars, and even out-and-out theft. The US has been nabbing planeloads of Chinese masks promised to France. France has confiscated cargoes of masks heading by air for Sweden. The Czech Republic has seized at its customs barriers ventilators and masks destined for Italy. Germany has made masks heading for Canada disappear. This is the true face of the “great democracies”: thieves and gangsters of the worst kind!

Unprecedented attacks on the exploited

For the bourgeoisie “profits are worth more than our lives” as striking car workers shouted in Italy. In all countries, it delayed as long as possible putting in place measures of confinement to protect the population in order to keep national production going at any cost. It was not the threat of a sharply rising death toll which in the end led to the lock-downs. The many imperialist massacres that have been going on for over a century, fought in the name of the national interest, have definitively proved the contempt that the ruling class has for the lives of the exploited. No, our rulers don’t care about our lives! Especially when the virus has the “advantage”, as far as the bourgeoisie is concerned, of mowing down the sick and the elderly, those it sees as “unproductive”. Letting the virus spread and do its “natural” work in the name of “herd immunity” was actually the initial choice of Boris Johnson and other leaders. In each country, what tipped the scales in favour of the lock-downs was the fear of the disorganisation of the economy and, in certain countries, the threat of social disorder, the mounting anger in response to the negligence and the rising death tolls. What’s more, even if they involve half of humanity, the social isolation measures are in many cases a total farce: millions of people have been obliged to crowd together every day on trains, tubes and buses, in the factories and supermarkets. And already the bourgeoisie is looking to end the lock-downs as quickly as possible, at the very time when the pandemic is hitting hardest, trying to find ways to provoke the least discontent by sending workers back to work sector by sector, firm by firm.

The bourgeoisie is perpetuating and planning new attacks, even more brutal conditions of exploitation. The pandemic has already thrown millions of workers into unemployment: ten million in three weeks in the US. Many of them, who have irregular, precarious or temporary jobs, will be deprived of any income. Others, who have some meagre social benefits to live on, are faced with no longer being able to pay rent and the costs of medical care. The economic ravages have started to accelerate the world recession which was already looming: explosion in the food prices, massive lay-offs, wage cuts, growing job insecurity etc. All states are adopting measures of “flexibility” by calling for sacrifices in the name of “national unity in the war against the virus”.

The national interest that the bourgeoisie is invoking today is not our interest. It’s this same defence of the national economy and this same generalised competition which has, in the past, led it to carry out budget cuts and attacks against the living conditions of the exploited. Tomorrow, it will serve up the same lies when, following the economic devastation caused by the pandemic, it will call on the exploited to pull their belts in further, to accept even more poverty and exploitation. This pandemic is an expression of the decadent character of the capitalist mode of production, of the many expressions of the rotting of present day society, along with the destruction of the environment, pollution and climate change, the proliferation of imperialist wars and massacres, the inexorable descent into poverty of a growing portion of humanity, the number of people obliged to become migrants or refugees, the rise of populist ideology and religious fanaticism, etc (see our text “Theses on the decomposition of capitalism” on our internet site: https://en.internationalism.org/ir/107_decomposition [8]) It’s an indicator of the dead-end that capitalism has reached, showing the direction in which this system is leading humanity: towards chaos, misery, barbarism, destruction and death.

Only the proletariat can change the world

Certain governments and media argue that the world will never be the same as it was before this pandemic, that the lessons of the disaster will be drawn, that in the end states will move towards a more humane and better managed form of capitalism. We heard the same refrain after the 2008 recession: with hand on their hearts, the states and leaders of the world declared “war on rogue finance”, promising that the sacrifices demanded to get out of the crisis would be rewarded. You only have to look at the growing inequality in the world to recognise that these promises to “reform” capitalism were just lies to make us swallow a new deterioration in our living conditions.

The exploiting class cannot change the world and put human lives and social needs above the pitiless laws of its economy: capitalism is a system of exploitation, in which a ruling minority draws its profits and its privileges from the work of the majority. The key to the future, the promise of another world, a truly human world without nations or exploitation, lies solely in the international unity and solidarity of the workers in struggle!

The wave of spontaneous solidarity within our class in response to the intolerable situation inflicted on the health workers is being derailed by the governments and politicians of the whole world into the campaign of applause on doorsteps and balconies. Of course this applause will warm the hearts of the workers who, with courage and dedication, in dramatic working conditions, are looking after the sick and saving lives. But the solidarity of our class, of the exploited, can’t be reduced to a five minute round of applause. It means, in the first place, denouncing the governments of all countries, no matter their political colouring. It means demanding masks and all the necessary protective equipment. It means, when it’s possible, going on strike and affirming that, as long as health workers don’t have the material they need, as long as they are being hurled towards their deaths with uncovered faces, the exploited who are not in the hospitals will not work.

Today, while the lock-down lasts, we can’t wage massive struggles against this murderous system. We can’t gather together to express our anger and our solidarity through massive struggles, through strikes and demonstrations. Because of the lock-down, but not only that. Also because our class has to recover its real source of strength, which it has shown so many times in history but which it has since forgotten: the potential for uniting in struggle, for developing massive movements against the ruling class and its monstrous system.

The strikes that broke out in the automobile sector in Italy or in supermarkets in France, in front of New York hospitals or those in the north of France, the enormous indignation of workers refusing to serve as "virus fodder", herded together without masks, gloves or soap, for the sole benefit of their exploiters, can today only be scattered reactions and cut off from the strength of an entire united class. Nonetheless, they show that the workers are not prepared to accept, like some kind of inevitability, the criminal irresponsibility of those who exploit us.

It’s this perspective of class battles that we have to prepare for. Because after Covid-19 there will be the world economic crisis, massive unemployment, new “reforms” which are nothing but further sacrifices. So, right now, we must prepare our future struggles. How? By discussing, exchanging experiences and ideas, on different internet channels on forums, on the phone, as much as possible. Understanding that the greatest scourge is not Covid-19 but capitalism, that the solution is not to rally behind the killer state but to stand against it; that hope resides not in the promises of this or that politician but in the development of workers’ solidarity in the struggle; that the only alternative to capitalist barbarism is the world revolution!

 

THE FUTURE BELONGS TO THE CLASS STRUGGLE!

International Communist Current, 10.4.20

www.internationalism.org [9]

The Trump administration had already caused a series of humiliating but lethal fiascos for the US bourgeoisie – not least by actively worsening the Covid pandemic 2020 - but there was always hope among the saner factions of the American ruling class that having an incompetent narcissist in supreme power was only a passing nightmare, from which they would soon awake. But the electoral victory of the Democratic Party wasn’t the landslide that was hoped for – either for the new administration of Joe Biden or for the new Congress.

Worse still, a televised riot took place in the Capitol, the sacred venue of US democracy, incited by the outgoing head of state who rejected the official, validated, results of the presidential election! A mob attempted to violently prevent the democratic succession, encouraged by the sitting president himself – as in a banana republic as George W Bush recognised. Truly it is a politically defining moment in the decomposition of world capitalism. The populist self-harming of the UK through Brexit may look merely absurd to other countries, because Britain is a secondary power, but the threat of instability represented by the insurrection on Capitol Hill of the US has caused shock and fear throughout the international bourgeoisie.

The subsequent attempt to impeach Trump for a second time may well fail again, and in any case it will galvanise the millions of his supporters in the population, including a large part of the Republican party.

The inauguration of the new President on January 20th, usually an occasion for a show of national unity and reconciliation, won’t be: Trump will not attend, contrary to the custom with outgoing presidents, and Washington DC will be under military lockdown to prevent further armed resistance from Trump supporters. The perspective then is not the smooth, long term re-establishment of traditional democratic order and ideology by a Biden administration, but an accentuation - of an increasingly violent nature – of the divisions between classical bourgeois democracy and populism, the latter not disappearing with the end of the Trump regime.

The US – from the world‘s biggest superpower to the epicentre of decomposition

Since 1945 US democracy has been the flagship of world capitalism. Having played a decisive role in the Allied victory in World War II, and making a major contribution to reducing Europe and Japan to ruins, it was then able to drag the world out of the rubble and reconstruct it in its own image during the Cold War. In 1989, with the defeat and disintegration of the rival totalitarian Russian bloc, the US seemed to be at the apex of its global dominance and prestige. George Bush Snr announced the coming of a New World Order after the collapse of the Russian bloc in 1989. Washington thought it could maintain its supremacy by preventing any new power emerging as a serious contender for its world leadership. But instead, the assertion of its military superiority has accelerated a world disorder with a series of pyrrhic victories (Kuwait, the Balkans in the 1990s) and expensive foreign policy failures in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. The US has increasingly undermined the alliances on which its former world leadership rested and this has encouraged other powers to act on their own account.

Moreover US power and wealth has been unable to attenuate the increasing convulsions of the world economy: the spark of the 2008 crisis emanated from Wall Street and engulfed the US and the world in the most serious downturn since the open crisis re-emerged in 1967.

The social and political consequences of these US reverses, and the absence of alternatives, is that the divisions and disarray in the bourgeois state, and in the population generally, has been increased, leading to the growing discredit of the established political norms of the US democratic political system.

The previous presidencies of Bush and Obama failed to forge a lasting consensus for the traditional democratic order among the population as a whole. Trump’s ‘solution’ to this problem was not to resolve this disunity but to accentuate it even more with a raucous and incoherent policy of vandalism that further shredded the political consensus domestically and ripped up military and economic agreements with its former allies on the world stage. All this was done under the banner of ‘America First’ - but in reality it served to increase the USA‘s loss of status.

In a word, the ongoing political crisis of US democracy, symbolised by the storming of the Capitol, complements the chaotic and self-destructive consequences of US imperialist policy and makes it clearer that the still-strongest world power is at the centre of, and the major player in, the decomposition of world capitalism at all levels.

China can’t fill the vacuum

China, despite its increasing economic and military power, won’t be able fill the vacuum of world leadership created by the disorientation of the US. Not least because the latter is still capable of and determined to prevent the growth of Chinese influence as a major objective with or without Trump. For example one of the plans of the Biden Administration will be to step up this anti-China policy with the formation of a D10, an alliance of the democratic powers (the G7 plus South Korea, India, and Australia). The role this will play in the worsening of imperialist tensions need hardly be explained.

But these tensions cannot be channeled into the formation of new blocs for obvious reasons. The worsening decomposition of capitalism makes the possibility of a generalised world war increasingly unlikely.

The dangers for the working class

In 1989 we predicted that the new period of the decomposition of capitalism would bring increased difficulties for the proletariat.

The recent events in the US vindicate this prediction again.

The most important of these in relation to the present US situation is the danger that sections of the working class will be mobilised behind the increasingly violent contests of the opposing factions of the bourgeoisie, ie, not just on the electoral terrain but in the streets. Parts of the working class can be misled into choosing between populism and the defence of democracy, the two false alternatives offered by capitalist exploitation.

Connected to this is the fact that in the present situation other layers of the non-exploiting population are increasingly propelled into political action by a whole series of factors: the effects of the economic crisis, the worsening of the ecological catastrophe, the strengthening of state repression and its racist nature, which leads them to act as a conduit for bourgeois campaigns such as the Black Lives Matter movement, or as a medium for inter-classist struggles.

Nevertheless the working class internationally in the period of decomposition has not been defeated as in the manner of the 1930s. Its reserves of combativity remain intact and the further economic attacks on its living standards that are coming - which will include the bill for the economic damage done by the Covid pandemic - will oblige the proletariat to respond on its class terrain.

The challenge for revolutionary organisations

The revolutionary organisation has a limited but very important role to play in the current situation because, while it has little influence yet, and even for a lengthy period to come, the situation of the working class as a whole is nevertheless bringing a small minority to revolutionary class positions, notably in the US itself.

The successful work of transmission to this minority rests on a number of needs. Significant in the present context is the combination, on the one hand, of a long term programmatic rigour and clarity, linked on the other hand to the ability of the organisation to have a coherent, developing analysis of the entire world situation: its historical setting and perspectives.

The world situation over the past year has increasingly broken new records in the putrefaction of world capitalism - the covid pandemic, the economic crisis, the political crisis in the US, the ecological catastrophe, the plight of refugees, the destitution of ever-larger parts of the world population. The dynamic of chaos is speeding up and becoming more unpredictable, offering new, more frequent challenges to our analyses and requiring an ability to change and adapt them according to this acceleration without forgetting our fundamentals.

 ICC, 16.01.2021

 

Baku Congress, 1920: "support for colonial revolutions" really meant grave concessions to nationalism by the Comintern

In the previous parts of this article, we began by identifying the conditions in which the Third or Communist International was formed in March 1919. In a very complicated context, the revolutionaries of that time did not manage to clarify all the new questions and challenges facing the proletariat.

Furthermore, the process of regroupment of revolutionary forces was marked by the lack of a firm attitude to revolutionary principles at the foundation of the International. This is one of the lessons which the Italian Fraction of the communist left grouped around the review Bilan, and then above all by the Gauche Communiste de France (Internationalisme) drew from the experience of the CI: “the ‘broad’ method, with its concern above all to rally the greatest possible numbers straight away at the expense of precise principles and programme, led to the formation of mass parties, real giants with feet of clay, which were to fall under the sway of opportunism”[1].

While the founding Congress was a real step forward in the unification of the world proletariat, the evolution of the CI in the years that followed was marked essentially by regressions which disarmed the revolution in the face of the counter-revolutionary forces which were more and more gaining ground. The rampant opportunism within the ranks of the party was not eliminated as Lenin and the Bolsheviks envisaged. On the contrary, with the degeneration of the revolution, it ended up taking a preponderant place and hastened the end of the CI as a class party. This opportunist dynamic, already visible by the Second Congress, only deepened after that, both on the programmatic and organisational levels, as we will try to show in this article.

1920-21: The retreat of the revolutionary wave

Following the Third Congress of the CI[2], revolutionaries were beginning to understand that the revolution would be more difficult than they had thought. A few days after the end of the Congress, Trotsky analysed the situation thus:

“The Third Congress took note of the further falling apart of the economic foundations of bourgeois rule. But it has at the same time forcibly warned the advanced workers against any naive conceptions that this will lead automatically to the death of the bourgeoisie through an uninterrupted offensive by the proletariat. Never before has the bourgeoisie’s class instinct of self-preservation been armed with such multiform methods of defence and attack as today. The economic preconditions for the victory of the working class are at hand. Failing this victory, and moreover unless this victory comes in the more or less near future, all civilisation is menaced with decline and degeneration. But this victory can be gained only by the skilled conduct of battles and, above all, by first conquering the majority of the working class. This is the main lesson of the Third Congress.”[3]

This is far removed from the overweening enthusiasm of the Founding Congress, where, in his closing speech, Lenin asserted that “the victory of the proletarian revolution on a world scale is assured. The founding of an international Soviet republic is on the way”. In the intervening period, the assaults launched by the proletariat in a number of countries had come up against the riposte of the bourgeoisie. And in particular we saw the failure of the attempt to take power in Germany in 1919, whose significance was underestimated by revolutionaries.

As the great majority in the ranks of the CI saw it, the crisis of capitalism and its fall into decadence could only hurl the masses onto the road of revolution. However, a consciousness of the scale of the goal to be attained and the means to reach it was well below the level required. This situation was particularly visible after the Second Congress, marked by a series of difficulties which were further isolating the proletariat in Russia:

• In western Europe, workers’ struggles had not achieved the hoped-for victories. In Italy the bourgeoisie had succeeded in channelling and sterilising the movement. In Germany, the adventurist action of March 1921[4], piloted by the KPD with the support of the CI, ended in a crushing and demoralising failure;
• On the military level, the offensive of the Red Army in Poland ended in defeat and the retreat from Warsaw, preventing the establishment of a bridge between the working class in Russia and the working class in western Europe;
• In Russia itself, the civil war had given rise to serious food shortages and a dramatic economic and social situation which made it necessary to put an end to the war economy and its nationalisations and restore a certain level of commodity exchange. The New Economic Policy (NEP) was adopted in March 1921;
• At the same moment, the repression of the uprising of the Kronstadt sailors took place. An error which had disastrous consequences for the relations between the masses and the Communist Party in Russia.

If the international bourgeoisie did not succeed in totally annihilating the proletarian revolution at this point, it was nevertheless the case that the heart of the revolution, Russia of the Soviets, was particularly isolated. Although Lenin described the situation as “a state of equilibrium which, although highly unstable and precarious, enables the Socialist Republic to exist—not for long, of course—within the capitalist encirclement”[5], with hindsight we can affirm that the multiple failures and difficulties which appeared between 1920 and 1921 already heralded the defeat of the revolutionary wave. It is in this particularly difficult context that we propose to analyse the policies of the CI. Policies which, on a number of points, expressed an increasingly opportunist retreat.

1. The disastrous consequences of support for “national liberation movements”

A. A question that had not yet been settled in the workers’ movement

The national question was one of the unresolved questions in the revolutionary movement at the time the CI was constituted. While it is true that during the ascendant period of capitalism revolutionaries had sometimes supported national struggles, this was not a matter of principle. The debate had arisen again in the years preceding the First World War. Rosa Luxemburg was one of the first to understand that the entry of capitalism into its phase of decadence also meant that every nation state had an imperialist nature. Consequently, the struggle of one nation to liberate itself from another aimed only at defending the interests of one bourgeoisie against another and in no way the interests of the working class.

The Bolsheviks adopted a position which was that of the social democratic centre, since the right of peoples to self-determination had appeared in the 1903 programme. “The tenaciousness with which the Bolsheviks clung to this position, despite opposition from without and from within, is best explained by the fact that Tsarist Russia was the perpetrator of national oppression par excellence (‘the prison-house of nations’) and that as a mainly ‘Great Russian’ party in geographical terms the Bolsheviks considered that granting nations oppressed by Russia the right to secede as the best way of winning the confidence of the masses in these countries. This position, though it proved to be erroneous, was based on a working class perspective. In a period in which the Social Imperialists of Germany, Russia, and elsewhere were arguing against the right of peoples oppressed by German or Russian imperialism to struggle for national liberation, the slogan of national self-determination was put forward by the Bolsheviks as a way of undermining Russian and other imperialisms and of creating the conditions for a future unification of the workers in both oppressing and oppressed nations.”[6]. While Lenin considered that the “right of nations to self-determination” had become an obsolete demand in the western countries, the situation was different in the colonies where the blossoming of national liberation movements was part of the formation of an independent capitalism which contributed to the appearance of a proletariat. In these conditions, national self-determination remained a progressive demand in the eyes of Lenin and the majority of the Bolshevik party.

Understanding that imperialism was not simply a form of pillage perpetrated by the developed countries at the expense of backward nations but the expression of the totality of capitalist relations on a global scale, Rosa Luxemburg was able to develop the most lucid critique of national liberation struggles in general and the position of the Bolsheviks in particular. In opposition to the fragmented vision of the Bolsheviks which considered that the proletariat could have different tasks in a given geographic location, Rosa Luxemburg adopted an approach which described a global process, in the context of a world market which would increasingly come up against insurmountable obstacles: “In this context it was impossible for any new nation state to enter into the world market on an independent basis, or to undergo the process of primitive accumulation outside this barbaric global chessboard”[7]. Consequently, “In the contemporary imperialist milieu there can be no wars of national defence”[8]

This ability to grasp the fact that any national bourgeoisie could only operate inside the imperialist system led her to criticise the national policy of the Bolsheviks after 1917, when the Soviets accepted the independence of Ukraine, Finland, Lithuania, etc, in order to “win over the masses”. The following lines admirably prophesy the consequences of the national policy of the CI in the 1920s: “One after another, these ‘nations’ used the freshly granted freedoms to ally themselves with German imperialism against the Russian revolution as its mortal enemy, and under German protection, to carry the banner of counter-revolution into Russia itself.”[9]

B. The Baku Congress

The national question was raised for the first time in the CI during the Second World Congress. Beginning from the erroneous conception of imperialism held by the Bolsheviks in particular, the Congress considered that “a policy must be pursued that will achieve the closest alliance, with Soviet Russia, of all the national and colonial liberation movements. The form of this alliance should be determined by the degree of development of the communist movement in the proletariat of each country, or of the bourgeois-democratic liberation movement of the workers and peasants in backward countries or among backward nationalities.”[10].

The Congress of the Peoples of the East, held in Baku between the 1st and the 8th of September 1920, was given the task of putting into practice the orientations of the Second World Congress which had finished a few weeks earlier. Nearly 1900 delegates, coming mainly from the Near East and Asia, met together. While nearly two thirds of the organisations represented proclaimed themselves to be communist, their adherence was extremely superficial. “The national elites were more attracted to the organisation and effectiveness of the modes of action proposed by the Bolsheviks than by communist ideology”[11]. This is why the assembly was a grand bazaar made up of multiple classes and social strata, coming for all sorts of reasons, but very few with the firm intention of working consciously for the development of the world proletarian revolution. The description of the composition of the Congress given by Zinoviev to the Executive Committee of the CI after his return from Baku needs no comment: “The Baku Congress was composed of a communist fraction and a much bigger non-party fraction. The latter was in turn divided into two groups: one effectively made up of non-party elements, including the representatives of the peasants and the semi-proletarian population of the towns, the other formed by people who defined themselves as non-party but in fact belonged to bourgeois parties”[12].

For a number of delegations, the building of a revolutionary communist movement in the East was secondary and even of no interest. For many of them, it was a question of ensuring the aid of Soviet Russia in order to kick out British colonialism and realise their own dreams of national sovereignty.

What was the attitude of the representatives of the CI towards these evidently bourgeois demands? Instead of defending proletarian internationalism with the greatest firmness, the CI delegation insisted on its support for bourgeois nationalist movements, and called on the peoples of the East to join “the first truly Holy war, under the red banner of the Communist International”, in order to wage a crusade against “the common enemy, British imperialism”.

The important concessions accorded to the nationalist parties and the whole policy carried out at Baku was already dictated by the need to defend the Soviet Republic rather than by the interests of the world revolution.  This central position of the CI, established at the Second Congress, showed how far the opportunist tendency had gained ground. There were of course criticisms of these attempts to reconcile nationalism and proletarian internationalism: Lenin warned against “painting nationalism red”, and John Reed, who had been present at Baku, also objected to “this demagogy and this parade”, but “such responses failed to address the roots of the opportunist course being followed, remaining instead on a centrist terrain of conciliation with more open expression of opportunism, and hiding behind the Theses of the Second Congress, which, to say the least, covered a multitude of sins in the revolutionary movement”[13]

C. Little by little, the CI becomes an instrument of Russian imperialism

The retreat of the revolution in western Europe and the isolation of the proletariat in Russia in the most dramatic conditions gradually led the CI to become an instrument of Bolshevik foreign policy – the Bolsheviks themselves, as the years passed, turning into the administrators of Russian capital[14]. While this fatal evolution was partly linked to the Bolsheviks’ erroneous ideas about the relationship between class, party and state in the period of transition, the main reason lay in the irreversible degeneration of the revolution from the 1920s on.[15]

It was first and foremost in the name of the defence of the Soviet State that the Bolsheviks and the CI would make alliances with or directly support national liberation movements. From 1920, the world party gave its support to the movement of Kemal Atatürk , whose interests were very far from the policies of the International, as Zinoviev admitted. But this alliance was a means to push the British out of the region. Even though this nationalist movement would shortly execute the leaders of the Communist Party of Turkey, the CI continued to see potential in it, and maintained its alliance with a country whose geographical position was strategically important to the Russian state. This didn’t stop Kemal from turning on his ally and making an alliance with the Entente in 1923.

If the policy of support for national liberation movements was, for a certain period, an erroneous position within the workers’ movement, by the end of the 1920s it had become the imperialist strategy of a capitalist power like all the others. The CI’s support for the Kuomintang nationalists in China which led to the massacre of the workers of Shanghai in 1927 was a decisive episode in this process of degeneration. Before that, the CI had supported the nationalist movement led by Abd El-Krim in the war of the Rif (1921-26) and the Druze in Syria in 1926. Consequently “such overt acts of treason demonstrated that the Stalinist faction, which had by then won almost complete dominion over the CI and its parties, was no longer an opportunist current within the workers’ movement but a direct expression of the capitalist counter-revolution”[16]

II Winning the masses at the expense of principles

1. The formation of “mass” Communist Parties in the West

As we showed in the first part of this study[17], only a handful of properly constituted Communist Parties were present at the Founding Congress of the CI in March 1919. In the weeks that followed, the International undertook a whole work aimed at forming Communist Parties: “The Communist International does not aim to form small communist sects seeking to exert influence on the working masses through propaganda and agitation. Rather, from the earliest days after its formation, it has clearly and unambiguously pursued the goal of taking part in the struggles of the working masses, leading these struggles in a communist direction, and, through the struggle, forming large, tested, mass revolutionary Communist Parties”.[18] This orientation was based on the conviction that there would be a rapid extension of the revolution in western Europe, and consequently that there was a pressing need to equip the working class in different countries with parties that would make it possible to guide the revolutionary action of the masses.

Thus the Bolsheviks pushed not only for the formation of mass Communist Parties as quickly as possible, but also on the basis of a compromise between the left wing of the workers’ movement and the centrist current which had not broken with the views and weaknesses of the Second International. In the majority of cases, these parties were not engendered out of nothing but emerged from a decantation within the Socialist Parties of the Second International. This was notably the case with the Communist Party of Italy, formed at the Livorno Congress of January 1921, or of the French Communist Party which saw the light of day at the Tours Congress of December 1920. Thus, from their inception, the parties carried within themselves a whole series of organisational detritus and weaknesses which could only further compromise the capacity of these organisations to give a clear orientation to the masses. While Lenin and the main animators of the International were fully aware of these concessions being made and the danger this could represent, they counted on the capacity of the parties to fight against them. In reality, Lenin seriously underestimated the danger. The adoption of the 21 conditions for joining the CI at the Second World Congress, which was rightly considered a step forward in the struggle against reformism, was not really followed up. Lenin’s whole approach was based on the idea that the march towards the revolution could not be interrupted, that the development of the CI at the expense of the Second International and the Two and Half International was more or less an accomplished fact[19] .

In a situation where the masses were not yet ready to take power, “the Communist Parties’ current task consists not in accelerating the revolution, but in intensifying the preparation of the proletariat.”[20]. For these reasons, one of the orientations of the Second Congress was to “unite the scattered Communist forces, to form a single Communist Party in every country (or to reinforce or renovate the already existing Party) in order to increase tenfold the work of preparing the proletariat for the conquest of political power—political power, moreover, in the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The ordinary socialist work conducted by groups and parties which recognise the dictatorship of the proletariat has by no means undergone that fundamental reorganisation, that fundamental renovation, which is essential before this work can be considered communist work and adequate to the tasks to be accomplished on the eve of proletarian dictatorship.”[21] A correct orientation but based on an erroneous practice.

This explains the aberration of the fusion between the USPD[22] and the KPD at the Halles Congress of 12 October 1920. The most significant example is probably the creation of the French Communist Party (PCF). The latter was formed in December 1920 following a split with the SFIO (Socialist Party) whose main leaders had rallied to the “Union Sacrée” during the First World war. Its birth was the result of a compromise, encouraged by the CI, between the left (a weak minority) and a centrist current which was strongly in the majority. As we have shown in our pamphlet How the PCF passed over to the service of capital[23], “this tactic was a disaster because membership was not – unlike all the other European CPs – based on the Twenty One conditions for joining the CI, which demanded in particular a complete and definitive break with the opportunist policy of centrism towards reformism, social patriotism and pacifism, but on much less selective criteria. The objective of this tactic of the CI was to draw the majority to separate from the right wing of social democracy, an openly patriotic party which had participated in capitalist governments…The centrist majority of the new party was infested with opportunists, who had more or less ‘repented’ of having joined the Union Sacrée… At the same time, the party was also joined by another important component, saturated with anarchist-type federalism (represented in particular by the Federation of the Seine), which on every occasion, on the organisational level, lined up with the centre against the left to oppose international centralisation and above all the orientations of the CI towards the young French party”. Gangrened by opportunism, the PCF would submit fully to the degeneration of the CI, which began to weigh heavily at the Third Congress. It was to become one of the principal agents of Stalinism[24]. It was the same in Italy since, following a split with the Socialist Party of Italy at the Livorno Congress, the CP of Italy was made up of a marxist, communist left wing resolutely committed to the struggle against opportunism in the CI, and a centre led by Gramsci and Togliatti, incapable of understanding the political role of the soviets as centralised organs of power, and underestimating the political role of the party. The centre of the party was then to act as the support for the CI in the exclusion of the left during the period of “Bolshevisation”.

Finally, the most caricatural example was perhaps that of the CP of Czechoslovakia, formed around the Šmeral tendency which had supported the Hapsburg monarchy during the imperialist war of 1914-18.

How can we explain such compromises? How can we explain that the Bolsheviks, who for years had waged a hard battle to preserve intransigent principles, came to accept such concessions? The Communist Left of Italy attentively examined this episode and put forward an initial response: “It is evident that this was not a sudden conversion of the Bolsheviks to another approach towards the formation of Communist Parties, but essentially based on a historic perspective which envisaged the possibility of avoiding the difficult path that led to the foundation of the Bolshevik Party. In 1918-20, Lenin and the Bolsheviks were counting on the immediate outbreak of the world revolution and, because of this, saw the foundation of Communist Parties in different countries as so many support bases for the revolutionary action of the Russian state, which seemed to them to be the essential element in the overthrow of the capitalist world”[25].

Undoubtedly, the halt in the advance of the revolution during this period and the desperate efforts to deal with it led Lenin and the Bolsheviks to lower their guard on the defence of principles and so to fall into opportunism. But it was also the persistence of errors on the tasks of the party and its relationship to the class which contributed to forcing the formation of CPs on a totally confused basis in a period marked by the first retreats of the proletariat.

B. The creation of “phantom” Communist Parties in the East

The opportunist method through which its member parties were formed found its ultimate expression in the birth of Communist Parties in the colonial world.

After the Baku Congress, the Executive of the CI set up a central bureau for Asia, in charge of work towards the Middle East and as far as India. This organ, composed of Sokolnikov, Grefor Safarov and MN Roy, was installed in Tashkent in Uzbekistan. Then in January 1921, a CI secretariat of the Far East was set up in Irkutsk. Thus, faced with the retreat of the revolution in western Europe, the CI wanted to give itself the means to “accelerate” the revolution in the East. With this objective, between 1919 and 1923, in the East and the Far East, Communist Parties were formed on extremely fragile theoretical and political bases.

Before this period, CPs had arisen in Turkey, Iran, Palestine and Egypt, but as the Trotskyist historian Pierre Broué observed, “There was no lack of problems between the International and these Communist Parties who knew nothing about communism and represented countries where properly proletarian strata were insignificant. Which didn’t prevent their leaders from claiming a doctrinal purity and a rigorously workerist schema for the revolution which they believed to be at hand”[26].

In India, the elements who were moving towards the International all had a nationalist past. The best know was MN Roy. The CI ordered the group formed around the latter to enter into the nationalist Congress Party led by Gandhi, initially by making an alliance with the so-called “revolutionary” and “communist” left wing, then with all the factions opposed to Gandhi following the violent clashes that took place on 4 February 1922 during a campaign of civil disobedience launched by Gandhi himself[27]. Roy was led to defend an openly opportunist programme within the Congress Party: national independence, universal suffrage, abolition of large landed property, nationalisation of public services. What’s more, the goal was not to get its programme adopted but to provoke its rejection by the leadership of the party which would thus “unmask” itself. This enterprise ended in utter failure. Roy’s programme didn’t receive any favourable echo and the life of the “communist” group very quickly degenerated into internal quarrels. After that the communists were very harshly repressed. They were arrested and then convicted of conspiracy, which put an end to the policies of the CI in India[28].

In east Asia, the CI more or less adopted the same irresponsible approach. The structuring of a communist movement in China was led by the Far Eastern Bureau through making contact with intellectuals and students who had been won over to “Bolshevism”. The Communist Party of China was constituted at a conference held in Shanghai in July 1921. Made up of a few dozen militants it then went through a significant phase of growth, reaching nearly 20,000 members in 1927. While this numerical reinforcement did express the revolutionary spirit which animated the Chinese working class in a period of intense social struggles, it nevertheless remained the case that militants joined the party on very superficial theoretical and political bases. Again, the same irresponsible method opened the door to the disarming of the party faced with the opportunist policy of the CI towards the Kuomintang. In January 1922, the Conference of the Peoples of the East held in Moscow laid the bases for class collaboration through an “anti-imperialist bloc”. At the instigation of the CI’s Executive, the Chinese CP launched the slogan of a the “anti-imperialist united front with the Kuomintang” and called for communists to join the latter as individuals. This policy of class collaboration was the result of secret negotiations between the USSR and the Kuomintang. In June 1923 the Third Congress of the Chinese CP voted for its members to join the Kuomintang. At first this policy of subordinating itself to a bourgeois party met with opposition from within the young party, and this included part of its leadership[29]. But the political fragility and inexperience of this opposition rendered it incapable of effectively combating the erroneous and suicidal directives of the International. And so “this policy had disastrous consequences for the working class movement in China. While strike movements and demonstrations arose spontaneously and impetuously, the Communist Party, merged with the Kuomintang, was incapable of orientating the working class, of putting forward independent class politics, despite the incontestable heroism of the communist militants who were frequently found in the front ranks of the workers’ struggles. Equally bereft of unitary organisations of political struggle, such as the workers’ councils, at the demand of the CPC itself the working class put its confidence in the Kuomintang, in other words in the bourgeoisie.”[30]

We could give many more examples of Communist Parties formed in backward countries where the working class was very weak and which, in the wake of defeats, very quickly became bourgeois organisations. For now it’s necessary to insist that the formation of “mass parties”, in the West as well as the East, was a factor aggravating the difficulties of the proletariat to face up to the reflux of the revolutionary wave, making it impossible to conduct a retreat in good order.

C. The policy of the United Front

At its Third Congress, the CI adopted the policy of the “Workers’ United Front”[31]. This involved making alliances with the organisations of social democracy, carrying out common actions with similar demands, with the idea that this would unmask the counter-revolutionary role of these organisations in the eyes of the masses.

This orientation was fully concretised at the Fourth Congress and marked a complete about-turn with regard to the founding Congress, in which the new International announced its clear determination to fight against all the forces of the social democratic current, inviting “the workers of all countries to struggle energetically against the Yellow International and protect the broad masses from this lying and fraudulent organisation”[32]. What was it that, only two years later, pushed the CI to adopt a policy of alliances with parties which had been turned into the most effective agents of the counter-revolution?

Had they made an honourable amends and repented of their former crimes? Quite obviously not. Here again it was a question of “not cutting ourselves off from the masses”: “The argument of the CI to justify the necessity for the United Front was based mainly on the fact that the reflux had reinforced the weight of social democracy, and that, to fight against it, it was necessary not to cut yourself off from the masses who were prisoners of this mystification. It was necessary to work towards a denunciation of social democracy via alliances with it, in the case of the strongest Communist Parties (In Germany, the CP came out in favour of a unified proletarian front and recognised the possibility of supporting a united workers’ government), or via entrism for the weaker parties (‘The British Communists must launch a vigorous campaign for their admittance to the Labour Party’, as it said in the Theses on the United Front from the Fourth Congress)”[33].

This opportunist line was combated and sharply denounced by the groups on the left of the CI. The KAPD began the struggle at the Third Congress prior to being expelled from the CI shortly afterwards. The left of the CP of Italy followed it at the Fourth Congress, declaring that the party would not accept “being part of organisms made up of different political organisations…it would thus avoid participating in joint declarations with political parties when these declarations contradicted its programme and are presented to the proletariat as the result of negotiations aiming at finding a common line of action” [34] Miasnikov’s Workers’ Group also rejected the United Front. In its Manifesto it defended a position towards the parties of the Second International that was clearly in conformity with the interests of the revolution: “It will not be the United Front with the Second International or the Two and a Half International which will lead to the victory of the revolution, but the war against them. That is the slogan of the future world social revolution”. History would confirm the foresight and intransigence of the groups of the left. With the inversion of the balance of forces, the dominant ideology regained its hold over the masses. In these circumstances, the role of the party was not to follow the direction of the class but to defend the revolutionary programme and principles within it. In the period of the decadence of capitalism, the return to a “minimum programme”, even on a temporary basis, had become impossible. This was another lesson drawn later on by the Communist Left of Italy: “In 1921, the change in the situation did not alter the fundamental characteristic of the epoch as the revolutionary turbulence of 1923, 1925, 1927 and 1934 (to name only the most important) was to fully confirm… Such a change in the situation would obviously have consequences for the Communist Parties. But the problem was the following: was it necessary to modify the substance of the politics of the Communist Parties, or to deduce from the unfavourable circumstances the need to call on the masses to come together around partial struggles while remaining oriented to a revolutionary outcome[35], once the defeats suffered made it impossible to call directly for the insurrection? The Third Congress, the Enlarged Executive of 1921 and more overtly the Fourth Congress gave a solution to this problem which was prejudicial to the interests of the cause. This was above all through the question of the United Front”[36]

Conclusion

As we have just seen, the period from the Second to that after the Third Congress was marked by a significant penetration of opportunism into the ranks of the Comintern. This was the direct consequence of the erroneous policy of “conquering the masses” at the price of compromises and concessions: support for national liberation struggles, alliance with the traitor parties of the IInd International, participation in parliament and the trade unions, formation of mass parties…The CI was turning its back on what had been the strength of the left fractions within the IInd International: the intransigent defence of communist principles and programme. This is what Herman Gorter pointed out to Lenin in 1920: “Now you are working in the Third International differently from the time when you were the party of maximalism. The latter was kept very ‘pure’ and perhaps it still is. Whereas according to you we must now welcome into the International all those who are half, quarter, maybe even one eighth communists…The Russian revolution triumphed through ‘purity’, through the firmness of its principles… Instead of now applying this proven tactic to all the other countries, and thus strengthening the Third International from within, now you are making a volte-face and just like social democracy of yesterday, are going over to opportunism. This is what we are now told to enter: the unions, the Independents, the French centre, a portion of the Labour Party”[37].

The fundamental error of the Communist International was to consider that, merely by its own efforts, it was possible to “conquer” the working masses, to free them from the influence of social democracy and thus raise their level of consciousness and lead them to communism.

From this flowed the policy of the United Front to unmask and denounce social democracy; participation in parliament to make use of the divisions among the bourgeois parties; work in trade unions in order to bring them back to the proletarian camp and the side of the revolution[38]. None of the attempts had the hoped-for results. On the contrary, they only precipitated the CI towards betraying the proletarian camp. Instead of raising class consciousness, these tactics simply spread confusion and disorientation among the masses, rendering them more vulnerable to the traps of the bourgeoisie. Although the groups on the left of the CI never managed to unite, they all agreed on the suicidal nature of this policy which they saw as leading to the defeat of the workers’ movement and the death of the revolution. At root these groups defended a very different vision of the relationship between party and class[39]. The role of the party was not to fuel the illusions in the class and still less to embroil it in dubious and dangerous tactics but rather to raise its level of consciousness through a defence of proletarian principles and to ensure that no concessions were made on matters of principle. This was the only real compass that could point in the direction of revolution at a time when the wave unleashed by October 1917 in Russia was going through its first retreats. (to be continued)

Najek, 16 June 2020

“Bright lights, big city, gone to my baby’s head” - Jimmy and Mary Reed, 1961

Introduction

This article is being written in the midst of the global Covid-19 crisis, a startling confirmation that we are living through the terminal phase of capitalist decadence. The pandemic, which is a product of the profoundly distorted relationship between humanity and the natural world under the reign of capital, highlights the problem of capitalist urbanisation which previous revolutionaries, notably Engels and Bordiga, have analysed in some depth. Although we have looked at their contributions on this question in previous articles in this series[1], it thus seems opportune to raise the issue again. We are also nearing the 50th anniversary of Bordiga’s death in July 1970, so the article can also serve as part of our tribute to a communist whose work we value very highly, despite our disagreements with many of his ideas. With this article, we begin a new “volume” of the series on communism, specifically aimed at looking at the possibilities and problems of the proletarian revolution in the phase of capitalist decomposition

Revolution in the face of capitalist decomposition

In an earlier part of this series, we published a number of articles which looked at the way that the communist parties which emerged during the great revolutionary wave of 1917-23 had tried to take the communist programme from the abstract to the concrete – to formulate a series of measures to be taken by the workers’ councils in the process of taking power out of the hands of the capitalist class  [2]. And we think that it is still perfectly valid for revolutionaries to pose the question: what would be the fundamentals of the programme that the communist organisation of the future – the world party – would be obliged to put forward in an authentic revolutionary upsurge? What would be the most urgent tasks confronting the working class when it is moving towards the taking of political power on a global scale? What would be the key political, economic and social measures to be implemented by the dictatorship of the proletariat, which remains the necessary political precondition for the construction of a communist society? 

The revolutionary movements of 1917-23, like the world imperialist war which fuelled them, were clear proof that capitalism had entered its “epoch of social revolution”, of decadence. Henceforward the progress and even survival of humanity would be increasingly under threat unless the capitalist social relation was overcome on a world scale. In this sense the fundamental aims of a future proletarian revolution are in full continuity with the programmes that were put forward at the onset of the period of decadence. But this period has now lasted over a century and in our view the contradictions accumulated over this century have opened up a terminal phase of capitalist decline, the phase we call decomposition, in which the continuation of the capitalist system contains the growing danger that the very conditions for a future communist society are being undermined. This is particularly evident at the “ecological” level: in 1917-23 the problems posed by pollution and the destruction of the natural environment were far less developed than they are today. Capitalism has so distorted the “metabolic exchange” between man and nature that at the very least, a victorious revolution would have to dedicate an enormous amount of human and technical resources simply to cleaning up the mess that capitalism will have bequeathed to us. Similarly, the whole process of decomposition, which has exacerbated the tendency towards social atomisation, towards the attitude of “every man for himself” inherent in capitalist society, will leave a very damaging imprint on the human beings who will have to construct a new community founded on association and solidarity. We also have to recall a lesson from the Russian revolution: given the certainty that the bourgeoisie will resist the proletarian revolution with all its might, the victory of the latter will involve a civil war which could cause incalculable damage, not only in terms of human lives and further ecological destruction, but also at the level of consciousness, since the military terrain is not at all the most propitious for the flowering of proletarian self-organisation, consciousness and morality. In Russia in 1920, the Soviet state emerged victorious in the civil war, but the proletariat had largely lost control over it. Thus, when trying to understand the problems of communist society “just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally and intellectually, still stamped with the birth marks of the old society from whose womb it emerges"[3], we must recognise that these birthmarks will probably be far uglier and potentially more damaging than they were in the days of Marx and even of Lenin. The first phases of communism will thus not be an idyllic waking up on a May morning, but a long and intense work of reconstruction from the ruins.  This recognition will have to inform our understanding of all the tasks of the transitional period, even if we continue to base our anticipations of the future on the conviction that the proletariat can indeed carry out its revolutionary mission – despite everything. 

The historic context of Bordiga’s “The immediate programme of the revolution”

Throughout this long series we have tried to understand the development of the communist project as the fruit of the real historical experience of the class struggle, and of the reflection on that experience by the most conscious minorities of the proletariat. And in this article we want to proceed with this historical method, by looking at an attempt to elaborate an updated version of the “immediate programmes” of 1917-23, one which has itself become part of the history of the communist movement.  We refer to the text written by Amadeo Bordiga in 1953 and published in Sul Filo del Tempo, “The immediate programme of the revolution”, which we have already mentioned in a previous article in this series[4] with the promise of returning to it in more detail. In our view, it is essential that any future attempts to formulate such an “immediate programme” bases itself on the strengths of these previous efforts while radically criticising their weaknesses. The whole text, which has the merit of being very succinct, now follows.

1. With the resurgence of the movement which occurred on a world scale after the First World War and which was expressed in Italy by the founding of the PCI, it became clear that the most pressing question was the seizure of political power, which the proletariat could not accomplish by legal means but through violence, that the best opportunity for reaching that end was the military defeat of one’s own country, and that the political form after victory was to be the dictatorship of the proletariat, which in turn is the first precondition for the following task of socio-economic overthrow.

2. The “Communist Manifesto” clearly pointed out the different measures are to be grasped as gradually possible and "despotic" - because the road to complete communism is very long - in dependence upon the level of development of the productive forces in the country in which the proletariat first attains victory and in accordance with how quickly this victory spreads to other countries. It designates the measures which in 1848 were the order of the day for the advanced countries and it emphasizes that they are not to be treated as complete socialism but as steps which are to be identified as preliminary, immediate and essentially “contradictory”.

3. Later in some countries many of the measures at that time considered to be those of the proletarian dictatorship were implemented by the bourgeoisie itself: i.e. free public education, a national bank etc.

This was one of the aspects which deceived those who did not follow a fixed theory, but believed it required perpetual further development as a result of historical change.

That the bourgeoisie itself took these specific measures does not mean that the exact laws and predictions on the transition from the capitalist to the socialist mode of production have to be changed in their entire economic, political and social configuration; It only means that the first post-revolutionary, the lower and final higher stages of socialism (or total communism) are still antecedent periods, which is to say that the economics of transition will be somewhat easier.

1. The distinguishing mark of classical opportunism was to make believe that the bourgeois democratic state could accomplish all these measures from first to last if only the proletariat brought enough pressure to bear, and that it was even possible to accomplish this in a legal manner. However these various “corrections” - insofar as they were compatible with the capitalist mode of production - were in that case in the interest of the survival of capitalism and their implementation served to postpone its collapse, while those which were not compatible were naturally not applied.

2. With its formula of an always more widely developed popular democracy within the context of the parliamentary constitution contemporary opportunism has taken up a different and more evil duty.

Not only does it make the proletariat think that a state standing over classes and parties is capable of carrying out some of its own fundamental tasks (which is to say it diffuses defeatism with regards to dictatorship - like social democracy before it), it deploys the masses it organizes in struggles for “democratic and progressive” social arrangements in diametrical opposition to those which proletarian power has set as its goal since 1848 and the “Manifesto”.

1. Nothing better illustrates the full magnitude of this retrogression then a listing of the measures to take after the seizure of power in a country of the capitalist West. After a century these “corrections” are different from those enumerated in the “Manifesto”, however their characteristics are the same.

2. A listing of these demands looks like this:

   1. “De-investment of capital”: means of production are assigned a smaller proportion in relation to consumer goods.

   2. “Increase of production costs” - so that as long as wages, money and the market still exist - more remuneration is exchanged for less labour time.

   3. “Drastic reduction of labour time” - by at least half as unemployment and socially useless and damaging activities will shortly become things of the past.

   4. A reduction in the mass of what is produced through an “under-production plan” which is to say the concentration of production on what is necessary as well as an “authoritarian regulation of consumption” by which the promotion of useless, damaging and luxury consumption goods is combated and activities which propagate a reactionary mentality are violently prohibited.

   5. Rapid “dissolution of the boundaries of the enterprise” whereby decisions on production are not assigned to the workforce, but the new consumption plan determines what is to be produced.

   6. “Rapid abolition of social services” whereby the charity hand-outs characteristic of commodity production are replaced by a social (initial minimum) provision for those incapable of work.

   7. “Construction freeze” on the rings of housing and workplaces around major and small cities in order to spread the population more and more equally throughout the land area of the country. With a ban on unnecessary transportation, limitation of traffic and speed of transportation.

   8. “A decisive struggle against professional specialization” and the social division of labour though the removal of any possibility of making a career or obtaining a title.

   9. Immediate politically determined measures to put the schools, the press, all means of communication and information, as well as the entire spectrum of culture and entertainment under the control of the communist state.

2. It is not surprising that the Stalinists and those akin to them, together with their parties in the West today demand precisely the reverse - not only in terms of the “institutional” and also political-legal objectives, but even in terms of the “structural” which is to say socio-economic objectives.

The cause of this is their coordination with the party which presides over the Russian state and its fraternal countries, where the task of social transformation remains that of transition from pre-capitalist forms to capitalism: With all the corresponding ideological, political, social, and economic demands and pretensions in their baggage aiming towards a bourgeois zenith - they turn away with horror only from a medieval nadir.

Their Western cronies remain nauseating renegades insofar as the feudal danger (which is still material and real in insurgent areas of Asia) is non-existent and false with regards to the bloated super-capitalism across the Atlantic and for the proletarians who stagnate under its civilised, liberal and nationalist knout it is a lie.

The text was published in the year after the split in the Internationalist Communist Party which had been formed in Italy during the war following an important wave of workers’ struggles[5]. The split, however – like the dissolution of Marc’s group the Gauche Communiste de France, which also took place in 1952 – was an expression of the fact that, contrary to the hopes of many revolutionaries, the war had not given rise to a new proletarian upsurge but to the deepening of the counter-revolution. The disagreements between the “Damenists” and the “Bordigists” in the Partito Comunista Internazionalista in Italy were partly about different appreciations of the post-war period. Bordiga and his followers tended to have a better grasp of the fact that the period was one of mounting reaction[6]. And yet here we have Bordiga formulating a list of demands that would be more suited to a moment of open revolutionary struggle. This text thus appears more as a kind of thought experiment than a platform to be taken up by a mass movement. This might to some degree explain some of the more obvious weaknesses and lacunae in the document, although in a deeper sense they are the product of contradictions and inconsistencies which were already embedded in the Bordigist world view.

Reading the remarks that introduce and conclude the text, we can also see that it was written as part of a broader polemic against what the Bordigists describe as the “reformist” currents, in particular the Stalinists, those false inheritors of the tradition of Marx, Engels and Lenin. The main reason that the Bordigists described the official Communist parties as reformist was not so much that they shared the illusions of the Trotskyists that these were still workers’ organisations, but more because the Stalinists had increasingly become partisans of forming national fronts with the traditional bourgeois parties and were advocating a gradual “transition” to socialism  through the formation of “popular democracies” and various parliamentary coalitions. Against these aberrations, Bordiga reaffirms the fundamentals of the Communist Manifesto which takes as its starting point the necessity for the violent conquest of power by the proletariat (in retrospect, we can also point out here the gulf that separates Bordiga from many who “speak in his name”, notably the “communisation” currents who often cite Bordiga but who gag on his insistence on the need for the proletarian dictatorship and a communist party). At the same time, still with his sights trained on the Stalinists, Bordiga makes it clear that while the specific “transitional” measures advocated at the end of the second chapter of the 1848 Manifesto - heavy progressive income tax, formation of a state bank, state control of communication and key industries etc – may form the backbone of the economic programme of the “reformists”, they should not be seen as eternal verities: the Manifesto itself emphasised that they were “not to be treated as complete socialism but as steps which are to be identified as preliminary, immediate and essentially contradictory”, and corresponded to the low level of capitalist development at the time they were drawn up; and indeed quite a few of them have already been implemented by the bourgeoisie itself.

You might be forgiven for taking this to be a refutation of invariance, the idea that the communist programme has remained essentially unchanged since at least 1848. In fact, Bordiga castigates the Stalinists because they “did not follow a fixed theory, but believed it required perpetual further development as a result of historical change”. And again, he argues that his proposed “corrections” to the immediate programme “are different from those enumerated in the ‘Manifesto’; however their characteristics are the same”. We find this contradictory and unconvincing. While it’s true that certain key elements of the communist programme, such as the necessity for the proletarian dictatorship, do not change, historical experience has indeed brought profound developments in the understanding of how this dictatorship can come about and the political forms that will compose it. This has nothing to do with the “revisionism” of the social democrats, the Stalinists or others who may indeed have used the excuse of “changing with the times” to justify their desertion of the proletarian camp. 

Many cons, but some important pros

Examining Bordiga’s “corrections” to the measures proposed by the Manifesto, you might also be forgiven for only seeing their weaknesses, most notably:

• Despite all the lessons of the revolutionary movements of 1905-23, there is no indication at all of the forms of proletarian political power most suited to implementing the transition to communism. No reference to the soviets, no attempt to build on examples like the KPD programme of 1918 which lays particular emphasis on the need to dismantle the institutions of the bourgeois state, local and central, and to install in their place the power of the workers’ councils; no lessons drawn from the degeneration of the Russian revolution about the relationship between party and class, or party and state. Indeed the only mention of any form of political power following the revolution is the “communist state”, an atrocious contradiction in terms, as the previous article in this series argued via the contributions of Marc Chirik[7]. Again, we are faced with the underlying weaknesses of the Bordigist “doctrine” here: organisational forms are not important, what matters is the content injected by the party, which is destined to exercise the dictatorship of the proletariat on behalf of the masses. Furthermore, while Bordiga is of course right to insist in point 5 that production and consumption will be based on a global plan, his ignoring of the question of how the working class will take and hold power in its own hands at every level, from the most local to the most global, implies a top-down vision of centralisation. This is most evident with the paragraph dealing with the spheres of education and culture, where a kind of state monopoly is clearly advocated. We can contrast this with Trotsky’s view that the post-revolutionary state should have an “anarchist” approach on the question of art and culture – by which he meant that the state should interfere as little as possible in questions of artistic style, taste or creativity, and should not demand that all art should serve as propaganda for the revolution. More generally, there is little sign in his list of measures of the need for a vast political, moral and cultural struggle to overcome the habits and attitudes inherited not only from capitalism but from thousands of years of class society. He does talk about the need to struggle against “professional specialisation and the social division of labour”, but such a struggle demands something more than a ban on titles, while the call to remove “the possibility of making a career” only makes sense in the context of a wholesale reorganisation of production and the elimination of the wage system.
• Bordiga was perfectly aware that abolishing “wages, money and the market” is a central characteristic of communism[8], and we know that it will not be possible to dispense with them all overnight. But apart from advocating “more remuneration for less labour time”, Bordiga gives us no indication of what measures can be taken – and taken from the very start of the revolution – that will lead towards the elimination of these key categories of capitalism. In this sense Bordiga’s corrections fail to build on, or coherently criticise, the proposals made by Marx in the Critique of the Gotha Programme (the system of labour time vouchers, which we will have to return to in another article).

And yet the document retains considerable interest for us in trying to understand what would be the principal problems and priorities facing a communist revolution that would be taking place not at the dawn of capitalism’s decadence, as in 1917-23, but after an entire century in which the slide towards barbarism has continued to accelerate, and the threat to humanity’s very survival is far greater than it was a hundred years ago.

The methods of communist reconstruction

Bordiga’s document makes no attempt to draw a balance sheet of the successes and failures of the Russian revolution at the political level, and indeed only makes a cursory reference to the revolutionary wave that followed the First World War. However, in one respect, it does seek to apply an important lesson from the economic policies adopted by the Bolsheviks: Bordiga’s proposals are pertinent because they recognise that the road to material abundance and a classless society cannot be based on a programme of “socialist accumulation”, in which consumption is still subject to “production for production’s sake” (which is actually production for the sake of value), living labour subjected to dead labour. To be sure, communist revolution has become a historic necessity because capitalist social relations have become a fetter on the development of the productive forces. But from the communist point of view, the development of the productive forces has a very different content from its application in capitalist society, where it is driven by the profit motive and thus the urge to accumulate. Communism will certainly make full use of the scientific and technological advances achieved under capitalism, but it will turn them to human use, so that they become servants of the real “development” posited by communism: the full flowering of the productive, i.e. the creative powers of the associated individuals. One example will suffice here: with the development of computerisation and robotisation, capitalism has promised us an end to drudgery and a “leisure society”. In reality, these potential boons have brought the misery of unemployment or precarious work to some, and an increased work-load to others, with the mounting pressure on employees to carry on working at their computers anywhere and at any time of the day.

In concrete terms, the first four points of his programme involve: a demand to stop focusing on the production of machines to produce more machines, and the gearing of production towards direct consumption. Under capitalism, of course, the latter has meant the production of ever more “useless, damaging and luxury consumption goods” – exemplified today in the production of more and more sophisticated computers or mobile phones which are designed to fail after a limited period and cannot be repaired, or by the immensely polluting automobile and fast fashion industries, in which “consumer demand” is driven to the point of frenzy by advertising and social media. For the working class in power the reorientation of consumption will focus on the urgent need to provide all human beings, across the planet, with the fundamental necessities of life. We will have to return to these questions in other articles but we can mention some of the most obvious: 

• Nourishment. Capitalism in decay has presented humanity with a gigantic contradiction between the possibilities of producing enough food for all, and the real and permanent undernourishment that haunts large parts of the planet, including sectors of the population in the most advanced countries, while both in the central and more peripheral countries millions suffer from obesity and poor quality diet deliberately maintained by the food producing and marketing corporations, which also contribute enormously to global carbon emissions, deforestation and other threats to the world’s ecology such as plastic pollution. The world’s supply of water has also become a fundamental problem exacerbated by global warming. The working class will thus have to feed the world but without resorting to the capitalist methods that have led us to this impasse, not least contemporary “factory farming” with its disgusting cruelty to animals and its probable connection to pandemic disease. It will have to resolve the antagonism between plentiful food and healthy eating. And all this on the basis of a social-economic transformation that cannot be solved immediately: it is one thing, for example, to expropriate the big “agri-business” and state-owned sources of food production, another to integrate the small-holding farmers or peasants into cooperative and then associated production, which will take time and will make it impossible to immediately overcome exchange relations between the socialised sector and the small holders.
• Housing: homelessness has become endemic in all capitalist countries, not least the cities of the capitalist centre; millions are herded together in the vast slums that surround the cities of the “global south” (and again, also in parts of the “global north”); and in the last few decades the proliferation of war and ecological destruction has created a refugee problem of proportions not seen since the end of the Second World War, with further millions living in desperate conditions in camps which provide little protection from the elements, from disease, and from all kinds of exploitation, including modern forms of slavery. At the same time, the great cities of the world have engaged in a frenzy of building mainly devoted to speculation, luxury apartments and economic activities which would have no place in a communist society. Large scale expropriation of such misused and misconceived buildings can provide a temporary solution to the worst expressions of homelessness, but in the long term the housing of communist humanity cannot be based on patching up already inadequate and increasingly dilapidated housing stock where residents are squeezed into cage-like compartments. The re-housing of much of the world population poses a much greater challenge: the overcoming of the contradiction between town and country, which has nothing in common with the untrammelled expansion of the cities that we are witnessing in this phase of capitalism. We will return to this below.
• Health care: health, as every report on public health concludes, is a social, class question. Those who are poorly fed and badly housed, with limited access to healthcare, die much sooner than those who eat well, have decent housing and can receive adequate medical treatment when they are ill. The current Covid-19 pandemic, however, is exposing the limits of all existing “health services”, even in the most powerful capitalist countries, not least because they cannot escape the logic of competition between national capitalist units, whereas a pandemic has no respect for national borders and underlines the necessity for something that can only be a nightmare for “Big Pharma” and the Trumps of this world, but also for that left wing version of nationalism which does not want us to see beyond “our National Health Service”: medicine, healthcare and research that is not state-run, but truly socialised, and not national but “without borders”: in short, a planetary health service.

Waste not, want not

But at the same time, these admittedly immense tasks, which are merely the starting point for a new human culture, cannot be envisaged as the result of a brutal increase in the working day. On the contrary, they must be linked to a drastic reduction in labour time, without which, we should add, the direct participation of the producers in the political life of general assemblies and councils will not be feasible. And this reduction is to be achieved to a large extent by the elimination of waste: the waste of unemployment and of “socially useless and damaging activities”.

Already at the beginning of capitalism, in a speech at Elberfeld in 1845, Engels stigmatised the way that capitalism could not avoid a terrible mis-use of human energy and insisted that only a communist transformation could solve the problem.

“From the economic point of view the present arrangement of society is surely the most irrational and unpractical we can possibly conceive. The opposition of interests results in a great amount of labour power being utilised in a way from which society gains nothing, and in a substantial amount of capital being unnecessarily lost without reproducing itself. We already see this in the commercial crises; we see how masses of goods, all of which men have produced with great effort, are thrown away at prices which cause loss to the sellers; we see how masses of capital, accumulated with great effort, disappear before the very eyes of their owners as a result of bankruptcies. Let us, however, discuss present-day trade in a little more detail. Consider through how many hands every product must go before it reaches the actual consumer. Consider, gentlemen, how many speculating, swindling superfluous middlemen have now forced themselves in between the producer and the consumer! Let us take, for example, a bale of cotton produced in North America. The bale passes from the hands of the planter into those of the agent on some station or other on the Mississippi and travels down the river to New Orleans. Here it is sold — for a second time, for the agent has already bought it from the planter — sold, it might well be, to the speculator, who sells it once again, to the exporter. The bale now travels to Liverpool where, once again, a greedy speculator stretches out his hands towards it and grabs it. This man then trades it to a commission agent who, let us assume, is a buyer for a German house. So the bale travels to Rotterdam, up the Rhine, through another dozen hands of forwarding agents, being unloaded and loaded a dozen times, and only then does it arrive in the hands, not of the consumer, but of the manufacturer, who first makes it into an article of consumption, and who perhaps sells his yarn to a weaver, who disposes of what he has woven to the textile printer, who then does business with the wholesaler, who then deals with the retailer, who finally sells the commodity to the consumer. And all these millions of intermediary swindlers, speculators, agents, exporters, commission agents, forwarding agents, wholesalers and retailers, who actually contribute nothing to the commodity itself — they all want to live and make a profit — and they do make it too, on the average, otherwise they could not subsist. Gentlemen, is there no simpler, cheaper way of bringing a bale of cotton from America to Germany and of getting the product manufactured from it into the hands of the real consumer than this complicated business of ten times selling and a hundred times loading, unloading and transporting it from one warehouse to another? Is this not a striking example of the manifold waste of labour power brought about by the divergence of interests? Such a complicated way of transport is out of the question in a rationally organised society. To keep to our example, just as one can easily know how much cotton or manufactured cotton goods an individual colony needs, it will be equally easy for the central authority to determine how much all the villages and townships in the country need. Once such statistics have been worked out — which can easily be done in a year or two — average annual consumption will only change in proportion to the increasing population; it is therefore easy at the appropriate time to determine in advance what amount of each particular article the people will need — the entire great amount will be ordered direct from the source of supply; it will then be possible to procure it directly, without middlemen, without more delay and unloading than is really required by the nature of the journey, that is, with a great saving of labour power; it will not be necessary to pay the speculators, the dealers large and small, their rake-off. But this is still not all — in this way these middlemen are not only made harmless to society, they are, in fact, made useful to it. Whereas they now perform to the disadvantage of everyone else a kind of work which is, at best, superfluous but which, nevertheless, provides them with a living, indeed, in many cases even with great riches, whereas they are thus at present directly prejudicial to the general good, they will then become free to engage in useful labour and to take up an occupation in which they can prove themselves as actual members, not merely apparent, sham members, of human society, and as participants in its activity as a whole”[9].

Engels then goes to enumerate other examples of this wastage: the need, in a society based on competition and inequality, to maintain vastly expensive but entirely unproductive institutions such as standing armies, police forces and prisons; the human labour poured into servicing what William Morris termed “the swinish luxury of the rich”; and last but not least the huge waste of labour power engendered by unemployment, which rises to particularly scandalous levels during the periodic “commercial” crises of the system. He then contrasts the wastefulness of capitalism with the essential simplicity of communist production and distribution, which is calculated on the basis of what human beings need and the overall time needed for the labour that will satisfy this need.

All these capitalist ailments, observable during the period of rising and expanding capitalism, have become far more destructive and dangerous during the epoch of capitalist decline: war and militarism have increasingly seized hold of the entire economic apparatus, and constitute such a menace to humanity that certainly one of the most urgent priorities facing the proletarian dictatorship (one which Bordiga doesn’t mention, even though the “atomic age” had already clearly dawned by the time he wrote this text) will be to rid the planet of the weapons of mass destruction accumulated by capitalism – especially because there is no guarantee that, faced with its definitive overthrow by the working class, the bourgeoisie or factions of it will prefer to destroy humanity than sacrifice their class rule.

A militarised capitalism can also only operate through the cancerous growth of the state, with its own standing army of bureaucrats, policemen and spies. The security services, in particular, have swollen to gigantic proportions, as have their mirror image, the mafia gangs which enforce their brutal order in many countries of the capitalist periphery

Similarly, capitalist decadence, with its vast apparatus of banking, finance and advertising which are more than ever essential to the circulation of actually produced goods, has vastly inflated the number of people involved in fundamentally pointless forms of daily activity; and successive waves of “globalisation” have made the absurdities involved in the planet-wide circulation of commodities even more apparent, not to mention its mounting cost at the ecological level. And the amount of labour devoted to the demands of what is today called the “super rich” is no less shocking than it was in Engels’ day - not only in their inexhaustible need for servants but also in their thirst for truly useless luxuries like private jets, yachts and palaces. And at the opposite pole, in an epoch in which the economic crisis of the system has itself tended to become permanent, unemployment is less a cyclical scourge than a permanent one, even when it is disguised through the proliferation of short-term jobs and underemployment. In the so-called third world, the destruction of traditional economies has resulted in some areas of intensive capitalist development, but it has also created a gigantic “sub-proletariat” living the most precarious existence as shack-dwellers in the townships of Africa or the “favelas” of Brazil and Latin America.

Thus Bordiga – even if he was not coherent in his understanding of the decadence of the system – had understood that implementing the communist programme in this epoch does not mean advancing towards abundance through a very rapid process of industrialisation, as the Bolsheviks had tended to assume, given the “backward” conditions they faced in Russia after 1917. Certainly, it will require the development and application of the most advanced technologies, but it will initially take shape as a planned dismantling of everything that is harmful and useless in the existing apparatus of production, and a global reorganisation of the real human resources which capitalism continually squanders and destroys. 

The communist movement today – even if it has been late in recognising the scale of the problem – cannot help but be aware of the ecological cost of capitalist development in the past century, and above all since the end of the Second World War. It is more evident to us than it was to the Bolsheviks that we can’t arrive at communism through the methods of capitalist industrialisation, which sacrifices both human labour power and natural wealth to the demands of profit, to the idol of self-expanding value. We now understand that one of the primary tasks facing the proletariat is that of halting the threat of runaway global warming and clearing up the gigantic mess that capitalism will have bequeathed to us: the wanton destruction of forests and wilderness, the poisoning of the air, land and water by the existing system of production and transportation. Some parts of this “inheritance” will take many years of patient research and labour to overcome – the pollution of the seas and food chain by plastic waste is just one example. And as we have already mentioned, satisfying the most basic needs of the world population (food, housing, health, etc) will have to be consistent with this overall project of harmonisation between man and nature.

It is to Bordiga’s credit that he was already becoming aware of this problem in the early 1950s: his intuition of the centrality of this dimension is shown above all in his position on the problem of the “great cities”, which is fully in line with the thinking of Marx and especially of Engels. 

Breaking up the megacities

The city and civilisation derive from the same roots, historically and etymologically. Sometimes the term “civilisation” is extended back to include the entirety of human culture and morality[10]: in this sense the hunter gatherers of Australia or Africa also constitute a civilisation. But there is no question that the transition to living in cities, which is the more generally used definition of civilisation, represented a qualitative development in human history: a factor in the advancement of culture and the recording of history itself, but also the definitive beginnings of class exploitation and the state. Even before capitalism, as Weber shows, the city is also inseparable from trade and the money economy[11]. But the bourgeoisie is the urban class par excellence, and the mediaeval cities became the centres of resistance to the hegemony of the feudal aristocracy, whose wealth was above all based on land ownership and the exploitation of the peasants. The modern proletariat is no less an urban class, formed from the expropriation of the peasants and the ruin of the artisans. Driven into the hastily constructed conurbations of Manchester, Glasgow, or Paris, it was here that the working class first became aware of itself as a distinct class opposed to the bourgeoisie and began to envisage a world beyond capitalism.

At the level of man’s relationship with nature, the city presents the same dual aspect: the centre of scientific and technological development, opening up the potential for liberation from scarcity and disease. But this growing “mastery of nature”, taking place in conditions of mankind’s alienation from itself and from nature, is also inseparable from the destruction of nature and from a series of ecological catastrophes. Thus, the decay of the Sumerian or Mayan city cultures has been explained as the result of the city overreaching itself, exhausting the surrounding milieu of forests and agriculture, the collapse of which delivered terrible blows to the hubris of civilisations which had begun to forget their intimate dependence on nature. So too the cities, to the extent that they pressed human beings together like sardines, failed to solve the basic problem of waste disposal, and inverted age-old relationships between humans and animals, became the breeding ground for plagues such as the Black Death in the period of feudal decline or the cholera and typhus which ravaged the industrial cities of early capitalism. But again, we have to consider the other side of the dialectic: the rising bourgeoisie was able to understand that the diseases which strike down its wage slaves could also reach the capitalists’ doorsteps and undermine their whole economic edifice. It was thus able to begin and carry through astonishing feats of engineering in the construction of sewage systems that are still operating today, while rapidly evolving medical expertise was applied to the elimination of hitherto chronic forms of illness.

In the work of Friedrich Engels in particular, we can find the fundamental elements for a history of the city from a proletarian standpoint. In The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, he charts the dissolution of the old “gens”, the tribal organisation based on kinship ties, to the new territorial organisation of the city, which marks the irreversible division into antagonistic classes and with it the emergence of the state power, whose task is to prevent these divisions tearing society apart. In The Condition of the Working Class in England, he draws a picture of the hellish living conditions of the young proletariat, the day-to-day dirt and disease of the Manchester slums, but also the stirrings of class consciousness and organisation which would, in the end, play the decisive role in compelling the ruling class to grant meaningful reforms to the workers.

In two later works, the Anti-Duhring and The Housing Question, Engels embarks on a discussion about the capitalist city in a phase when capitalism has already triumphed in the heartlands of Europe and the USA and is about to conquer the entire globe. And it is noticeable that he already concludes that the great cities have overreached themselves and will have to disappear in order to fulfil the demand of the Communist Manifesto: abolition of the separation between town and country. Here we should recall that by the 1860s, Marx was also becoming increasingly concerned about the destructive impact of capitalist agriculture on the fertility of the soil, and noted, in the work of Liepig, that the annihilation of forest cover in parts of Europe was having an impact on the climate, raising local temperatures and decreasing rainfall[12]. In other words: just as Marx discerned signs of the political decadence of the bourgeois class after its crushing of the Paris Commune, and, in his correspondence with Russian revolutionaries towards the end of his life was looking for ways that the regions where capitalism was yet to triumph fully could avoid the purgatory of capitalist development, both he and Engels had started to wonder whether, as far as capitalism was concerned, enough is enough[13]. Perhaps the material foundations for a global communist society had already been laid, and further “progress” for capital would have an increasingly destructive result? We know that the system, through its imperialist expansion in the last decades of the 19th century, would prolong its life for several more decades and provide the basis for a staggering phase of growth and development, leading some elements in the workers’ movement to question the marxist analysis of the inevitability of capitalist crisis and decline, only for the unresolved contradictions of capital to explode into the open in the war of 1914-18 (which Engels had also anticipated). But the searching questions about the future that they had begun to pose precisely when capitalism had reached its zenith were perfectly valid at the time and are more than ever relevant today.

In “The transformation of social relations”, IR 85, we looked at how the revolutionaries of the 19th century – particularly Engels, but also Bebel and William Morris – had argued that the growth of the big cities had already reached the point where the abolition of the antagonism between town and country had become a real necessity, hence that the expansion of the great cities must come to an end in favour of a greater unity between industry and agriculture and the more even distribution of human dwellings across the Earth. It was a necessity not only to solve pressing problems such as waste disposal and the prevention of overcrowding, pollution and disease, but also as the basis for a more human pace of life in harmony with nature.

In “Damen, Bordiga and the passion for communism”, IR 158, we showed that Bordiga – perhaps more than any other Marxist in the 20th century – had remained loyal to this essential aspect of the communist programme, citing for example his 1953 article “Space Versus Cement”[14], which is a passionate polemic against the contemporary trends in architecture and town planning (an area in which Bordiga himself was professionally qualified), which were driven by capital’s need to herd as many human beings as possible into increasingly restricted spaces – a trend typified by the rapid construction of tower blocks supposedly inspired by the architectural theories of Le Corbusier. Bordiga is merciless about the purveyors of modern town planning ideology:

“Anyone who applauds such tendencies should not be considered only as a defender of capitalist doctrines, ideals and interests, but as an accomplice in the pathological tendencies of the supreme stage of capitalism in decay and dissolution” (no hesitations about decadence here, then!). Elsewhere in the same article he affirms:

“Verticalism, this deformed doctrine is called; capitalism is verticalist. Communism will be ‘horizontalist’”. And at the end of the article he joyfully anticipates the day when “the cement monsters will be ridiculed and suppressed” and the “giant cities deflated” in order to “make the density of life and work uniform over the inhabitable land”.

In another work, “The Human Species and the Earth’s Crust”[15], Bordiga cites extensively from Engels’ On the Housing Question, and we cannot avoid the temptation to do the same. This is from the last section of the pamphlet, where Engels lays into Proudhon’s follower Mülberger for claiming that it is utopian for wanting to overcome the “inevitable” antagonism between town and country:

“The abolition of the antithesis between town and country is no more and no less utopian than the abolition of the antithesis between capitalists and wage workers. From day to day it is becoming more and more a practical demand of both industrial and agricultural production. No one has demanded this more energetically then Liebig in his writings on the chemistry of agriculture, in which his first demand has always been that man shall give back to the land what he takes from it, and in which he proves that only the existence of the towns, and in particular the big towns, prevents this. When one observes how here in London alone a greater quantity of manure than is produced by the whole kingdom of Saxony is poured away every day into the sea with an expenditure of enormous sums, and when one observes what colossal works are necessary in order to prevent this manure from poisoning the whole of London, then the utopian proposal to abolish the antithesis between town and country is given a peculiarly practical basis. And even comparatively insignificant Berlin has been wallowing in its own filth for at least thirty years.

On the other hand, it is completely utopian to want, like Proudhon, to transform present-day bourgeois society while maintaining the peasant as such. Only as uniform a distribution as possible of the population over the whole country, only an integral connection between industrial and agricultural production together with the thereby necessary extension of the means of communication – presupposing the abolition of the capitalist mode of production – would be able to save the rural population from the isolation and stupor in which it has vegetated almost unchanged for thousands of years”[16].

Several strands of thought are suggested in this passage, and Bordiga is well aware of them. First, Engels insists that overcoming the antagonism between town and country is intimately linked to overcoming the general capitalist division of labour – a theme developed further in Anti-Dühring, in particular the division between mental and manual labour which appears to be so unbridgeable in the capitalist production process. Both these separations, no less than the division between the capitalist and the wage worker, are indispensable to the emergence of a fully rounded human being. And contrary to the schemes of the backward-gazing Proudhonists, the abolition of the capitalist social relation does not involve the preservation of the small-scale property of peasants or artisans; transcending the city-country, industry-agriculture divides will rescue the peasant from isolation and intellectual vegetation as much as it will free the city-dwellers from overcrowding and pollution.

Second, Engels raises here, as he does elsewhere, the simple but oft-avoided problem of human excrement. In their first, “savage” forms, the capitalist cities made almost no provision for dealing with human waste, and very rapidly paid the price in the generation of epidemic disease, notably dysentery and cholera – scourges which still haunts the shanty towns of the capitalist periphery, where basic hygiene facilities are notoriously absent. The construction of the sewage system certainly represented a step forward in the history of the bourgeois city. But simply flushing away human waste is itself a form of waste since it could be used as a natural fertiliser (as indeed it was in the earlier history of the city).

Looking back to the London or Manchester of Engels’ day, one might easily say: they thought these cities had already grown much too large, much too separated from their natural environment. What would they have made of the modern avatars of these cities? It has been estimated by the UN that around 55% of the world’s population now inhabit big cities, but if the current growth of the cities continues this figure will rise to around 68% by 2050[17]

This is a true example of what Marx already posited in the Grundrisse: “development as decay”, and Bordiga was prescient in seeing this in the period of reconstruction after the Second World War. The anthropologists who to seek define the opening of the period of what they call the “Anthropocene Era” (which basically means the era in which human activity has had a fundamental and qualitative impact on the planet’s ecology) usually trace it back to the spread of modern industry in the early 19th century – in short to the victory of capitalism. But some of them also talk about a “Great Acceleration” which took place after 1945, and we can see the juggernaut speeding up even more after 1989 with the rise of China and other “developing” countries.

The consequences of this growth are well-known: the contribution of the megacity to global heating through untrammelled construction, energy consumption, and the emissions of industry and transport, which are also making the air unbreathable in many cities (already noted by Bordiga in the “The Human Species and the Earth’s Crust”: “As for bourgeois democracy, it has stooped so low as to renounce the freedom to breathe”). The uncontrolled spread of urbanisation has been a primary factor in the destruction of natural habitats and species extinction; and last but not at all least, the megacites have revealed their role as incubators of new pandemic diseases, the deadliest and most contagious of which – Covid-19 -  is at the time of writing paralysing the world economy and leaving a world-wide trail of death and suffering. Indeed the last two “contributions” have probably come together in the Covid-19 epidemic, which is one of a number where a virus has jumped from one species to another. This has become a major problem in countries like China and in many parts of Africa where animal habitats are being obliterated, leading to a considerable expansion in the consumption of “bush meat”, and where the new cities, built to serve China’s frenzy of economic growth, have minimal hygiene controls. 

Overcoming the antagonism

In the list of revolutionary measures contained in Bordiga’s article, point 7 is the most relevant to the project of abolishing the antagonism between city and country: 

“’Construction freeze’ on the rings of housing and workplaces around major and small cities in order to spread the population more and more equally throughout the land area of the country. With a ban on unnecessary transportation, limitation of traffic and speed of transportation”.

This point seems especially contemporary today, when virtually every city is the theatre of relentless “vertical” elevation (the construction of huge skyscrapers, particularly in city centres) and “horizontal” extension, eating up the surrounding countryside. The demand is simply this: stop. The bloating of the cities and the unsustainable concentration of the population within them is the result of capitalist anarchy and is therefore essentially unplanned, un-centralised. The human energy and technological possibilities currently engaged in this cancerous growth must, from the very beginning of the revolutionary process, be mobilised in a different direction. Even though the world population has grown considerably since Bordiga calculated, in Space versus Cement, that “on average our species has one square kilometre for every twenty of its members”[18], the possibility of a far more rational and harmonious spreading of the population across the planet remains, even taking into account the necessity to preserve large areas of wilderness – a need understood better today because the immense importance of preserving bio-diversity across the planet has been scientifically established, but it was something already envisaged by Trotsky in Literature and Revolution[19].

The abolition of the city-country antagonism was distorted by Stalinism into meaning: pave over everything, build “workers’ barracks” and new factories over every field and forest. For authentic communism it will mean cultivating fields and planting forests in the middle of cities, but also that viable communities can be located in an astonishing variety of locations without destroying everything around them, and they will not be isolated because they will have at their disposal the means of communication which capitalism has indeed developed at bewildering speed. Engels had already referred to this possibility in The Housing Question and Bordiga takes it up again in “Space versus Cement”:

“The most modern forms of production, using networks of stations of all kinds, such as hydroelectric power stations, communications, radio, television, increasingly give a unique operational discipline to workers spread out in small groups over enormous distances. Combined work remains, in ever larger and more marvellous weaves, and autonomous production disappears more and more. But the technological density mentioned above is constantly decreasing. The urban and productive agglomeration remains therefore not for reasons dependent on the optimum of production, but for the durability of the profit economy and the social dictatorship of capital”.

Digital technology, of course, has further advanced this potential. But under capitalism the overall result of the “internet revolution” has been to accelerate the atomisation of the individual, while the trend towards “working from home” - particularly highlighted by the Covid-19 crisis and the accompanying measures of social isolation – has not at all reduced the tendency towards urban agglomeration. The conflict between, on the one hand, the desire to live and work in association with others, and on the other hand the need to find space in which to move and breathe, can only be resolved in a society where the individual is no longer at odds with the community.

Reduce your speed

As with the construction of human habitations, so it is with the mad rush of modern transport: stop, or at least, slow down!

Here again, Bordiga is ahead of his time. The methods of capitalist transportation on land, sea and air, based overwhelmingly on the burning of fossil fuels, account for over 20% of global carbon dioxide emissions[20], while in the cities, they have become a leading source of heart and lung disease, particularly affecting children. The yearly world death toll from traffic accidents stands at a staggering 1.35 million, more than half of them “vulnerable” road users: pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists.[21]And these are only the most obvious disadvantages of the present system of transport. The constant noise it generates gnaws away at the city dweller’s nerves, and the subordination of town planning to the needs of the car (and the car industry, so central to the existing capitalist economy) produces cities that are endlessly fragmented, with residential areas divided from each other by the ceaseless flow of traffic. Meanwhile social atomisation, an essential characteristic of bourgeois society and of the capitalist city in particular, is not only illustrated but reinforced by the lone car owner and driver competing for road space with millions of similarly separated souls.

Of course, capitalism has had to take measures to try to mitigate the worst effects of all this: “carbon offsetting” to make up for excessive flights, “traffic calming” and car-free walk-ways in city centres, the move towards the electric car.

None of these “reforms” go anywhere near solving the problem because none of them address the capitalist social relationship which lies at its root. Take the electric car for example: the car industry has seen the writing on the wall and is tending to switch more and more towards this form of transport. But even setting aside the problem of extracting and disposing of the lithium needed for the batteries, or the need to increase electricity production to power these vehicles, all of which has a substantial ecological cost, a city full of electric vehicles would be marginally quieter and somewhat less polluted but still dangerous to walk in and carved up by roads.

It’s possible that communism will indeed make extensive (though doubtless not exclusive) use of electric vehicles. But the real issue lies elsewhere. Capitalism needs to operate at break-neck speed because time is money and transport is driven by the needs of accumulation, which includes “turnover” time and thus transportation in its overall calculations. Capitalism is equally driven by the need to sell as many products as possible, hence the constant pressure for each individual to have their own personal possession – again typified by the private car which has become a symbol of personal wealth and prestige, the key to the “Freedom of the Road” in an era of incessant traffic jams.

The pace of life in today’s cities is far greater (even with the traffic jams) than it was in the second part of the 19th century, but in Woman and Socialism, first published in 1879, August Bebel was already looking forward to the city of the future, where “the nerve-racking noise, crowding and rushing of our large cities with their thousands of vehicles of all sorts ceases substantially: society assumes an aspect of greater repose" (p 300).

The rushing and congestion that make city life so stressful can only be overcome when the drive to accumulate has been suppressed, in favour of production planned to freely distribute necessary use values. In working out the transport networks of the future, a key factor will obviously be to greatly keep carbon emissions and other forms of pollution to a minimum, but the need to achieve “greater repose”, a certain degree of peace and quiet both for residents and travellers, will certainly be factored in to the overall plan. Since there is much less pressure to get from A to B at the quickest possible rate, travellers will have more time to enjoy the journey itself: perhaps, in such a world, the horse will return to parts of the land, sailboats to the sea, airships to the sky, while it will also be possible to use much faster means of transport when needed[22]. At the same time, the volume of traffic will be greatly reduced if the addiction to personal ownership of vehicles can be broken, and travellers can have access to free public transport of various kinds (buses, trains, boats, taxis and ownerless self-drive vehicles). We should also bear in mind that, in contrast to the many western capitalist cities where half of all apartments are occupied by single owners or tenants, communism will be an experiment in more communal forms of living; and in such a society travelling in the company of others can become a pleasure rather than a desperate race between hostile competitors.

We should also bear in mind that many of the journeys that clog up the transport system, those that involve travelling to pointless jobs such as those linked to finance, insurance or advertising, will have no place in a moneyless society. The daily rush hour will be a thing of the past. At the same time, production of useful objects can be re-designed and re-located to avoid the need for transporting products over long distances, which under capitalism is very often only determined by the aim of finding lower paid workforces or other advantages (for capital) such as lack of environmental regulation. The entire production and distribution of the use values we need will be reorganised and so many journeys between places of production and dwellings will no longer be necessary.

Thus the streets of a town where the angry roar of traffic has been reduced to a purr will regain some of their older advantages and uses– as playgrounds for children for example.

Again, we don’t underestimate the magnitude of the tasks involved here. Although the possibility of living in a more communal or associated way is contained in the transition to a communist mode of production, the egoistic prejudices that have been greatly exacerbated by several hundred years of capitalism, will not disappear in an automatic manner and will indeed often operate as serious obstacles to the process of communisation. As Marx put it,

"Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it, when it exists for us as capital or when we directly possess, eat, drink, wear, inhabit it etc, in short when we use it. Although private property conceives all these immediate realizations of possession only as means of life, and the life they serve is the life of private property, labour and capitalization. Therefore all the physical and intellectual senses have been replaced by the simple estrangement of all these senses - the sense of having" (Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, chapter on ‘Private property and communism’)

Rosa Luxemburg always maintained that the struggle for socialism was not just about “bread and butter” issues but that “morally … the working-class struggle denotes the cultural renovation of society”[23]. This cultural and moral aspect of the class struggle, and above all the fight against the “sense of having”, will certainly continue throughout the transition to communism.

CDW

In the first part of this article we looked at some of the most important developments in the international proletarian milieu after the events of May 68 in France. We noted that, while the resurgence of the class struggle gave a significant impetus to the revival of the proletarian political movement, and thus to the regroupment of its forces, this dynamic had begun to run into difficulties by the beginning of the 80s. We take up the story from this point. This “history” by no means claims to be exhaustive and we make no apology for the fact that it is presented from the ICC’s “partisan” point of view. It can be supplemented in future by contributions from those who may have different experiences and perspectives.

The mass strike in Poland in 1980 demonstrated the capacity of the working class to organise itself independently of the capitalist state, to unify its struggles across an entire country, to unite economic with political demands. But as we said at the time: as in Russia in 1917, the problem could be posed in Poland, but it could only be resolved on an international scale. The working class of Western Europe in particular had been issued a challenge: faced with the irreversible deepening of the capitalist crisis, it would be necessary to attain the same heights of self-organisation and unification of its struggles, but at the same time to go beyond the movement in Poland at the level of politicisation. The Polish workers, fighting a brutal regime which claimed that the sacrifices it demanded were all steps on the way to a communist future, had, at the political level, not been able to reject a whole series of bourgeois political mystifications, in particular the idea that their conditions could best be improved by installing a democratic regime which allowed “free trade unions” to organise the working class. It was the specific task of the workers in the west, who had been through many years of bitter experience of the fraud of parliamentary democracy and the sabotaging role of trade unions that were formally separate from the capitalist state, to develop a genuinely proletarian perspective: the mass strike maturing into a direct confrontation with the capitalist system, the goal of an authentically communist society.

And there is no doubt that the workers in the west did take up the challenge in the sense of fighting back against a whole new round of attacks on their living standards, masterminded largely by right wing regimes in power prepared to force through massive levels of unemployment in order to “trim down” the bloated economic apparatus inherited from the post-war Keynesian period. In Belgium in 1983 the workers took important steps towards the extension of the struggle – relying not on the deliberations of union officials but sending massive delegations to other sectors to call on them to join the movement. In the following two years, the strikes by car workers, steel workers, printers and above all miners in the UK were the response of the proletariat to the new “Thatcherite” regime. They contained a real potential for unification if only they could rid themselves of the obsolete trade unionist notion that you can defeat the capitalist enemy by holding out for as long as possible in the confines of a single sector. Elsewhere in Europe – among the railway and the health workers in France, or the education workers in Italy – workers went further in trying to break away from the numbing grip of the trade unions, organising themselves in general assemblies with elected and revocable strike committees, and making tentative efforts towards coordinating these committees.

As we argued in the first part of this article, it was absolutely necessary for the small revolutionary organisations which existed at that time, even with their limited means, to participate in these struggles, to make their voices heard through the press, through leaflets, through speaking up at demonstrations, at picket lines and in general assemblies, to make concrete proposals for the extension and self-organisation of the struggle, to play a part in the formation of groups of militant workers seeking to stimulate the struggle and draw out its most important lessons. The ICC devoted a good deal of its resources in the 1980s to carrying out these tasks, and we produced a number of polemics with other proletarian organisations which, in our view, had not sufficiently grasped the potential of these struggles, above all because they lacked a general, historic vision of the “line of march” of the class movement. [1]

And yet, as we have also accepted elsewhere[2], we ourselves were less clear about the growing difficulties of the struggle. We tended to underestimate the significance of the heavy defeats suffered by emblematic sectors like the miners in the UK and the real hesitation of the class to reject trade union methods and ideology. Even when there was a strong tendency to organise outside the trade unions, the extreme left wing of the bourgeoisie set up false rank and file unions, even extra-union “co-ordinations”, to keep the struggle inside the bounds of sectionalism and ultimately of trade unionism. Above all, despite the determination and militancy of these struggles, there was not much progress towards the elaboration of a revolutionary perspective. The politicisation of the movement remained at best embryonic.

Since the end of the 1980s we have been arguing that this situation – of a working class strong enough to resist the drive towards another world war, and yet not capable of offering humanity the perspective of a new form of social organisation – constituted a kind of social stalemate which opened up what we call the phase of social decomposition. The collapse of the eastern bloc in 1989, which marked the definitive onset of this new phase in the decline of capitalism, was like an alarm bell which made us reflect deeply on the destiny of the international class movement which had appeared in successive waves since 1968. We began to understand that the new period would pose considerable difficulties for the working class, not least (but not only) because of the furious ideological assault of the bourgeoisie which proclaimed the death of communism and the final refutation of marxism.

In the first part of this article we noted that, already at the beginning of the 80s, the proletarian political milieu had gone through a major crisis, signalled by the collapse of the international conferences of the communist left, the splits in the ICC and the implosion of the Bordigist International Communist Party (Communist Program). The main political organisations of the working class thus entered this new and uncertain period in a weakened, dispersed condition. The overall failure of the class to politicise its struggles also meant that the very noticeable growth of the proletarian political milieu in the late 60s and 70s had begun to slow down or stagnate. Furthermore, in our view, none of the existing organisations apart from the ICC had the theoretical framework which would enable them to understand the characteristics of the new phase of decadence: some of them, such as the Bordigists, more or less rejected the concept of decadence altogether, while others, like Battaglia and the Communist Workers Organisation (now regrouped as the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party) had a concept of decadence but no interest in gauging the historic balance of forces between the classes (what we referred to as the question of the “historic course”). The idea of a social stalemate thus had no meaning for them.

The impact of decomposition

The principal danger of decomposition for the working class is that it gradually undermines the very basis of its revolutionary nature: its capacity, indeed its fundamental need, for association. The tendency towards “every man for himself” is inherent in the capitalist mode of production, but it takes on a new intensity, even a new quality, in this final phase of capitalist decay. This tendency may be driven by both material and ideological factors - by the physical dispersal of proletarian concentrations as a result of mass lay-offs and relocations, and by the deliberate stirring up of divisions between workers (national, racial, religious etc); by competition over employment or social benefits and by ideological campaigns about the ‘joys’ of consumerism or democracy. But its overall effect is to gnaw away at the capacity of the proletariat to see itself as a class with distinct interests, to come together as a class against capital. This is intimately linked to the actual diminution of working class struggles in the past three decades.

The revolutionary minority, as a part of the class, is not spared the pressures of a disintegrating social system which clearly has no future. For revolutionaries, the principle of association is expressed in the formation of revolutionary organisations and the commitment to organised militant activity. The counter-tendency is the flight into individual solutions, towards a loss of confidence in collective activity, distrust in revolutionary organisations and despair about the future. When the eastern bloc fell and the prospect of a profound retreat in the class struggle began to reveal itself, our comrade Marc Chirik, who had experienced the full force of the counter-revolution and had resisted its impact through his militant activity in the fractions of the communist left, said once that “now we will see who the real militants are”. Unfortunately, Marc, who died in 1990, would not be around in person to help us adapt to conditions where we would often be swimming against the tide, although he had certainly done all he could to transmit the principles of organisation which would serve as our best means of defence against the coming storms.

In part one of this article we already explained that crises are an inevitable product of the situation of revolutionary organisations in capitalist society, of the ceaseless bombardment of bourgeois ideology in its various forms. The ICC has always been open about its own difficulties and internal differences, even if it aims to present them in a coherent manner rather than simply “putting everything on the table”. And we also insisted that crises should always oblige the organisation to learn from them and thus strengthen its own political armoury.

The advancing decomposition of capitalist society tends to make such crises more frequent and more dangerous. This was certainly the case in the ICC in the 90s and at the turn of the century. Between 1993 and 1995, we were faced with the necessity to confront the activities of a clan that had become deeply entrenched in the international central organ of the ICC, an “organisation within the organisation” that bore a strange resemblance to the International Brotherhood of the Bakuninists inside the First International, including the leading role played by a political adventurer, JJ, steeped in the manipulative practises of freemasonry.  Such predilections for occultism were already an expression of the powerful tide of irrationality that tends to sweep across society in this period. At the same time, the formation of clans inside a revolutionary organisation, whatever their specific ideology, parallels the search for false communities which is a much broader social characteristic of this period.

The ICC’s response to these phenomena was to bring them into the light of day and to deepen its knowledge of the way the marxist movement in had defended itself against them. We thus produced an orientation text on functioning which rooted itself in the organisational battles in the First International and the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party[3], and a series of articles on the historical fight against sectarianism, adventurism, freemasonry, and political parasitism[4].  In particular, the series identified Bakunin as an example of the declassed adventurer who uses the workers’ movement as a springboard for his own personal ambitions, and the International Brotherhood as an early example of political parasitism – of a form of political activity which, while superficially working for the revolutionary cause, carries out a work of denigration and destruction which can only serve the class enemy.

The aim of these texts was not only to arm the ICC against being infected by the morality and methods of classes alien to the proletariat, but to stimulate a debate in the whole proletarian milieu around these questions. Unfortunately, we received little or no response to these contributions from the serious groups of the milieu, such as the IBRP, who tended to see them as no more than strange hobbyhorses of the ICC. Those who were already overtly hostile to the ICC – such as the remnants of the Communist Bulletin Group – seized on them as final proof that the ICC had degenerated into a bizarre cult that should be avoided at all cost[5]. Our efforts to provide a clear framework for understanding the growing phenomenon of political parasitism – the Theses on Parasitism published in 1998[6] - met with the same kind of reaction. And very quickly, the milieu’s lack of understanding of these problems did not merely result in an attitude of neutrality towards elements who can only play a destructive role towards the revolutionary movement. As we shall see, it led from “neutrality” to tolerance and then to active cooperation with such elements. 

The growth of political parasitism

At the beginning of the 2000s the ICC was again faced with a grave internal crisis. A certain number of militants of the organisation, again members of the international central organ, who had played an active part in exposing the activities of the JJ clan, coalesced into a new clan which took up some of the same themes as the previous one – particularly their targeting of comrades who had stood most firmly for the defence of organisational principles, even spreading the rumour that one of them was a police agent who was manipulating the others. 

The “Internal Fraction of the International Communist Current” has since amply demonstrated that there is often a thin line between the activity of a clan inside the organisation and of a fully fledged parasitic organisation. The elements who made up the IFICC were excluded from the ICC for actions unworthy of communist militants, which included theft from the organisation’s funds and the publication of sensitive internal information that could have put our militants in danger from the police. Since then, this group, which has subsequently changed its name to the International Group of the Communist Left, has given further evidence that it embodies a form of parasitism so rabid that it is indistinguishable from the activities of the political police. In 2014 we were obliged to publish a denunciation of this group which had again managed to steal internal material from the ICC and was seeking to use it to denigrate our organisation and its militants[7].

Clearly a group which behaves in this manner is a danger to all revolutionaries, regardless of the formally correct political positions it defends. The response of a communist milieu which understood the need for solidarity between its organisations would be to exclude such practises, and those who engage in them, from the proletarian camp; at the very least, it would have to renew the traditions of the workers’ movement which held that behaviour of this sort, or accusations against the probity of a revolutionary militant or organisation, required the formation of a “Jury of Honour” to establish the truth about such forms of conduct or such accusations[8]. In 2004, however, a series of events which we have referred to as the “Circulo” affair showed how far today’s proletarian political movement has strayed from these traditions. 

In 2003, the ICC entered into contact with a new group in Argentina, the Nucleo Comunista Internationalista. After intensive discussions with the ICC, there was a definite movement towards the positions of our organisation and the question of eventually forming an ICC section in Argentina was posed. However, a member of this group, who we have called “B”, held a monopoly of the computer equipment available to the comrades and thus of communication with other groups and individuals, and it had become clear during the course of our discussions that this individual regarded himself as a kind of political guru who had arrogated to himself the task of representing the NCI as a whole. During the visit of the ICC’s delegation in 2004, B demanded that the group should immediately be integrated into the ICC. Our response was that that we were interested above all in political clarity and not in the foundation of commercial franchises and that a good deal of discussion was still necessary before such a step could be taken. His ambition to use the ICC as a springboard for his personal prestige thus thwarted, B then made an abrupt volte face: unbeknown to the other members of the NCI, he had entered into contact with the IFICC and with their support suddenly declared that the entire NCI had broken with the ICC because of its Stalinist methods and had formed a new group, the Circulo de Comunistas Internacionalistas. Jubilation from the IFICC who happily published this great news in their bulletin. But the worst of this was that the IBRP – who had also entered into contact with the IFICC, no doubt flattered by the IFICC’s declaration that the IBRP, “now that the ICC had thoroughly degenerated”, was now the true pole of regroupment for revolutionaries – also published the Circulo’s statement on their website, in three languages. 

The ICC’s response to this lamentable affair was very thorough. Having established the facts of the matter – that the new group was in fact a pure invention of B, and that the other members of the NCI had known nothing of the alleged split with the ICC – we wrote a series of articles denouncing the adventurist behaviour of B, the parasitic activity of the IFICC and the opportunism of the IBRP, which was prepared to take a whole heap of slanders against the ICC at face value, without any attempt at investigation, with the idea of demonstrating that “something was moving in Argentina” … away from the ICC and towards themselves. It was only when the ICC proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that B was indeed a political imposter, and when the NCI comrades themselves made a statement denying that they had broken with the ICC, that the IBRP quietly deleted the offending Circulo material from their website, without offering any explanation and still less any self-criticism. A similarly ambiguous attitude was exhibited around the same time when it became evident that the IBRP had made use of a list of ICC contact addresses stolen by the IFICC when they were expelled from the ICC to advertise an IBRP public meeting in Paris[9].

This affair demonstrates that the problem of political parasitism is not a mere invention of the ICC, and still less a means of shutting up those who oppose our analyses, as some people have claimed. It is a real danger for the health of the proletarian milieu and serious obstacle to the formation of the future class party. And thus our theses on parasitism conclude that:

“What was valid in the time of the IWA remains valid today. The struggle against parasitism constitutes one of the essential responsibilities of the communist left and is part of the tradition of its bitter struggles against opportunism. Today it is one of the basic components in the preparation of the party of tomorrow, and in fact is one of the determining factors both of the moment when the party can arise and its capacity to play its role in the decisive battles of the proletariat”.

The parasitic groups have the function of sowing divisions in the proletarian camp by spreading rumours and slanders, introducing into it practices which are alien to proletarian morality, such as theft and behind-the-scenes manoeuvres. The fact that their principal aim has been to build a wall around the ICC, to isolate it from other communist groups and turn newly emerging elements away from engaging with us does not mean that they are only damaging the ICC – the whole milieu and its capacity to cooperate with a view to the formation of the party of the future is weakened by their activity. Furthermore, since their nihilistic and destructive attitudes are a direct reflection of the growing weight of social decomposition, we can expect them to have a growing presence in the coming period, above all if the proletarian milieu remains blithely ignorant of the danger they represent.

2004-2011: the emergence of new political forces, and the difficulties they encountered

The article on our experience with the NCI talks about revival of class struggle and appearance of new political forces. The ICC had noted signs of this recovery in 2003, but the clearest proof that something was shifting was provided by the struggle of students against the Contrat Première Embauche (CPE) legislation in France in 2006, a movement which showed a real capacity for self-organisation in assemblies and which threatened to spread to the employed sectors, thus obliging the government to cancel the CPE. In the same year the assembly form was adopted by the steel workers of Vigo who also showed a real will to incorporate other sectors into the movement. And in the wake of the financial crash of 2008, in 2010, we saw a significant struggle by university and college students around fees and grants in the UK, and a movement against pension “reforms” in France. The next year, 2011, saw the outbreak of the “Arab spring”, a wave of social revolts where the influence of the proletariat varied from country to country but which in Egypt, Israel and elsewhere provided the world with the example of the occupation of public squares and the holding of regular assemblies - an example taken up by the Occupy movement in the US, by assemblies in Greece and most importantly by the Indignados movement in Spain. The latter in particular provided the basis for a definite degree of politicisation through animated debates about the obsolescence of capitalism and the need for a new form of society.

This politicisation at a more general level was accompanied by the appearance of new forces looking for revolutionary answers to the impasse of the social order.  A number of these forces were oriented towards the positions and organisations of the communist left. Two different groups from South Korea were invited to ICC congresses during this period, as well as the EKS group in Turkey and new contacts from the USA. Discussions began with groups or discussion circles in South America, the Balkans and Australia; some of these groups and circles became new sections of the ICC (Turkey, Philippines, Ecuador, Peru). The ICT has also gained new forces since this period

There was also a sizeable development of an internationalist current in anarchism, which could be seen for example in the discussions on the libcom internet forum, and in the growth of new anarcho-syndicalist groups which were critical of the “institutionalised” syndicalism of organisations like the CNT. 

The ICC responded to these developments as widely as possible, and this was absolutely necessary: without passing on the heritage of the communist left to a new generation, there can be no hope of a movement towards the party of the future.

But there were important weaknesses in our intervention. When we say that opportunism and sectarianism are diseases of the workers’ movement, the result of the constant pressure of the ideology of other classes on the proletariat and its political organisations, we do not use this merely as a means for criticising other organisation, but as a yardstick for assessing our own capacity to resist this pressure and hold onto the methods and acquisitions of the working class in all areas of our activity.

The Turkish section of the ICC, integrated in 2009, left the ICC in 2015 to form a short-lived group, Pale Blue Jadal. In our attempt to draw a balance sheet of this failure, we turned the light on our own opportunist errors in the process of their integration:

 “Our integration of the EKS group as the ICC’s Turkish section was a process infested with opportunism. We do not propose here to go into the reasons for this: suffice it to say that we tried to force the pace of history, and this is a classic recipe for opportunism.

‘Forcing the pace’, of course, was at our own small level; principally, it meant the decision to ‘fast-track’ the discussions with the EKS group which was to become our section in Turkey. In particular we decided:

1. To drastically reduce the time spent on organisational discussion with the members of EKS before their integration, on the grounds that the art of building an organisation is learnt essentially from experience.
2. To integrate EKS as a group, not as individuals. Although our statutes provide for this, it holds the danger that the new militants will see themselves, not first and foremost as individual militants of an international organisation but as members of their original group”[10].

As we argued in the first part of this article, opportunism and sectarianism often go together. And some retrospective elements of our response to the Circulo affair can certainly be seen as sectarian. Given the rise of new political forces on the one hand, given the latest evidence of the difficulty of the ICT in behaving in a principled manner, and the unalterably rigid sectarianism of the Bordigists, there was a certain tendency in the ICC to conclude that the “old milieu” was already washed up and that our hopes for the future would have to reside in the new forces we were beginning to encounter.

This was the sectarian side of our reaction. But again, it also had an opportunist side. In order to convince the new milieu that we were not sectarian, in 2012 we made fresh overtures to the ICT, arguing for a resumption of discussions and common work that had been disrupted ever since the collapse of the international conferences at the beginning of the 80s. This was correct in itself, and was a continuation of a policy we had, without much success, carried on throughout the 80s and 90s[11]. But in order to get this process underway, we accepted at face value the ICT’s explanation for their behaviour over the Circulo affair: that it had essentially been the work of one comrade who had subsequently died. Apart from the dubious morality of such an approach on their part, it brought absolutely no clarification by the ICT about their willingness to form an alliance with elements who really had no place in the proletarian milieu. And in the end the discussions we started with the ICT soon foundered on this so far unbridgeable gap on the question of parasitism – the question of which groups and elements can be considered as legitimate components of the communist left. And this was not the only example of a tendency on the ICC’s part to push to one side this vital question because it was decidedly unpopular in the proletarian milieu. It also included the integration of the EKS who never agreed with us on the question of parasitism, and approaches to groups which we ourselves considered to be parasitic, such as the CBG (approaches which led nowhere).

The ICC’s articles during this period show an understandable optimism about the potential contained in the new forces (see for example the article on our 18th congress[12]). But there was at the same a time an underestimation of many of the difficulties facing these new elements who had appeared in the phase of decomposition.

As we have said, a number of the elements coming from this upsurge came towards the communist left and some integrated into its main organisations. At the same time, many of these elements did not survive for very long – not only the ICC’s Turkish section, but also the NCI, the discussion group formed in Australia[13], and a number of contacts who appeared in the US. More generally, there was a very pervasive influence of anarchism on this new wave of “seekers” – to some extent an expression of the fact that the trauma of Stalinism and the impact it has had on the notion of the revolutionary political organisation was still an operative factor in the second decade after the collapse of the Russian bloc.

The development of the anarchist milieu in this period was not wholly negative. For example, the internet forum libcom, which was a focus for a lot of international political debate in the first decade of its existence, was run by a collective which tended to reject leftist and life-stylist forms of anarchism and to defend some of the basics of internationalism. Some of them had come through the superficial activism of the “anti-capitalist” milieu of the 1990s and had begun to look to the working class as the force for social change. But this quest was to a large extent blocked by the development of anarcho-syndicalism, which reduces the entirely valid recognition of the revolutionary role of the working class to an economist outlook unable to integrate the political dimension of the class struggle, and which replaces activism limited to the street to activism in the workplace (the notion of training “organisers” and forming “revolutionary unions”). Paradoxical as it may seem, this milieu was also influenced by the theories of “communisation”, which is a very explicit expression of a loss of conviction that communism can only come about through the struggle of the working class. But the paradox is more apparent than real, since both syndicalism and communisation reflect an attempt to by-pass the reality that a revolutionary struggle is also a struggle for political power, and demands the formation of a proletarian political organisation. More recently, libcom and other expressions of the anarchist movement have been sucked into various forms of identity politics, which continues the slide away from a proletarian standpoint[14] . Meanwhile, other sectors of the anarchist movement were completely suckered by the claims of Kurdish nationalism to have established some kind of revolutionary Commune in Rojava.

It must also be said that the new milieu - and even the established revolutionary groups – had few defences against the noxious moral atmosphere of decomposition and in particular the verbal aggression and posturing that often infests the internet. On libcom, for example, members and sympathisers of left communist groups, and the ICC in particular, had to fight hard to get through a wall of hostility in which the slanders of parasitic groups like the CBG were usually taken as read. And while some progress at the level of the culture of debate seemed to be taking place in libcom’s early years, the atmosphere took a definite turn for the worse following the entanglement of the libcom collective in the scandal of “Aufhebengate”, in which the majority of the collective adopted a cliquish stance of defending one of their friends in the Aufheben group who had been clearly shown to be cooperating with police strategies against street protests[15].

Other examples of this kind of moral decay among those professing the cause of communism could be given – the member of the Greek communisation group Blaumachen who became a minister in the Syriza government being perhaps one of the most evident[16]. But the groups of the communist left were not spared from such difficulties either: we have already mentioned the dubious alliances the ICT has established with certain parasitic groups. And more recently, the ICT was first compelled to dissolve its section in Canada which had adopted an apologetic attitude to one of its members who had engaged in sexual abuse, while a group of Greek sympathisers lapsed into the most rabid nationalism in the face of the immigration crisis[17]. And the ICC itself experienced what we called a “moral and intellectual crisis” when one of our comrades, most vociferous in opposing the opportunist policies we had adopted in certain of our activities (and who had previously been the target of the clans from the 90s) was subjected to a campaign of scapegoating[18]. A “Jury of Honour” established within the organisation found all the charges against her to be null and void. These events demonstrate that the question of behaviour, of ethics and morality, has always been a key element in the construction of a revolutionary organisation worth its name. The revolutionary movement will not be able to overcome its divisions without confronting this question.

Contemporary problems and future perspectives

The signs of a revival of the class struggle which appeared in 2006-2011 have largely been eclipsed by a wave of reaction which has taken the form of the rise of populism and the installation of a series of authoritarian regimes, notably in a country like Egypt which was at the centre of the “Arab Spring”. The resurgence of chauvinism and xenophobia has affected some of the very areas where, in 2011, the first shoots of a new internationalist flowering seemed to be appearing – most notably, the wave of nationalism in Catalonia, which had previously been at the heart of the Indignados movement. And while the growth of nationalism highlights the danger of bloody imperialist conflicts in the period ahead, it also underlines the total incapacity of the existing system, riven by rivalry and competition, to address the mounting threat of environmental destruction. All of this contributes to widespread moods either of denial about the apocalyptic future capitalism has in store for us, or of nihilism and despair.

In short, the sombre social and political atmosphere does not seem to be propitious for the development of a new revolutionary movement, which can only be presaged on a conviction that an alternative future is possible.

And again, little progress has been made towards improving relations between the existing communist groups, where it seems to be a case of one step forwards, two steps back: thus, while in November 2017 the CWO accepted the ICC’s invitation to make a presentation at our day of discussion on the October revolution, since then they have consistently rejected any further initiatives of this type.

Does this mean, as a member of the CWO recently claimed, that the ICC has lapsed into demoralisation and pessimism about the future of the class struggle and the potential for the formation of the party of tomorrow?[19]

We certainly see no sense in denying the very real difficulties facing the working class and in developing a communist presence within it. A class which has increasingly lost a sense of its own existence as a class will not easily accept the arguments of those who, against all the odds, continue to insist that the proletariat not only exists but holds the key to the survival of humanity. 

And yet, despite the very tangible dangers of this last phase of capitalist decadence, we do not think that the working class has said its last word. There remain a number of elements pointing to the possibilities of an eventual recovery of class identity and class consciousness among new generations of the proletariat, as we argued at our 22nd Congress in our resolution on the international class struggle[20]. And we are also seeing a renewed process of communist politicisation in a small but significant minority of this new generation, often taking the form of a direct inter-action with the communist left. Individuals searching for clarification as well as new groups and circles have appeared in the USA in particular, but also in Australia, Britain, South America… This is a real testimony to the fact that Marx’s “old mole” continues to burrow away beneath the surface of events.

Like the new elements who appeared a decade or so ago, this emerging milieu is faced by many dangers, not least from the diplomatic offensive towards them of certain parasitic groups and the indulgence shown towards the latter by proletarian organisations like the ICT. It is especially hard for many of these young comrades to understand the necessarily long-term character of revolutionary commitment and the need to avoid impatience and precipitation. If their appearance expresses a potential that still resides deep in the entrails of the working class, it is vital for them to recognise that their current debates and activities only make sense as part of a work towards the future. We will return to this question in subsequent articles.

Evidently, the existing organisations of the communist left have a key role in the fight for the long-term future of these new comrades. And they themselves are not immune from dangers, as we have already mentioned with regard to the previous wave of “searching elements”. In particular, they must avoid courting any facile popularity by avoiding discussion about difficult questions or watering down their positions with the aim of “gaining a wider audience”. A central task of the existing communist organisations is basically the same as it was for the fractions which detached themselves from the degenerating Communist International in order to lay the bases for a new party when the evolution of the objective, and above all the subjective, conditions placed this on the agenda: an intransigent combat against opportunism in all its forms, and for the maximum rigour in the process of political clarification.

Amos

 

Despite the difficulties resulting from the pandemic, the ICC held its 24th International Congress and we can draw a positive balance sheet from it. As we have always done, and in conformity with the practice of the workers’ movement, we are providing a general overview of its work through this article and through a number of documents which will orient our activity and intervention in the two years ahead – reports and resolutions which have been on our website for several months[1]. The Congress took place with a full recognition of the gravity of the current historical situation, characterised by one of the most dangerous pandemics in history, which is far from having been overcome.

The worst thing to do would be to under-estimate this situation at a time when governments are proclaiming that "everything is under control" and that "we are back to normal", while at the same time a horde of Covid deniers and anti-vaxxers (the other face, equally lying, of the government lies) who  downplay reality with their talk of "conspiracies" and "dark manoeuvres"; who use a real fact - the strengthening of the totalitarian control of the state - to take things to absurd levels in the name of “the defence of democratic freedoms”, thus denying the very real dangers to human life that the pandemic entails.

The most serious thing about the pandemic has been how all the states have responded: in a completely irresponsible way, taking contradictory and chaotic measures, without the slightest plan, without any coordination, playing more cynically than ever with the lives of millions of people[2]. And this did not happen in the states usually labelled as "rogue states", but in the United States, Germany, Britain and France, the "most advanced" countries, where there is supposedly "civilization and progress". The pandemic has brought to light the decadence and decomposition of capitalism, the rottenness of its social and ideological structures, the disorder and chaos emanating from its very relations of production, the “no future” of a mode of production gripped by increasingly violent contradictions that it cannot overcome.

Worse: the pandemic is the harbinger of new and deeper convulsions in all countries, imperialist tensions, ecological destruction, economic crisis ... The world proletariat cannot be fooled by vague promises of a "return to normal". It needs to look reality in the face, to understand that the face of barbarism has been clearly outlined by the pandemic and will be defined with even more virulence in the times to come.

The acceleration of capitalist decomposition

The 24th Congress of the ICC took place, like the congresses of revolutionary organisations throughout history, in a framework of fraternity and profound debate. It had the responsibility of confirming the framework of analysis of the decomposition of capitalism, rectifying possible errors or insufficiently elaborated appreciations. The Congress had to answer a series of necessary questions:

• Does the notion of decomposition and its progressive elaboration fully accord with the method of marxism?
• How are the effects of decomposition, its acceleration and intensification, and its interference on other planes of social life, mainly the economy, manifesting themselves?
• How does decomposition affect the class struggle and what is the perspective for its future development?
• Finally, what is the role of the organisation in this situation? How does it prepare for the future in the face of these challenges?

 

The method of analysis of capitalist decomposition

This Congress confirmed that the analysis of decomposition is in continuity with marxism. In 1914, with the outbreak of the First World War, marxists identified capitalism’s entry into its epoch of decadence, an analysis confirmed in 1919 by the platform of the Communist International, which spoke of “epoch of the breakdown of capital, its internal disintegration”. Faithful to this approach, the ICC more than three decades ago identified a specific and terminal phase of the decadence of capitalism: its decomposition. This phase of decomposition is the accumulation of a series of contradictions that capitalist society has been unable to resolve, as described in point 3 of the Theses of Decomposition [3]:

“To the extent that contradictions and expressions of decadent capitalism that mark its successive phases do not disappear with time, but continue and deepen, the phase of decomposition appears as the result of an accumulation of all the characteristics of a moribund system, completing the 75-year death agony of a historically condemned mode of production. Concretely, not only do the imperialist nature of all states, the threat of world war, the absorption of civil society by the state Moloch, and the permanent crisis of the capitalist economy all continue during the phase of decomposition, they reach a synthesis and an ultimate conclusion within it".

This analysis, first developed 30 years ago, has been powerfully confirmed in all its gravity, leading us to conclude in the Resolution on the International Situation from the 24th ICC Congress "most of the important events of the last three decades have confirmed the validity of this framework, as witnessed by the exacerbation of the every man for himself at the international level, the ‘rebound’ of the phenomena of decomposition to the core areas of world capitalism through the growth of terrorism and the refugee crisis, the rise of populism and the loss of political control by the ruling class, the growing rot of ideology through the spread of scapegoating, religious fundamentalism and conspiracy theories…The current Covid-19 pandemic is a distillation of all the key manifestations of decomposition, and an active factor in its acceleration" [4].

Since our Congress completed its work, events have succeeded each other with an unprecedented virulence, clearly confirming our analysis: imperialist wars in Ethiopia, Ukraine, Yemen, Syria; intensification of the confrontation between the USA and China; huge imprint of the ecological crisis around the world, notably through the multiplication of catastrophic floods and wildfires. Today, the pandemic is seeing a new surge of infections and the very dangerous threat of the Omicron variant; at the same time, the economic crisis is aggravating… The defence of the marxist framework of decomposition is today more necessary than ever faced with the blindness of other groups of the Communist Left and the infiltration into the revolutionary milieu of all kinds of modernist, sceptical, nihilist positions, which close their eyes to the reality of the situation. At this moment, we are seeing the unfolding in a number of countries of combative workers’ struggles which more than ever need the strength and lucidity of this framework of analysis.

Accumulation and acceleration of the effects of decomposition

The 24th Congress was able to identify the acceleration of capitalist decomposition by examining in depth the roots and consequences of the pandemic, “the first on such a scale since the Spanish flu outbreak of 1918… the most important moment in the evolution of capitalist decomposition since the period definitively opened up in 1989. The inability of the ruling class to prevent the resulting death toll of between 7 and 12 million confirms that the capitalist world system, left to itself, is dragging humanity towards the abyss of barbarism, towards its destruction; and that only the world proletarian revolution can halt this slide and lead humanity to a different future". The pandemic has demonstrated and confirmed the following realities:

• While capitalism is the first system in history whose relations of production have extended themselves and are dominant on a planetary scale, it is nonetheless the case that its rule is eminently chaotic because it is based on deadly competition for the domination of the world market between capitalist states. The world-wide character of capitalism does not enable it to achieve organised and coordinated action on a world scale – which would be the only rational and effective response to phenomena like the Covid pandemic - because it is not unified and centralised on a world-wide scale. On the contrary, the deadly competition for markets and for imperialist control of the globe has led to more and more aberrant and dangerous forms of behaviour on the part of the states, who have left populations defenceless against the pandemic and have even dramatically worsened it. China kept silent about the initial source of the pandemic in Wuhan; after that, big countries like the US, out of fear of their economies being paralysed, took a long time to react, which exacerbated the risks involved in the pandemic, then obliged them to take hasty, extreme and disorganised measures like the lock-downs.
• The capitalist states, without exception, acted in the same way against the working class: restrictions without any kind of planning and based essentially on repression; closing of supply centres without bothering about the economic conditions of the workers; maintenance of production and service sectors without caring about the lives of the workers, as happened with the health workers in all countries (according to Amnesty International, 17000 workers in this sector have died because of Covid and in America alone 570000 were infected [5]).
• After the Second World War, the WHO (World Health Organisation) was founded, which allowed a certain coordination between states to fight epidemics; however, in the face of the pandemic, the WHO has been ignored, each state has gone its own way, which has increased contagions and deaths and prevented any organised action. This is a clear expression of the advance of capitalist decomposition[6].
• The disputes over the production and distribution of the vaccine express the chaos and rottenness of the bourgeoisie. In the face of the economic crisis, such conflicts of interest within the ruling class will become more and more vicious. 

The 24th Congress concluded that the pandemic cannot be reduced to a "calamity" or seen only as a health crisis (in the style of those that occurred periodically in pre-capitalist modes of production and in capitalism itself during the 19th century). It is a global crisis, manifesting itself at many levels: sanitary, economic, social and political, as well as moral and ideological. It is a crisis of capitalist decomposition: a product of the accumulation of contradictions of the system of the last 30 years, as expressed in our Report on Pandemic and Decomposition for the 24th Congress[7]. Specifically, the pandemic is the result:

• of the dismantling of the health system in all the countries of the world. Since the beginning of the 21st century the capitalist states have known about the proliferation of epidemics such as EBOLA, SARS, etc. However, budgets have been decreased in health services and scientific research. This contrasts with the exorbitant increase in arms budgets and in the beefing up of the repressive forces.
• Viral diseases, such as Covid-19, are also the result of the living conditions of large sections of the working class in all countries, forced to live in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions.
• The irrationality of capitalist production that exclusively privileges profit devastates forests, rivers, and oceans. In particular, the destruction of forests dangerously alters the “biological links” between animals, plants and humans, with unforeseeable consequences… The majority of scientists attribute the emergence of Covid to this factor.

“The ICC is more or less alone in defending the theory of decomposition. Other groups of the communist left reject it entirely, either, as in the case of the Bordigists, because they do not accept that capitalism is a system in decline (or at best are inconsistent and ambiguous on this point); or, for the Internationalist Communist Tendency, because talking about a ‘final’ phase of capitalism sounds far too apocalyptic, or because defining decomposition as a descent into chaos is a deviation from materialism, which, in their view, seeks to find the roots of every phenomenon in the economy and above all in the tendency of the rate of profit to fall" (Resolution on the International Situation, 24th Congress). The Activities Resolution of the 24th Congress underlined that “The Covid Pandemic that began in early 2020 strikingly confirmed the acceleration of the impact of the period of the social decomposition of capitalism”.

The pandemic crisis has shown that decomposition has gone further: 1) it has hit the central countries with particular force, especially the USA; 2) there is a combination and concomitance between the different effects of the decomposition, which is unlike previous periods when they were contained locally and did not influence each other. What this crisis announces is increasingly violent convulsions, a sharpening of the tendencies to the loss of control of society on the part of the state. The decade ahead appears full of serious uncertainties, of more frequent and interrelated catastrophes. The slide of capitalism towards barbarism will have an increasingly terrifying face.

The perspective for the class struggle

The perspectives for the proletariat must also be analysed in the framework of capitalist decomposition. The Resolution on the Balance of Class Forces adopted by our previous Congress[8] identified the difficulties and weaknesses of the working class over the last 30 years. With the collapse of the Eastern bloc, the ICC identified the opening of the phase of decomposition and its consequences for the proletariat in terms of increasing difficulties for the development of its struggles, difficulties which would be further aggravated by the campaigns about the "death of communism" and the "disappearance of the working class”. However, at its 24th Congress, the ICC argued, as it did at its previous Congresses, that the working class is not defeated: "

“Despite the enormous problems facing the proletariat, we reject the idea that the class has already been defeated on a global scale, or is on the verge of such a defeat comparable to that of the period of counter-revolution, a defeat of a kind from which the proletariat would possibly no longer be able to recover. The proletariat, as an exploited class, cannot avoid going through the school of defeats, but the central question is whether the proletariat has already been so overwhelmed by the remorseless advance of decomposition that its revolutionary potential has been effectively undermined. Measuring such a defeat in the phase of decomposition is a far more complex task than in the period before the Second World War, when the proletariat had risen openly against capitalism and been crushed by a series of frontal defeats." (Resolution on the International Situation)

Obviously, we have to sharpen our analytical skills in order to detect this "point of no return" because, “the phase of decomposition indeed contains the danger of the proletariat simply failing to respond and being ground down over a long period – a ‘death by a thousand cuts’ rather than a head-on class confrontation" (ibid).

However, the Congress affirmed that “there is still sufficient evidence to show that, despite the undoubted ‘progress’ of decomposition, despite the fact that time is no longer on the side of the working class, the potential for a profound proletarian revival– leading to a reunification between the economic and the political dimensions of the class struggle – has not vanished.

The Congress also noted "The small but significant signs of a subterranean maturation of consciousness, manifesting itself in efforts towards a global reflection on the failure of capitalism and the need for another society in some movements (particularly the Indignados in 2011), but also through the emergence of young elements looking for class positions and turning towards the heritage of the Communist Left".

We must also bear in mind that the situation facing the working class is not the same as that following the collapse of the Russian bloc and the confirmation of the phase of decomposition in 1989. At that time, the bourgeoisie was able to present these events as proof of the death of communism, the victory of capitalism and the beginning of a bright future for humanity. Thirty years of decomposition have seriously undermined this ideological fraud, and the pandemic in particular has exposed the irresponsibility and negligence of all capitalist governments, the reality of a society plagued by deep economic divisions where we are by no means "all in it together". On the contrary, the pandemic and the lockdown have revealed the conditions of the working class, both as the main victim of the health crisis and as the source of all labour and all material production and, in particular, as the force whose labour satisfies basic human needs. This can be the basis for a future recovery of class identity. And, along with the growing realisation that capitalism is a totally obsolete mode of production, this has already been an element in the emergence of politicised minorities whose motivation has been above all to understand the dramatic situation facing humanity.

Despite the social atomisation of decomposition, despite deliberate attempts to fragment the labour force through stratagems like the green economy, or ideological campaigns that aim to present the more educated sectors of the proletariat as "middle class" and encourage individualism, the workers remain a class that in recent years has increased and is globally interconnected; but with the advance of decomposition, it is also true that atomisation and social isolation intensifies. It is a factor that makes it difficult for the working class, for the time being, to experience its own class identity. Only through the struggles of the working class on its own class terrain will it be able to develop the collective strength that the proletariat will need on a world scale to overthrow capitalism.

The workers are brought together by capital in the production process; their associated work is carried out under coercion, but the revolutionary character of the proletariat means dialectically reversing these conditions in a collective struggle. The exploitation of common labour is transformed into the struggle against exploitation and for the liberation of the social character of labour, for a society that knows how to consciously use all the potential of associated activity. That society for which the world proletariat will have to fight is communist society.

Debate: a strength for the revolutionary organisation

"Contrary to the Bordigist view, the organisation of revolutionaries cannot be ‘monolithic’. The existence of divergences within it is the manifestation that it is a living organ which has no ready-made answers to provide immediately to the problems arising in the class. Marxism is neither a dogma nor a catechism (...) Like all human reflection, that which presides over the development of proletarian consciousness is not a linear and mechanical process, but a contradictory and critical one, which necessarily poses the discussion and confrontation of arguments"[9].

Since before the 23rd International Congress divergences have been expressed on different questions: will the imperialist tensions lead to a new world war? Is the proletariat already defeated? What is the task of the hour for the organisation? This leads to the question of what does it mean to be active as a kind of fraction [10]in the present phase of decomposition​

The divergences on the analysis of the international situation had a first public expression in the document “Divergences with the Resolution on the international situation at the 23rd ICC Congress”[11]. The Activities Resolution of our recent Congress underlines that “the organisation has made an effort at every level - at Congresses, meetings of central organs, section meetings along with some 45 individual contributions in the internal bulletins over the last four years - to answer the divergences of the comrades and has also begun to express the debate externally. …The organisation's effort to confront divergences during this period expresses a positive will to strengthen the polemical defence of its positions and analyses."

The divergences were made more precise at the 24th Congress:

• Isn't the polarisation of imperialist tensions, mainly between the US and China, paving the way for a Third World War?
• Wouldn't the brutal measures taken by the states of confinement etc. be a covert means of preparing the populations for imperialist war?
• Is the pandemic a "socio-natural" phenomenon that the states can take advantage of for population control purposes or does it express and accelerate, above all, the general decomposition of capitalism?
• How can the proletariat face up to this grave historical situation? Does it first need a consciousness of itself and the development of its historical perspective? Or would this require the development of a struggles on its own class terrain, the maturing of its consciousness and the strengthening of the capacity of its communist organisations to intervene?

These and other questions have been addressed at the Congress and, with the aim of reaching as much clarity as possible in their expression, will be presented publicly in discussion documents. This is a practice of the workers' movement that the ICC has taken very seriously, as the above-mentioned text from IR 33 points out:

"Insofar as the debates in progress in the organisation concern the proletariat as a whole, it is appropriate for the organisation to bring them to the outside world, respecting the following conditions:

• that the debates concern general political questions that have reached sufficient maturity to make their publication a real contribution to the consciousness of the working class;
• that the place of the debates should not compromise the overall balance of the publications;
• that it is the organisation as a whole that decides and takes charge of the publication according to the criteria that guide the publication of any article in the press: clarity and editorial form, the interest they present for the working class as a whole".

The pillars on which to build the organisation

The Congress drew a positive balance of the activity of the organisation in the last two years, in particular the solidarity with all the comrades affected by the pandemic or by the serious economic consequences of the confinement (a good number of comrades lost the means to earn a living).

This positive balance should not make us lower our guard. The communist organisation is subjected to multiple pressures, and acquisitions - which cost a lot to win - can quickly be lost. As the Activities Resolution adopted by the Congress points out "The acceleration of decomposition poses important problems at the level of militancy, theory and organisational tissue".

These problems are not new, they are an expression of the impact of decomposition on the functioning and militancy of communist organizations since

“The different elements which constitute the strength of the working class directly confront the various facets of this ideological decomposition:

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

 

These dangers clearly show that our work is above all to prepare the future. The ICC's fundamental aim of building a bridge to the future world communist party of the proletariat has been set out since its founding Congress in 1975, and was reaffirmed at the 23rd Congress; but this has been brought into even shaper relief in recent years by several factors: the acceleration of decomposition, and the mounting difficulties faced by the proletariat’s struggles intensify the challenges for the organisation of revolutionaries; ageing of comrades and at the same time the emergence of new militants who are joining the organisation in the context of decomposition; the growing attacks of parasitism against the organisation; the weight of opportunism and sectarianism in the groups coming from the Communist Left. 

At its 24th ICC Congress aimed to identify the perspectives, the difficulties and dangers we have to confront if we are to carry out this role of transmission. However, faced with this situation, the preparation of the future has to be clearly understood as going against the stream.

Historically, the marxist movement has only been able to develop by successfully confronting momentous events and therefore has always based itself on a fighting spirit, a desire to overcome all the obstacles that bourgeois society puts in its way. The ICC's experience is no different in this respect. The organisations which history requires to play a role of transmission have had to prove themselves through real trials by fire: the marxist current of the mid-19th century, despite the imprisonments, exile and great poverty of its militants after the defeats of 1848, provided the springboard for the creation of the 1st International in the 1860s. Bilan and the GCF went through the trials of the Stalinist counter-revolution of the 30s, 40s and 50s, fascism and anti-fascism, of the Second World War, to keep the revolutionary flame alive for future generations. It is clear that the period of decomposition is the ICC’s own trial by fire.

The ability to analyse the world and historical situation is one of the pillars of our immediate perspectives; the marxist method of historical materialism and the constant reference to the heritage of previous acquisitions, as well as the confrontation of divergences, are part of the preparation for the future. Our activity in the spheres of intervention, of theoretical deepening, of the defence of the organisation, are founded on the transmission and development of the historic acquisitions of a century of the Communist Left and it is only on this solid basis that the future world communist party of the proletariat can be prepared.

As part of the preparation for the future, there is also the uncompromising fight against parasitism. The effort of the last years shows the necessity to continue the fight against parasitism, denouncing it as the ICC has done in front of the working class, our contacts and in front of the milieu of the Communist Left.

The struggle against opportunism within the organisations of the Communist Left, linked to the struggle against parasitism[12], is going to be important in the next period; there is a great danger that the potential of the future unity of the revolutionaries could be lost and atrophy. The experience of the last two years of the defence of the organisation against the attacks of parasitism and for breaking the cordon sanitaire it tries to erect around the ICC shows that the struggle against opportunism and sectarianism is synonymous with the knowledge and defence of our history.

In the coming period the ICC intends to improve its press. In the last decades, the concern for polemics with the proletarian political milieu our ranks has diminished. In the next period the organisation intends to reverse this situation. Our fraction-like work, also involves preparing the future by widening polemics, inspired by those of the first phase of Iskra or the first issues of Internationalisme dedicated to the polemic against Vercesi and his opportunist drift. In response to the putrefaction of bourgeois ideology, to the obscurantist mystifications, the press must act as a reference point against the intoxication that emanates from the ideological decomposition of capitalism and offer the working class a rational and concrete perspective for the overthrow of capitalism; we must therefore strengthen the diffusion of our digital and printed press.

The perspective of communism is in the preparation of the future.

The central aim of the 24th Congress was the preparation of the future through drawing the lessons of past mistakes, relentlessly combating parasitism and opportunism, understanding as rapidly as possible the constant developments of historical evolution, defending the organisation and its united, fraternal and centralised functioning. This means firmly and critically basing ourselves upon the historical continuity of the communist organisations, as the Activities Resolution of the Congress put it:

“In the stormy transition to the future of ‘wars and revolutions’ Rosa Luxemburg declared at the founding congress of the German Communist Party in 1919 that they were ‘returning under the banner of marxism’. As the working class in Russia prepared for the first time in history to overthrow the bourgeois state Lenin recalled the acquisitions on the question of the state from Marx and Engels in State and Revolution…

The ICC, as it prepares for the unprecedented instability and unpredictability of the putrefaction of world capitalism must recover the heritage, the militant example, and the organisational experience of MC, thirty years after his death. That is, return to the tradition and method of the Communist Left which the ICC inherited...

This tradition lives on and must be critically reappropriated, in fact it is the only one which can guide the ICC and the working class through the test of fire that is to come”.

ICC, December 2021

This report is written within the framework of the resolution on the international situation adopted by the 24th ICC Congress and more particularly on the following points (emphasised in bold):

“8. While the advance of capitalist decomposition, alongside the chaotic sharpening of imperialist rivalries, primarily takes the form of political fragmentation and a loss of control by the ruling class, this does not mean that the bourgeoisie can no longer resort to state totalitarianism in its efforts to hold society together. (...) The election of Biden, supported by a huge mobilisation of the media, parts of the political apparatus and even the military and the security services, express this real counter-tendency to the danger of social and political disintegration most clearly embodied by Trumpism. In the short term, such “successes” can function as a brake on mounting social chaos.

9. The evident nature of the political and ideological decomposition in the world’s leading power does not mean that the other centres of world capitalism are able to constitute alternative fortresses of stability (...)

12. Within this chaotic picture, there is no doubt that the growing confrontation between the US and China tends to take centre stage. The new administration has thus demonstrated its commitment to the “tilt to the east” (...).”

This framework aims to understand the events of the last months in order to contribute reflection around the three following questions:

1. Where are we regarding the decline of American hegemony?

2. Has China been able to draw an advantage from this period?

3. What is the dominant tendency today on the level of imperialist confrontations?

 

1. The decline of American hegemony and the polarisation of US/Chinese tensions

“Confirmed as the only remaining superpower, the USA would do everything in its power to ensure that no new superpower – in reality, no new imperialist bloc – could arise to challenge its ‘New World Order’”. (Resolution on the International Situation, point 4, 15th ICC Congress, 2003, International Review 113). The history of the last 30 years has been characterised by a systematic decline of American leadership despite its persistent policy of trying to maintain its hegemonic position in the world.

1.1 A brief look at the decline of American hegemony

Different stages have characterised the efforts of the United States to maintain its leadership faced with evolving threats. It is also marked by internal dissensions within the American bourgeoisie on which policies to undertake, and this will also accentuate these dissensions.

a) The “New World Order” under the direction of the United States (Bush Senior and Clinton: 1990-2001)

President Bush Senior utilised the invasion of Kuwait by Iraqi forces in order to mobilise a large military coalition around the United States to “punish” Saddam Hussein. The first Gulf War aimed to make an “example”: faced with a world being swamped by chaos and “each for themselves” it was a matter of imposing a minimum of order and discipline, and, in the first place, on the most important countries of the ex-Western Bloc. The sole remaining superpower tried to impose on the “international community” a “new world order” under its aegis not only because it was the only one that had the means but also because it is the country which has most to lose from a world in disorder.

However, it could only take up this role by more tightly constraining the whole of the world in the steely grip of militarism and barbaric warfare, as in the bloody civil war in ex-Yugoslavia where it had to counter the imperialist appetites of the European countries (Germany, Britain, France, etc.) by imposing a “Pax Americana” in the region (Dayton Accords, December 1995).

b) The United States as the “World Cop” (Bush Junior: 2001-2008)

The attacks by al-Qaida on September 11 2001 led President Bush Junior to unleash a “War against Terror” in Afghanistan and above all Iraq in 2003. Despite all the pressure and the use of “fake news” aiming to mobilise the “international community” behind it against the “Axis of Evil”, the United States failed to mobilise the other imperialisms against the “Gangster State” of Saddam and invaded almost alone apart from Tony Blair’s Britain, its only significant ally.

The setback of these interventions, underlined by the retreat from Iraq (2011) and Afghanistan (2021), demonstrates the incapacity of the United States to play the role of World Cop, imposing its law on the world. On the contrary, the “War against Terror” opened wide the Pandora’s Box of decomposition in these regions, exacerbating the expansion of every man for himself, which has been particularly shown by a multiplication of imperialist ambitions all over the place: countries such as China and Russia, Iran of course, but also Turkey, Saudi Arabia, even the Gulf Emirates and Qatar. The growing impasse of the policy of the United States and the aberrant flight into military barbarity has demonstrated the net weakening of its world leadership.

The Obama administration attempted to reduce the political catastrophe created by Bush (Bin Laden’s execution in 2011 underlined the absolute technological and military superiority of the United States) and to focus more and more clearly on the rise of China as the principal danger for American hegemony This “pivot” has unleashed intense debates with its bourgeoisie and its state apparatus.

c) The policy of “America First” (Trump and essentially followed by Biden: 2017-)

The policy of “America First” on the imperialist level, opened up by Trump from 2017, meant in reality the official recognition of the retreat of American imperialist policy over the last 25 years: “The American response started by Obama taken on and amplified by Trump by other means represents a turning point in American politics. The defence of its interests as a national state now means embracing the tendency towards every man for himself that dominates imperialist relations: the United States is moving from being the gendarme of the world order to being the main agent of every man for himself, of chaos, of questioning the world order established since 1945 under its auspices.” (23rd Congress of the ICC, Resolution on the International Situation, International Review 164).

While this demonstrates the limits of operations based on “boots on the ground”, given the problems of mobilising masses of workers into large-scale engagements and consequent casualties that a major military deployment implies (Bush already had this difficulty in mobilising for the war in Iraq), above all it goes in tandem with a growing polarisation and sharpened aggression towards China which tends to be identified more and more as the principal danger. If this position was discussed within the Obama administration and if still more tensions appeared on the question within the Trump administration, between those who wanted to take on the “gangster states” such as Iran (Pompeo, Kushner) and those concentrating on the “major Chinese danger” (secret services and military), the focus on this last option is incontestably the central axis of Biden’s foreign policy. Concentrating its forces on military and technological competition with China is a strategic choice for the United States with a view to maintaining or even increasing its supremacy and defending its position as the “Godfather” faced with the gangsters (China and, subordinately, Russia) which most directly threaten its hegemony. Already as a world gendarme, the United States exacerbated warfare, chaos and each for themselves; its present policy is no less destructive, quite the contrary.

1.2. Polarisation of tensions around the South China Sea

The pivot of America towards China and the consequent redeployment of forces initiated by the Trump administration have been fully taken up by Biden’s administration. The latter has not only maintained the aggressive economic measures against China set in motion up by Trump, but it has ramped up the pressure through an aggressive policy:

- on the policy level: defence of Uyghur rights and Hong Kong; diplomatic and commercial rapprochement with Taiwan; accusations of information technology piracy against China:

- at the military level in the South China Sea through explicit and spectacular military actions over the last months: a multiplication of military exercises involving the American fleet and those of its allies; alarmist reports on the imminent threat of Chinese intervention in Taiwan; the presence in Taiwan of special US forces in order to strengthen the unity of the Taiwanese elite; conclusion of the new AUKUS accord between the United States, Australia and Britain which sets up a military coordination explicitly oriented against China; Biden’s pledge to support Taiwan in the event of Chinese aggression.

Taiwan has always played an important role in the strategy of the United States towards China. During the Cold War it constituted an important element of the containment of the Soviet Bloc; in the 1990’s, and in the beginning of the 2000s, it constituted a workshop for globalised capitalism, into which China was also integrated. But with the growth in power of the latter the outlook changed and Taiwan played a new geo-strategic role in blocking access to the west Pacific for Chinese vessels. Moreover, on a strategic level, “in effect the foundries on the island produce the major part of semi-conductors of the latest generation, indispensable components of the world’s digital economy (smartphones connections, artificial intelligence, etc.)” Le Monde diplomatique, October 2021.

For its part China has reacted furiously to these political and military pressures, particularly those around Taiwan: organisation of massive and threatening naval and aerial manoeuvres around the island; the publication of alarmist studies indicating that “the risk of war has never been so high”, or the release of plans for a surprise attack against the island which would lead to a total defeat of the Taiwanese forces.

Warnings, threats and intimidation have come one after the other in the last months around the South China Sea. They underline the growing pressure exerted on China by the United States. In this context the US has done everything possible to take in tow other Asian countries concerned by the expansionist aims of Beijing, trying for example to create a type of Asian NATO, the QUAD, bringing together the United States, Japan, Australia and India, and associating South Korea to it. On the other hand, and in the same sense, Biden wanted to revive NATO with the aim of drawing European countries into its policy of pressurising China. Paradoxically, the make-up of AUKUS indicates the limits of rallying other nations behind the United States.  AUKUS first of all represents a slap in the face for France and negated Biden’s fine words about a “partnership” within NATO. Moreover, this agreement confirms the sensitivity of countries like India, which has its own imperialist ambitions, and above all of South Korea and Japan, squeezed between fear of China’s military strengthening and their industrial and commercial links with the country.

 

2. The significance of the return to power of the Taliban in Afghanistan

After the chaos and bloody barbarism of Iraq and Syria, events of September 2021 in Afghanistan fully confirm the main tendencies of the period: the decline of US leadership, the growth of chaos and each for themselves.

2.1. The US debacle in Afghanistan

The total collapse of the regime and the Afghan army, the clear advance of the Taliban despite 20 years of American military intervention and hundreds of billions of dollars devoured by “nation building”, as well as the panicked evacuation of US nationals and collaborators, strikingly confirms that the United States is no longer up to fulfilling the role of World Cop. More specifically, the dramatic and chaotic retreat of American troops from Afghanistan has led to domestic and foreign stresses on the Biden administration.

a) on the external level, the debacle has undermined the reliability of the United States in the eyes of its “allies”

 When even the Secretary General of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, has had to recognise that the United States could no longer guarantee the defence of its European allies against their enemies, the whole charm offensive of Biden towards NATO and the allies collapsed. The total absence of working in concert within NATO and the uncompromising “Lone Ranger” attitude of the United States provoked indignant reactions in London, Paris and Berlin. As for the collaborators of the Americans in Afghanistan (like the Kurds in Syria betrayed by Trump), they rightly fear for their lives: here is the strongest world power incapable of guaranteeing the lives of its collaborators and the support of its allies. It doesn’t give much confidence (as Xi Jinping sarcastically observed!).

b) on the internal level it has eroded the credibility of the Biden administration

The resolution on the international situation of the 24th congress underlined that “The election of Biden, supported by a huge mobilisation of the media, parts of the political apparatus and even the military and the security services, express this real counter-tendency to the danger of social and political disintegration most clearly embodied by Trumpism. In the short term, such ‘successes’ can function as a brake on mounting social chaos” (point 8). However, the Afghan debacle demonstrates not only the lack of United States’ reliability towards its allies but it also accentuates tensions within the American bourgeoisie and opens up an avenue to all the adverse forces (Republican and populist) who condemn this hasty and humiliating retreat that “dishonours the United States on an international level”. And this at a time when the policy of industrial recovery and public works advocated by the Biden administration, and aimed at containing the ravages caused by populism, comes up against the ferocious opposition from Republicans in the Capitol and from Trump. On top of which, faced with a stagnating anti-Covid vaccination policy, it has been obliged to take measures of constraint against the population.

2.2 An unpredictable situation for the other imperialisms

The absence of centralisation in the Taliban power, the myriad currents and groups with the most diverse aspirations which make up the movement, and the agreements made with local warlords in order to quickly define the parameters of the country mean that chaos and unpredictability characterise the situation, as the recent attacks aimed at the Hazara minority demonstrate. This can only intensify the interventions of different imperialisms, but it also increases the unpredictability of the situation and thus the ambient chaos.

- Iran is linked to the Hazara minority along its frontiers and firmly intends to maintain its influence in this region. Pakistan is concerned that the victory of the Taliban (that it finances through its ISI secret services) leads to a Pashtun independence movement within its own frontiers. India, which largely financed the collapsed regime, is now confronted with an intensification of Muslim guerrilla activity in Indian Kashmir. Russia has strengthened its troop deployment in the ex-Soviet republics of Asia in order to counter any attempts to support any local jihadist movements.

- And does China in particular draw any advantage from the American retreat? The opposite is true. Chaos in Afghanistan even renders coherent and long-term policies in the country hazardous. Moreover, the presence of the Taliban on the borders with China constitute a potentially serious danger for Islamic infiltration (via the Uyghurs); above all the Pakistani “brothers” of the Taliban, the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), cousins of the Islamic State of Khorasan (ISK), are engaged in attacks against the workplaces and dockyards of the “New Silk Road”, which have already led to the deaths of dozens of Chinese “aid workers”.

China is trying to counter the danger coming from Afghanistan by implanting itself in the old Soviet republics of Central Asia (Turkistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan). But these republics are traditionally part of the Russian zone of influence. This increases the danger of a confrontation with its “strategic ally”, with whom it has fundamentally opposing long-term interests over the “New Silk Road” (cf. Point 4.2. which deals with the Russian-Chinese alliance).

 

3. China’s position on the imperialist chessboard

In the last decades China has undergone a dazzling rise on the economic and imperialist levels which has made it the most important challenger to the United States. However, as events of September 2021 in Afghanistan have already illustrated, it hasn’t been able to profit either from the decline of the US or from the crisis of Covid-19 and its consequences in order to strengthen its position on the level of imperialist relations; again quite the contrary. We’ll examine the difficulties which faced Chinese bourgeoisie in handling the pandemic, and in the management of the economy, imperialist relations and tensions within the ruling class.

3.1. Difficulties in the management of the Covid crisis

China put herd immunity (“zero tolerance”) before opening up the country, but the strict lock-downs applied to towns and entire regions each time infections were detected heavily disrupted economic and commercial activities: thus, the closure of the port of Yantian, the third largest container port in the world, led last May to the blockage of thousands of containers and hundreds of ships, totally disorganising world maritime traffic.

Moreover, this quest for herd immunity pushed some Chinese towns and provinces to put financial sanctions on latecomers and those reluctant to get vaccinated. Faced with numerous criticisms on Chinese social networks, the central government blocked these types of measures, which were tending “to put national cohesion into danger”.

Finally, the most serious problems came without doubt over the converging information on the limited efficacy of the Chinese vaccine communicated by the various countries using them “All in all, the Chilean vaccination campaign – quite effective with 62% of the population currently vaccinated - does not seem to have any noticeable impact on the proportion of deaths” (H. Testard, "Covid-19: la vaccination décolle en Asie mais les doutes augmentent sur les vaccins chinois", Asialyst, 21.07.21). Even the Chinese authorities are looking to make agreements to import Pfizer or Moderna versions in order to alleviate the inefficiencies of their own vaccine.

Beyond the undeniable responsibility of China in the outbreak of the pandemic, the inefficient management of the Covid crisis by Beijing puts pressure on Chinese state capitalism.

3.2. The accumulation of problems for the Chinese economy

The strong growth of China for 40 years now – even if the figures have fallen back the last decade – seems to be coming to an end. Experts expect growth of Chinese GDP lower than 6% in 2021 against 7% on average over the last decade and more than 10% from the preceding decade. Various other factors are accentuating the present difficulties of the Chinese economy:

a) The danger of the bursting of the Chinese property bubble: Evergrande, China’s second biggest real estate company today finds itself burdened with some 300 billion euros of debt, around 2% of GDP, that it can’t pay back. Others similar companies are contaminated such as Fantasia Holdings or Sinic Holdings and are on the edge of default faced with their creditors. Generally, the housing sector which represents 25% of the Chinese economy has generated a colossal public and private debt of billions and billions of dollars. Evergrande’s bankruptcy is really only the first sequence in the global collapse of this sector. Today empty buildings are so numerous that they could house 90 million people! It’s true that the immediate collapse of the sector will be avoided as the Chinese authorities have no other choice than to limit the damage which otherwise risks having a very severe impact on the financial sector: “(...) ‘there will not be a snowball effect like in 2008 [in the US], because the Chinese government can stop the machine’, says Andy Xie, an independent economist and former Morgan Stanley employee in China, quoted by Le Monde. ‘I think that with Anbang [insurance group, editor's note] and HNA [Hainan Airlines], we have good examples of what can happen: there will be a committee bringing together around a table the company, the creditors and the authorities, which will decide which assets to sell, which to restructure and, in the end, how much money is left and who can lose funds’.” (P.-A. Donnet, “Chute d’Evergrande en Chine: la fin de l’argent facile”, Asialyst, 25.09.21).

However, if the Chinese housing market bases its economic model on astronomical debt, numerous other sectors are in the red: at the end of 2020, the global debt of Chinese businesses represents 160% of the GDP of the country, against about 80% for American companies; and the “toxic” investments of local governments, according to the analyses of Goldman Sachs, represents 53,000 billion yuan, a sum which amounts to 52% of Chinese GDP. Thus the bursting of the housing bubble risks not only contaminating other sectors of the economy but also endangering social stability (close to 3 million direct and indirect jobs are linked to Evergrande), a great fear of the Chinese Communist Party.

b) Energy cuts: they are the consequence of a lack of provision of coal caused, among other things, by the record floods in the Shaanxi Province which alone produces 30% of the country’s combustibles, and also the hardening of anti-pollution rules decided by Xi. The shortage is already affecting industrial activity in several regions: the steel sector and the aluminium and cement sectors are already suffering from limitations on available electricity. Aluminium production capacity has already been reduced by 7%, cement production by 29% (Morgan Stanley’s figures); paper and glass will be the next sectors hit by power shortages. From now these cuts will slow down economic growth in the whole of the country. But the situation is even more serious than appears at first sight: “The power shortage is now spilling over into the residential market in parts of the Northeast. Liaoning province has extended power cuts from the industrial sector to residential networks.” (P.-A. Donnet, «Chine: comment la grave pénurie d’électricité menace l’économie», Asialyst, 30.09.21).

c) Breaks in the production and supply chain. These are linked to the energy crisis but also to the lock-down due to Covid infections (see the preceding points). They have affected production in industries across many regions and increased the risk of breaking national and global supply chains that have already been hit hard, much more so as some manufacturers are faced with an acute shortage of semi-conductors.

3.3. The planned “New Silk Road” is running out of steam

The “New Silk Road” is becoming more and more difficult to achieve, due to financial problems linked to the Covid crisis and to the difficulties of the Chinese economy but also to the reticence of its partners:

- on one hand, the level of debt in the “partner” countries has risen because of the Covid crisis and they find themselves unable to pay the interest on Chinese loans. Some countries like Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Kirghizstan, Pakistan, Montenegro and various African countries have asked China to restructure, delay or even annul their debt payments which are due this year.

- on the other hand, there is a growing distrust among numerous countries regarding the actions of China (European Union, Cambodia, Philippines, Indonesia) connected to the anti-Chinese pressure exercised by the United States (as in Latin America), and there are also the consequences of the chaos produced by decomposition, destabilising certain key countries “along the route”, as in the example of Ethiopia.

In short, we shouldn’t be surprised that in 2020 there was a collapse in the value of investments injected into the “New Silk Road” project (-64%), while China has loaned more than $461 billion since 2013.

3.4. Accentuation of tensions with the Chinese bourgeoisie

During the regime of Deng Xiao Ping’s Stalinist-type Chinese state capitalism, under the cover of a policy of “creating wealth in order to share wealth”, a number of “free” zones were established (Hong Kong, Macao, etc.) so as to develop a type of “free market” capitalism allowing international capital to come in while also favouring the private capitalist sector. This sector, with the collapse of the Eastern bloc and the “globalisation” of the economy in the 90’s, developed in an exponential manner, even if the public sector under the direct control of the state still represented 30% of the economy. How then did the rigid and repressive “One Party” Stalinist state manage this “opening” to private capital? From the 1990’s, the Party was transformed by massively integrating entrepreneurs and private business bosses: “In the early 2000s, the then president Jiang Zemin lifted the ban on recruiting private sector entrepreneurs, who had previously been seen as class enemies (...). The businessmen and women thus selected become members of the political elite, which ensures that their companies are, at least partially, protected from predatory managers” (“Que reste-t-il du communisme en Chine?”, Le Monde Diplomatique 68, July, 2021) Today, professionals and graduate managers constitute 50% of Chinese Communist Party members.

The oppositions between the different factions will thus be expressed not only within state structures but even within the CCP itself. For several years (see the Report on Imperialist Tensions for the 20th ICC Congress, 2013), the growing tensions between different factions within the Chinese bourgeoisie, particularly between those linked to the private capitalist sectors depending on international investments and exchanges, and those linked to the state structures of financial control at the regional and national level are those that advocate opening up to world trade and those that advance a more nationalist policy. In particular, the “turn to the left” taken by the faction behind President Xi, which means less economic pragmatism and more nationalist ideology, has intensified tensions and political instability these last years: thus “the continuing tensions between Premier Li Keqiang and President Xi Jinping over economic recovery, as well as China's 'new position' on the international stage” (A. Payette, "Chine : à Beidaihe, ‘l'université d'été’ du Parti, les tensions internes à fleur de peau", Asialyst, 06.09.20). There is the “policy of war” undertaken by Chinese diplomacy regarding Taiwan and, at the same time, the spectacular declaration by Xi that China wants to reach carbon neutrality for its economy by 2060, and explicit criticisms of Xi  are regularly appearing (latterly the “viral alert” essay published by a reputable professor of constitutional right at Beijing’s Tsinghua University, predicting the end of Xi). There are tensions between Xi and the general command of the People’s Liberation Army, the interventions of the state apparatus against “too flamboyant” entrepreneurs and criticisms of state control (Jack Ma and Ant Financial, Alibaba). Some bankruptcies (HNA, Evergrande) could also be linked to fighting between cliques within the Party, for example in the cynical framework of “protecting citizens from the excesses of the capitalist class”.

In short, far from taking advantage of the present situation, the Chinese bourgeoisie, as others, is confronted with the weight of the crisis, the chaos of decomposition and internal tensions that it is trying by all means to contain within the capitalist structures of a worm-eaten state.

 

4. The extension of chaos, instability and barbaric warfare

The analysis given in the preceding points certainly shows the tensions between the United States and China tends to occupy a predominant place in the situation of imperialism, but without stimulating a tendency to the formation of imperialist blocs. In fact, beyond certain limited alliances such as AUKUS, the principal power on the planet, the United States, has not only failed to mobilise other powers behind its policies (as against Iraq or Iran before or China today) but it is incapable of defending its own allies and taking on the role of “bloc leader”. This decline of US leadership leads to an accumulation of chaos which more and more impacts on the policies of the all the dominant imperialisms including China which itself cannot durably impose its leadership over other countries.

4.1. Chaos and war

The fact that the Taliban have “beaten” the Americans will embolden all the smaller sharks, who will not hesitate to advance their agendas in the absence of anyone able to impose the “rules”. We are going into a period of an acceleration of lawlessness and the greatest chaos in history. Each for themselves becomes the central factor in imperialist relations and the most barbaric warfare threatens entire zones of the planet.

a) Central Asia, the Middle East and Africa

In addition to the barbaric civil wars in Iraq, Libya and Yemen, the descent of Afghanistan into horror, the strong tensions between Armenia and Azerbaijan, stimulated by Turkey provoking Russia, civil war has broken out in Ethiopia (supported by Eritrea) against the “rebel province” of Tigray (supported by Sudan and Egypt); and finally there are growing tensions between Algeria and Morocco.

The “Somalisation” of States, zones of instability and “no-go” areas (see the Report of the 20th Congress of the ICC) have not stopped spreading; at present chaos reigns from Kabul to Addis-Ababa, Sanna to Yerevan, Damascus to Tripoli and Baghdad to Bamako.

b) Central and South America

Covid has hit the sub-continent hard (one eighth of the world population, one third of world deaths in 2020) and it has plunged into the worst recession for 120 years: GDP contracted by 7.7% in 2020 (LMD, October 2021). Chaos is growing in Haiti which is sinking into a desperate situation under the reign of bloody gangs and the situation is equally catastrophic in Central America; hundreds of millions of desperate people fleeing misery and chaos and threatening the frontier of the United States. The region suffers more and more convulsions linked to decomposition: social revolts in Columbia and Chile, populist confusion in Brazil. Mexico is trying to play its own cards (proposing a new OAS, etc) but is too dependent on the United States to affirm its own aspirations. The United States has not been able to remove Maduro in Venezuela where China, Russia and even Iran continue with their “humanitarian” support, as well as Cuba. Above all China has infiltrated itself into the economy of the region since 2008 and has become an important financier of numerous Latin American states, but American counter-pressure is presently strong on certain states (Panama, Ecuador and Chile) to keep their distance from “the predatory economic activity” of Beijing.

c) Europe

The tensions between NATO and Russia have intensified these last months: after the incident where the Ryanair flight was diverted and intercepted by Belarus in order to arrest a dissident taking refuge in Lithuania; there were June NATO manoeuvres in the Black Sea off the coast of Ukraine where an engagement took place between a British frigate and the Russian navy; and in September there were joint manoeuvres between the Russian and Belarusian armies on the frontiers of Poland and the Baltic States faced with NATO exercises on Ukrainian territory, a real provocation in the eyes of Putin.

4.2. Growing instability

The growing chaos also increases tensions within the bourgeoisie and strengthens the unpredictability of their imperialist positioning; this is the case with Brazil where the catastrophic health situation and the irresponsible management of the Bolsonaro government has led to a more and more intense political crisis, and there are similar situations in other countries of Latin America (political instability in Ecuador, Peru, Colombia and Argentina). In the Near and Middle East tensions between the clans and tribes who run Saudi Arabia could destabilise the country, while Israel is marked by an opposition from a large part of its political factions from the right to the left against Netanyahu and against the religious parties, but also by pogroms inside the country against “Israeli” Arabs. Finally, there is Turkey looking for a solution to its political and economic difficulties in a suicidal dash into imperialist adventures (Libya, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, etc).

In Europe the Afghan debacle and the US submarine deal as well as the post-Brexit situation accentuates the destabilisation of organisations which came from the period of blocs such as NATO or the EU. Within NATO some countries increasingly doubt the reliability of the United States. Thus, Germany has not given ground to American pressure regarding the Baltic Sea pipeline with Russia, and France didn’t react well to the insult from the United States in the submarine deal with Australia; meanwhile other European countries continue to see the United States as their main protector. The question of relations with Britain over the implementation of the Brexit agreement (Northern Ireland, fish quotas, etc.) divides the countries of the EU and tensions remain strong between France and Britain. Within the EU itself the flux of refugees continues to come up against states while those like Hungary and Poland are more and more openly calling into question the “supra-national powers” defined by the European Treaty and the hydra of populism threatens France at the time of the Spring elections in 2022.

Chaos and each for themselves also tends to hinder the continuity of action of the major imperialisms: the United States is obliged to maintain pressure through regular air bombardments on the Shi’ite militias that are harassing their remaining forces in Iraq; Russia has to play the fire-fighter in the armed confrontation between Armenia and Azerbaijan, stirred up by Turkish imperialism; the extension of chaos in the Horn of Africa through the civil war in Ethiopia with Sudan and Egypt supporting the Tigray region and Eritrea the central Ethiopian government. These developments are undermining Chinese plans to make Ethiopia, vaunted as a pole of stability and the “world’s new workshop”, a pivotal point for its “Belt and Road” plan in north-east Africa – this was also the reason China set up a military base in Djibouti. The continuing impact, measures and uncertainties linked to the pandemic are equally a factor in the imperialist policies of various states: stagnation of vaccinations in the United States after opening up with a fanfare (over 800,000 thousand deaths up to December 24, New York Times), new, massive lock-downs of entire regions and a patent lack of Chinese vaccine efficiency, distrust of the population in Russia towards vaccines (just over 30% vaccination rate).

This instability also characterises alliances such as the one between China and Russia. If these countries have developed a “strategic co-operation” (reference the Sino-Russian communiqué of 28.6.21) against the United States and in relation to the Middle East, Iran or North Korea, and even organised common manoeuvres between their armies and navies, their political ambitions are radically different: above all Russian imperialism aims for the destabilisation of regions and can aim for little more than “frozen conflicts” (Syria, Libya, Ukraine, Georgia...) whereas China deploys a long-term economic and imperialist policy: the New Silk Road. Moreover, Russia is perfectly conscious that the route of the “Silk Road” by land and through the zone of the Arctic opposes its interests inasmuch as it directly threatens Russian zones of influence in Central Asia and in Siberia. It also understands that on the level of industrial strength, it does not have the weight of the second world economy - its GDP corresponds to that of Italy.

4.3. Development of the war economy

“The war economy (...) is not a political economy which can resolve the contradictions of capitalism or create the foundations of a new stage of capitalist development (...) The only function of the war economy is ... WAR! Its raison d’être is the effective and systematic destruction of the means of production and of the forces of production and the production of the means of destruction – the real logic of capitalist barbarism” (“From the crisis to the war economy”, International Review no. 11, 1977). The fact that the perspective is not towards the constitution of large stable alliances, imperialist “blocs” engaged in a global confrontation and thus a world war, takes nothing away from the present accentuation of the war economy. Submitting the economy to military necessities is a drain on the economy but this irrationality is not a choice: it is the product of the impasse of capitalism that social decomposition accelerates.

The arms race devours phenomenal sums, in the case of the United States, which still has an important advantage at this level, but also in China which has significantly increased its military expenses during the last two decades. “The increase of 2.6% of global military expenses over the year where Gross Domestic Product at the global level has shrunk by 4.4% (projection of the International Monetary Fund, October 2020), principally because of the economic aspect of Covid-19. Consequently, military expenditure in percentage of GDP – the so-called military burden – has reached a world average of 2.4% in 2020 against 2.2% in 2019. This is the strongest annual increase since the economic and financial crisis of 2009” (Sipri press communiqué, April 2021). The arms race concerns not only conventional and nuclear weapons, but the greater militarisation of space and the extension of zones that have been spared up to now, such as the Arctic region.

Given the terrifying expansion of this imperialist each for themselves, the arms race is not limited to the major imperialisms but affects all states, particularly on the Asian continent which has seen a significant rise in military expenses: thus the inversion of the respective rates between Asia and Europ between 2000 and 2018 is spectacular: in 2000, Europe and Asia respectively represented 27% and 18% of defence expenses world-wide. In 2018, these figures were overturned as Asia now represented 28% and Europe 20% (Sipri).

This militarisation is also expressed today by an awesome development of cyber-warfare by states (attacks by hackers often linked directly or indirectly to states such as the cyber-attack by Israel against Iranian nuclear sites) as well as Artificial Intelligence and military robotics (robots, drones) which are playing a more and more important role in intelligence or in military operations.

However, “the real key of the constitution of the war economy (..) (is) the physical and/or ideological submission of the proletariat to the state, (the) degree of control that the state has over the working class” (Id., International Review no.11, 1977). But this aspect is far from being achieved. That explains why the acceleration of the arms race goes along with a strong reluctance of the major imperialist powers (United States, China, Russia, Britain and France) for the massive engagement of soldiers in the field of conflicts (“boots on the ground”), for fear of the impact of large numbers of body bags coming back home on the population and particularly on the working class. Also revealing is the use of private military companies (Wagner troops for the Russians, Blackwater/Academi for the United States) or the engagement of local militias in order to undertake actions:  for example, the use of Syrian Sunni militias by Turkey in Libya and Azerbaijan, Kurdish militias by the United States in Syria and Iraq, Hezbollah or the Iraqi Shi’ite militias by Iran in Syria, Sudanese militias by Saudi Arabia in Yemen, a regional force (Chad, Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso) “coached” by France in the Liptako...

 

5. Impact on the proletariat and its struggle

The perspective is thus a multiplication of barbaric and bloody conflicts:

“11. At the same time, ‘massacres from innumerable small wars’ are also proliferating as capitalism in its final phase plunges into an increasingly irrational imperialist free for all…

 13. This does not mean that we are living in an era of greater safety than in the period of the Cold War, haunted as it was by the threat of a nuclear Armageddon. On the contrary, if the phase of decomposition is marked by a growing loss of control by the bourgeoisie, this also applies to the vast means of destruction – nuclear, conventional, biological and chemical – that has been accumulated by the ruling class, and is now more widely distributed across a far greater number of nation states than in the previous period.” (Resolution on the International Situation of the 24th Congress).

Inasmuch as we are aware that the bourgeoisie is capable of turning the worst effects of decomposition against the proletariat, we must be conscious that the context of murderous barbarity does not at all facilitate the workers’ struggle:

- The acceleration of decomposition will bring with it endless wars throughout the world, a multiplication of massacres and misery, millions of refugees aimlessly wandering around, an indescribable social chaos and destruction of the environment, and all this accentuating the feeling of fear and demoralisation in the ranks of the proletariat.

- The different armed conflicts will be used to unleash intense campaigns about the defence of democracy, human rights, the rights of women, as is the case with Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Syria and Iraq.

- Consequently, our intervention must denounce the progression of barbarism and the insidious nature of the situation, it must constantly warn the proletariat against underestimating the dangers posed by the chaotic multiplicity of conflicts, in a context where each for themselves is the dominant dynamic: “Left to its own devices, it (decomposition) will lead humanity to the same fate as world war. In the end, it is all the same whether we are wiped out in a rain of thermonuclear bombs, or by pollution, radioactivity from nuclear power stations, famine, epidemics, and the massacres of innumerable small wars (where nuclear weapons might also be used). The only difference between these two forms of annihilation lies in that one is quick, while the other would be slower, and would consequently provoke still more suffering.” (Theses on Decomposition, point 11).

 

ICC, November 2021

Preamble

This resolution is in continuity with the report on decomposition to the 22nd ICC Congress, the resolution on the international situation to the 23rd congress, and the report on pandemic and decomposition to the 24th Congress. It is based on the proposition that not only does the decadence of capitalism pass through different stages or phases, but that we have since the late 1980s reached its ultimate phase, the phase of decomposition; furthermore, that decomposition itself has a history, and a central aim of these texts is to “test” the theoretical framework of decomposition against the evolution of the world situation. They have shown that most important developments of the last three decades have indeed confirmed the validity of this framework, as witness the exacerbation of every man for himself on an international level, the “rebound” of the phenomena of decomposition to the heartlands of world capitalism through the growth of terrorism and the refugee crisis, the rise of populism and a loss of political control by the ruling class, the advancing putrefaction of ideology through the spread of scapegoating, religious fundamentalism and conspiracy theories. And just as the phase of decomposition is the concentrated expression of all the contradictions of capital, above all in its epoch of decline, so the current Covid-19 pandemic is a distillation of all the key manifestations of decomposition, and an active factor in its acceleration.

 

The final phase of capitalist decline and the acceleration of chaos

1. The Covid-19 pandemic, the first on such a scale since the Spanish flu outbreak of 1918, is the most important moment in the evolution of capitalist decomposition since the period definitively opened up in 1989. The inability of the ruling class to prevent the resulting death toll of between 7 and 12 million confirms that the capitalist world system, left to itself, is dragging humanity towards the abyss of barbarism, towards its destruction; and that only the world proletarian revolution can halt this slide and lead humanity to a different future. 

 

2. The ICC is more or less alone in defending the theory of decomposition. Other groups of the communist left reject it entirely, either, as in the case of the Bordigists, because they do not accept that capitalism is a system in decline (or at best are inconsistent and ambiguous on this point); or, for the Internationalist Communist Tendency, because talking about a “final” phase of capitalism sounds far too apocalyptic, or because defining decomposition as a descent into chaos is a deviation from materialism, which, in their view, seeks to find the roots of every phenomenon in the economy and above all in the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. All these currents seem to ignore the fact that our analysis is in continuity with the platform of the Communist International in 1919, which not only insisted that the world imperialist war of 1914-18 announced capitalism’s entry into the “epoch of the breakdown of capital, its internal disintegration, the epoch of the communist revolution of the proletariat”, but also emphasised that “The old capitalist ‘order’ has ceased to function; its further existence is out of the question. The final outcome of the capitalist mode of production is chaos. This chaos can only be overcome by the productive and most numerous class – the working class. The proletariat has to establish real order - communist order”. Thus, the drama facing humanity was indeed posed in terms of order against chaos. And the threat of chaotic breakdown was linked to “the anarchy of the capitalist mode of production”, in other words, to a fundamental element in the system itself. According to marxism, the capitalist system, on a qualitatively higher level than any previous mode of production, involves the products of human labour becoming an alien power that stands above and against their creators. This decadence of the system, with its insoluble contradictions, is marked by a new spiral in this loss of control. And as the CI’s Platform explains, the necessity to try to overcome capitalist anarchy within each nation state – through monopoly and above all through state intervention – only pushes it onto new heights on a global scale, culminating in the imperialist world war. Thus, while capitalism can at certain levels and for certain phases hold back its innate tendency towards chaos (for example, through the mobilisation for war in the 1930s or the period of economic boom that followed the war), the most profound tendency is towards the “internal disintegration” that, for the CI, characterised the new epoch.

 

3. While the Manifesto of the CI talked about the beginning of a new “epoch”, there were tendencies within the International to see the catastrophic situation of the post-war world as a final crisis in an immediate sense rather than an entire age of catastrophes that could last for many decades. And this is an error that revolutionaries have fallen into many times - not only because of errors in their analyses, but also because it is not possible to predict with certainty the precise moment when a major change will occur at the historical level. Such mistakes occurred, for example, in 1848, when the Communist Manifesto already proclaimed that the envelope of capital had become too narrow to contain the productive forces it had set in motion; in 1919-20 with theory of the of the imminent collapse of capital, developed in particular by the German communist left; or again, in 1938, with Trotsky’s notion that the productive forces had ceased to grow. The ICC itself has also underestimated the capacity of capitalism to expand and develop in its own manner, even in a general context of advancing decay, notably in the case of Stalinist China after the collapse of the Russian bloc. However, these errors are products of an immediate interpretation of the capitalist crisis, not an inherent fault in the theory of decadence itself, which sees capitalism in this period as a growing fetter on the productive forces rather than an absolute barrier.  But capitalism has been in decline for over a century, and recognising that we are reaching the limits of the system is entirely consistent with an understanding that the economic crisis, despite ups and downs, has essentially become permanent; that the means of destruction have not only reached such a level that they could destroy all life on the planet, but are in the hands of an increasingly unstable world “order”; that capitalism has conjured up a planetary ecological disaster unprecedented in human history. In sum, the recognition that that we are indeed in the ultimate stage of capitalist decadence is based on a sober appraisal of reality. Again, this should be seen on a historical, not a day-to-day time scale. But It does mean that this final phase is irreversible and there can be no exit from it other than communism or the destruction of humanity. This is the historical alternative of our time.

 

4. The Covid-19 pandemic, contrary to the views propagated by the ruling class, is not a purely “natural” event, but results from a combination of natural, social and political factors, all of them linked the functioning of the capitalist system in decay. The “economic” element is indeed crucial here, and again at more than one level. It is the economic crisis, the desperate hunt for profit, which has driven capital to invade every part of the world’s surface, to grab what Adam Smith called nature’s “free gift”, destroying the remaining sanctuaries for wild life and vastly increasing the risk of zoonotic diseases. In turn, the financial crash of 2008 led to a brutal scaling down of investment in research into new diseases, in medical equipment and treatment, which exponentially increased the deadly impact of the Corona virus, a situation that was further exacerbated by massive attacks on health systems (reductions in the number of beds and carers, etc.) that were overwhelmed at the time of the pandemic. And the intensification of “every man for himself” competition between companies and nations at the global level has severely retarded the provision of safety material and vaccinations. And contrary also to the utopian hopes of certain parts of the ruling class, the pandemic will not give rise to a more harmonious world order once it has been kept at bay. Not only because this pandemic is probably only a warning sign of worse pandemics to come, given that the fundamental conditions that generated it cannot be addressed by the bourgeoisie, but also because the pandemic has considerably worsened a world economic recession which was already looming before the pandemic struck. The result will be the opposite of harmony as national economies seek to cut each others’ throats in the fight for dwindling markets and resources. This heightened competition will certainly express itself at the military level. And the “return to normal” of capitalist competition will place new burdens on the backs of the world’s exploited, who will bear the main brunt of capitalism’s efforts to claw back some part of the gigantic debts it has incurred through its attempts to manage the crisis.

 

5. No state can pretend to be a model of managing the pandemic. If, in an initial phase,  certain states in Asia have managed to face up to it more effectively (even though countries like China have engaged in falsifying the figures and the reality of the epidemic) this is because of their experience in confronting pandemics at the social and cultural level, since this continent has historically provided the soil for the emergence of new diseases, and above all because these states have maintained the means, institutions, and procedures of coordination set up during the SARS epidemic in 2003. The spread of the virus at the planetary level, the international generation of new variants, straight away pose the problem at the level where the impotence of the bourgeoisie is exposed most clearly, especially its inability to adopt a unified and coordinated approach (as shown by the recent failure of the proposal to sign a treaty of struggle against pandemics) and to ensure that the whole of humanity obtains the protection of vaccines.

 

6. The pandemic, a product of the decomposition of the system, thus reveals itself as a formidable force in the further acceleration of this decomposition. Moreover, its impact on the most powerful nation on Earth, the USA, confirms what was already noted in the report to the 22nd Congress: the tendency for the effects of decomposition to return with added force to the very heart of the world capitalist system. In fact, the USA is now at the “centre” of the global process of decomposition. The catastrophic mishandling of the Covid crisis by the populist Trump administration has certainly been a significant factor in the US experiencing the highest death rates in the world from the disease. At the same time, the extent of divisions within the ruling class in the US were laid bare by the contested elections in November 2020, and above all by the storming of the Capitol by Trump supporters on 6 January 2021, egged on by Trump and his entourage. The latter event demonstrates that the internal divisions rocking the USA traverse the whole of society. Although Trump has been ousted from government, Trumpism remains a potent, heavily armed force, expressing itself on the streets as well as through the ballot box. And with the whole of the left wing of capital rallying behind the banner of anti-fascism, there is a real danger that the working class in the US will be caught up in violent conflicts between rival factions of the bourgeoisie.

 

7. The events in the USA also highlight the advancing decay of capitalism’s ideological structures, where again the US “leads the way”. The accession of the populist Trump administration, the powerful influence of religious fundamentalism, the growing distrust of science, have their roots in particular factors in the history of American capitalism, but the development of decomposition and in particular the outbreak of the pandemic has moved all kinds of irrational ideas to the mainstream of political life, accurately reflecting the complete lack of perspective for the future offered by the existing society. In particular, the US has become the nodal point for the radiation of “conspiracy theory” throughout the advanced capitalist world, notably via the internet and social media, which have provided the technological means for further undermining the foundations of any idea of objective truth to a degree that Stalinism and Nazism could only have dreamed about. Appearing in different forms, conspiracy theory has certain common features: the personalised vision of secret elites who run society from behind the scenes, a rejection of scientific method and a deep distrust for all official discourse. Contrary to the mainstream ideology of the bourgeoisie, which presents democracy and the existing state power as true representatives of society, conspiracy theory has its centre of gravity in the hatred of the established elites, a hatred it directs against finance capital and the classical democratic facade of state capitalist totalitarianism. This misled representatives of the workers’ movement in the past to call this approach the “socialism of fools” (August Bebel, with reference to anti-Semitism) – a mistake still understandable before World War One, but which would be dangerous today. Conspiracy theory populism is not a warped attempt to approach socialism or anything resembling proletarian class consciousness. One of its main sources is the bourgeoisie itself: that part of the bourgeoisie which resents being excluded precisely from the elitist inner circles of its own class, backed up by other parts of the bourgeoisie which have lost or are losing their prior central position. The masses this kind of populism attracts behind it, far from being animated by any willingness to challenge the ruling class, by identifying with the struggle for power of those they support, hope to in some way share in that power, or at least to be favoured by it at the expense of others.

 

8. While the advance of capitalist decomposition, alongside the chaotic sharpening of imperialist rivalries, primarily takes the form of political fragmentation and a loss of control by the ruling class, this does not mean that the bourgeoisie can no longer resort to state totalitarianism in its efforts to hold society together. On the contrary, the more society tends to break apart, the more desperate becomes the bourgeoisie’s reliance on the centralising state power, which is the principal instrument for this most Machiavellian of all ruling classes. The reaction to the rise of populism, those factions of the ruling class who are more aware of the general interests of national capital and its state, is a case in point. The election of Biden, supported by a huge mobilisation of the media, parts of the political apparatus and even the military and the security services, express this real counter-tendency to the danger of social and political disintegration most clearly embodied by Trumpism. In the short term, such “successes” can function as a brake on mounting social chaos. Faced with the Covid-19 crisis, the unprecedented lock-downs, a last resort to hold back the unrestrained spread of the disease, the massive recourse to state debt to preserve a minimum of living standards in the advanced countries, the mobilisation of scientific resources to find a vaccine, demonstrate the bourgeoisie’s need to preserve the image of the state as the protector of the population, its unwillingness to lose credibility and authority in the face of the pandemic. But in the longer term, this recourse to state totalitarianism tends to further exacerbate the contradictions of the system.  The semi-paralysis of the economy and the piling up of debt can have no other result than to accelerate the global economic crisis, while at the social level, the massive increase in police powers and state surveillance introduced to enforce the lock-down laws- and inevitably used to justify all forms of protest and dissent – are visibly aggravating distrust of the political establishment, expressed mainly on the anti-proletarian terrain of the “rights of the citizen”.

 

9. The evident nature of the political and ideological decomposition in the world’s leading power does not mean that the other centres of world capitalism are able to constitute alternative fortresses of stability. Again, this is most clear-cut in the case of Britain, which has been pummelled simultaneously by the highest Covid death rates in Europe and the first symptoms of the self-inflicted wound of Brexit, and which faces a real possibility of breaking up into its constituent “nations”. The current unseemly rows between Britain and the EU over the viability and distribution of vaccines offer further proof that the main trend in global bourgeois politics today is towards increasing fragmentation, not towards unity in the face of a “common enemy”. Europe itself has not been spared from these centrifugal trends, not only around the management of the pandemic, but also around the issue of “human rights” and democracy in countries like Poland and Hungary.  It is remarkable that even central countries like Germany, which was previously considered a relative “safe haven” of political stability and was able to build on its economic strength, is now being affected by growing political chaos. The acceleration of decomposition in the historical centre of capitalism is characterised both by a loss of control and by increasing difficulties in generating political homogeneity. After the loss of its second largest economy, even if the EU is not in immediate danger of major splits, these threats continue to hang over the dream of a united Europe. And while Chinese state propaganda highlights the growing disunity and incoherence of the “democracies”, presenting itself as a bulwark of global stability, Beijing’s increasing recourse to internal repression, as against the “democracy movement” in Hong Kong and the Uighur Muslims, is actually evidence that China is a ticking time bomb. China's extraordinary growth is itself a product of decomposition. The economic opening up during the Deng period in the 1980s mobilised huge investments, especially from the US, Europe and Japan.  The Tiananmen Massacre in 1989 made it clear that this economic opening was being implemented by an inflexible political apparatus which has only been able to avoid the fate of Stalinism in the Russian bloc through a combination of state terror, a ruthless exploitation of labour power which subjugates hundreds of millions of workers to a permanent migrant worker status, and a frenzied economic growth whose foundations are now looking increasingly shaky. The totalitarian control over the whole social body, the repressive hardening of the Stalinist faction of Xi Jinping, is not an expression of strength but a manifestation of the weakness of the state, whose cohesion is endangered by the existence of centrifugal forces within society and important struggles between cliques within the ruling class.

 

Capitalism’s march towards the destruction of humanity

10. In contrast to a situation in which the bourgeoisie is able to mobilise society for war, as in the 1930s, the exact rhythm and forms of decomposing capitalism’s drive towards the destruction of humanity are harder to predict because it is the product of a convergence of different factors, some of which may be partially hidden from view. The final result, as the Theses on Decomposition insist, is the same: “Left to its own devices, (capitalism) will lead humanity to the same fate as world war. In the end, it is all the same whether we are wiped out in a rain of thermonuclear bombs, or by pollution, radioactivity from nuclear power stations, famine, epidemics, and the massacres of innumerable small wars (where nuclear weapons might also be used). The only difference between these two forms of annihilation lies in that one is quick, while the other would be slower, and would consequently provoke still more suffering”. Today, however, the contours of this drive towards annihilation are becoming sharper. The consequences of capitalism’s destruction of nature are becoming increasingly impossible to deny, as is the failure of the world bourgeoisie, with all its global conferences and pledges to move towards a “green economy”, to halt a process which is inextricably linked to capitalism’s need to penetrate every last corner of the planet in its competitive pursuit of the accumulation process. The Covid pandemic is probably the most significant expression so far of this profound imbalance between humanity and nature, but other warning signs are also multiplying, from the melting of polar ice to the devastating fires in Australia and California and the pollution of the oceans by the detritus of capitalist production.

 

11. At the same time, “massacres from innumerable small wars” are also proliferating as capitalism in its final phase plunges into an increasingly irrational imperialist free for all. The ten year agony in Syria, a country now utterly ruined by a conflict involving at least five rival camps, is perhaps the most eloquent expression of this terrifying “basket of crabs”, but we are seeing similar manifestations in Libya, the Horn of Africa and Yemen, wars that have been accompanied and aggravated by the emergence of regional powers such as Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, none of whom can be relied upon to accept the discipline of the main global powers: these second or third level powers may forge contingent alliances with the most powerful states only to find themselves on opposite sides in other situations (as in the case of Turkey and Russia in the war in Libya). The recurring military confrontations in Israel/Palestine are also testimony to the intractable nature of many of these conflicts, and in this case the slaughter of civilians has been exacerbated by the development of a pogrom atmosphere within Israel itself, showing the impact of decomposition at both the military and social levels. At the same time, we are seeing a sharpening of conflict between the global powers. The exacerbation of rivalries between the USA and China was already evident under Trump but the Biden administration will continue in the same direction, even if under different ideological pretexts, such as China’s human rights abuses; at the same time the new administration has announced that it will no longer “roll over” in the face of Russia, who have now lost their point of support in the White House. And even if Biden has promised to reinsert the US into a number of international institutions and accords (on climate change, Iran’s nuclear programme, NATO…), this does not mean that the US will forgo its capacity to act alone in defence of its interests. The military strike against pro-Iranian militias in Syria by the Biden administration only weeks after the election was a clear statement to this effect. The pursuit of every man for himself will make it increasingly difficult, if not impossible, for the United States to impose its leadership, an illustration of each against all in the acceleration of decomposition.

 

12. Within this chaotic picture, there is no doubt that the growing confrontation between the US and China tends to take centre stage. The new administration has thus demonstrated its commitment to the “tilt to the east” (now supported by the Tory government in Britain) which was already a central axis of Obama’s foreign policy. This has been concretised in the development of the “Quad”, an explicitly anti-China alliance between the US, Japan, India and Australia. However, this does not mean that we are heading towards the formation of stable blocs and a generalised world war. the march towards world war is still obstructed by the powerful tendency towards indiscipline, every man for himself and chaos at the imperialist level, while in the central capitalist countries capitalism does not yet dispose of the political and ideological elements - including in particular a political defeat of the proletariat - that could unify society and smooth the way towards world war. The fact that we are still living in an essentially multipolar world is highlighted in particular by the relationship between Russia and China. While Russia has shown itself very willing to ally with China on specific issues, generally in opposition to the US, it is no less aware of the danger of subordinating itself to its eastern neighbour, and is one of the main opponents of China’s “New Silk Road” towards imperialist hegemony.

 

13. This does not mean that we are living in an era of greater safety than in the period of the Cold War, haunted as it was by the threat of a nuclear Armageddon. On the contrary, if the phase of decomposition is marked by a growing loss of control by the bourgeoisie, this also applies to the vast means of destruction – nuclear, conventional, biological and chemical – that has been accumulated by the ruling class, and is now more widely distributed across a far greater number of nation states than in the previous period.  While we are not seeing a controlled march towards war led by disciplined military blocs, we cannot rule out the danger of unilateral military outbreaks or even grotesque accidents that would mark a further acceleration of the slide towards barbarism.

 

An unprecedented economic crisis

 

14. For the first time in the history of capitalism outside of a world war situation, the economy has been directly and profoundly affected by a phenomenon - the Covid 19 pandemic - which is not directly related to the contradictions of the capitalist economy. The magnitude and importance of the impact of the pandemic, as the product of a completely obsolete system in full decomposition, illustrates the unprecedented fact that the phenomenon of capitalist decomposition is now also affecting, massively and on a global scale, the entire capitalist economy.

This irruption of the effects of decomposition into the economic sphere is directly affecting the evolution of the new phase of open crisis, ushering in a completely unprecedented situation in the history of capitalism. The effects of decomposition, by profoundly altering the mechanisms of state capitalism which up till now have been set up to “accompany” and limit the impact of the crisis, are introducing a factor of instability and fragility, of growing uncertainty.

The chaos which is seizing hold of the capitalist economy confirm Rosa Luxemburg’s view that capitalism will not undergo a purely economic collapse. “The more ruthlessly capital sets about the destruction of non-capitalist strata, at home and in the outside world, the more it lowers the standard of living for the workers as a whole, the greater also is the change in the day-to-day history of capital. It becomes a string of political and social disasters and convulsions, and under these conditions, punctuated by periodical economic catastrophes or crises, accumulation can go on no longer. But even before this natural economic impasse of capital’s own creating is properly reached it becomes a necessity for the international working class to revolt against the rule of capital”. (Accumulation of Capital, chapter 32)

 

15. Hitting a capitalist system which since the beginning of 2018 had already been entering a clear slowdown, the pandemic quickly concretised the prediction of the ICC’s 23rd Congress that we were heading for a new dive into the crisis.

The violent acceleration of the economic crisis – and the fears of the bourgeoisie – can be measured by the height of the enormous wall of debt, hastily erected to preserve the apparatus of production from bankruptcy and to maintain a minimum of social cohesion.

One of the most important manifestations of the gravity of the current crisis, unlike past situations of open economic crisis, and unlike the crisis of 2008, resides in the fact that the central countries (Germany, China and the US) have been hit simultaneously and are among the most affected by the recession. In in China this has meant sharp drop in the rate of growth in 2020. The weakest states are seeing their economies strangled by inflation, the fall in the value of their currency and impoverishment.

After four decades of resorting to credit and debt to counter-act the growing tendency towards overproduction, punctuated by increasingly profound recessions and increasingly limited recoveries, the crisis of 2007-9 already marked a further step in capitalism’s descent into irreversible crisis. While massive state intervention was able to save the banking system from utter ruin, pushing debt up to even more staggering levels, the causes of the crisis of 2007-09 were not overcome. The contradictions underneath the crisis moved onto a higher level with a crushing weight of debt on states themselves. Attempts to relaunch economies didn’t lead to a real recovery: an element which was without precedent since the Second World War was that, apart from the US, China, and to a lesser extent Germany, production levels in all the other main countries stagnated or even fell between 2013 and 2018. The extreme fragility of this “recovery”, by piling up all the conditions for a further significant deterioration of the world economy, already presaged the current situation.

Despite the historic scale of recovery plans, and because the relaunch of the economy is taking place in such a chaotic manner, it is not yet predictable how – and to what degree – the bourgeoisie will manage to stabilise the situation, since it is characterised by all kinds of uncertainties, above all about the evolution of the pandemic itself.

Unlike what the bourgeoisie was able to do in 2008, when it brought together the G7 and the G20, made up of the main states, and was able to agree on a coordinated response to the credit crisis, today each national capital is reacting in dispersed order, without any other concern than reviving its own economic machinery and its survival on the world market, without concertation between the principal components of the capitalist system. Every man for himself has become decisively predominant.

The apparent exception to this, the European recovery plan, which includes the mutualisation of debts between EU countries, is a product of the awareness of the two main EU states of the need for a minimum of cooperation between them as a precondition for avoiding a major destabilisation of the EU in order to face up to their main rivals China and the United States, on pain of risking an accelerated downgrading of their position in the global arena.

The contradiction between the necessity to contain the pandemic and to avoid the paralysis of production led to the “war of masks” and the “war of vaccines” The present war of vaccines, the way they are being fabricated and distributed, is a mirror to the disorder afflicted the world economy.

After the collapse of the eastern bloc, the bourgeoisie did everything it could to maintain a certain collaboration between states, in particular by relying on the organs of international regulation inherited from the period of the imperialist blocs. This framework of “globalisation” made it possible to limit the impact of the phase of decomposition at the level of the economy, by pushing to its extreme the possibility of “associating” nations at different levels of the economy – financial, productive, etc.

With the aggravation of the crisis and imperialist rivalries, these multilateral institutions and mechanisms were already being put to the test by the fact that the main powers were increasingly developing their own policies, in particular China, by constructing its vast parallel network, the New Silk Road, and the US, which was tending to turn its back on these institutions because of the growing inability of these organisms to maintain their dominant position. Populism was already coming forward as a factor worsening the deteriorating economic situation by introducing an element of uncertainty faced with the torments of the crisis. Its accession to power in different countries accelerated the deterioration of the means imposed by capitalism since 1945 to avoid any drift towards a withdrawal behind national borders, which can only lead to an uncontrolled contagion of the economic crisis.

The unleashing of every man for himself derives from the contradiction in capitalism between the more and more global scale of production and the national structure of capital, a contradiction exacerbated by the crisis. By provoking growing chaos within the world economy (with the tendency towards the fragmentation of chains of production and breakdown of the world market into regional zones, towards the strengthening of protectionism and the multiplication of unilateral measures), this totally irrational move of each nation towards saving itself at the expense of everyone else is counter-productive for each national capital and a disaster at the world level, a decisive factor in worsening the entire global economy.

This rush by the most “responsible” bourgeois factions towards an increasingly irrational and chaotic management of the system, and, above all, the unprecedented advance of this tendency towards every man for himself, reveals a growing loss of control of its own system by the ruling class.

 

16. The only nation to have a positive growth rate in 2020 (2%), China has not emerged triumphant or strengthened from the pandemic crisis, even though it has momentarily gained ground at the expense of its rivals. On the contrary. The continuing deterioration in the growth of its economy, which is the most heavily indebted in the world, and which also has a low rate of utilisation of capacities and a proportion of “zombie enterprises” of more than 30%, is testimony to the incapacity of China from now on to play the role it did in 2008-11 in the relaunch of the world economy.

China is confronted with a reduction of markets across the world, with the desire of numerous states to free themselves from dependence on Chinese production, and with the risk of insolvency facing a number of those countries who are involved in the Silk Road project and which are most affected by the economic consequences of the pandemic. The Chinese government is therefore pursuing an orientation towards the internal economic development of the “Made in China 2025” plan, and of the “dual circulation” model, which is also aimed at compensating for the loss of external demand by stimulating domestic demand. This policy shift does not, however, represent an “inward turn”; Chinese imperialism will not and cannot turn its back on the world. On the contrary, the goal of this shift is to gain national autarky at the level of key technologies in order to be all the more able to gain ground beyond its own borders. It represents a new stage in the development of its war economy.  All this is provoking powerful conflicts within the ruling class, between partisans of the direction of the economy by the Chinese Communist Party and those linked to the market economy and the private sector, between the “planners” of the central authority and local authorities who want to guide investment themselves. Both in the United States (in relation to the “GAFA” technology giants from Silicon Valley) and - even more resolutely - in China (in relation to Ant International, Alibaba etc.) there is a strong move of the central state apparatus towards cutting down to size companies become too big (and to powerful) to control.

 

17. The consequences of the frenzied destruction of the environment by decomposing capitalism, the phenomena resulting from climate disturbance and the destruction of biodiversity, are in the first place leading to further pauperisation of the most deprived parts of the world population (sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Asia) or of those prey to military conflicts. But they are more and more affecting all economies, the developed countries at their head.

We are currently seeing the multiplication of extreme meteorological phenomena, extremely violent rainfall and flooding, vast fires leading to huge financial losses in city and countryside through the destruction of vital infrastructure (towns, roads, river installations). These phenomena disrupt the functioning of the industrial production apparatus and also weaken the productive capacity of agriculture. The global climate crisis and the resulting increased disorganisation of the world market in agricultural products are threatening the food security of many states.

Capitalism in decomposition does not possess the means to really fight against global warming and ecological devastation. These are already having an increasingly negative impact on the reproduction of capital and can only act as an obstacle to the return to economic growth.

Motivated by the necessity to replace obsolete heavy industries and fossil fuels, the “green economy” does not represent a way out for capital, whether on the ecological or the economic level. Its production networks are no more green and no less polluting. The capitalist system does not have the capacity to engage in a “green revolution”. The actions of the ruling class in this area also inevitably sharpen destructive economic competition and imperialist rivalries. The emergence of new and potentially profitable sectors, such as the production of electric vehicles, could at best benefit certain parts of the stronger economies, but given the limits of solvent markets and the increasing problems encountered by the ever more massive use of money creation and debt, they will not be able to act as a locomotive for the economy as a whole. The “green economy” is also a privileged vehicle for powerful ideological mystifications about the possibility of reforming capitalism, and a choice weapon against the working class, justifying plant closures and lay-offs.

 

18.  In response to mounting imperialist tensions, all states are increasing their military effort, in terms of both volume and duration. The military sphere is extending to more and more “zones of conflict”, such as cyber-security and the growing militarisation of space. All the nuclear powers are discreetly relaunching their atomic programmes. All states are modernising and adapting their armed forces.

This insane arms race, to which every state is irredeemably condemned by the demands of inter-imperialist competition, is all the more irrational given that the increasing weight of the war economy and arms production is absorbing a considerable proportion of national wealth: this gigantic mass of military expenditure on a world scale, even if it constitutes a source of profit for the arms merchants, represents a sterilisation and destruction of global capital. The investments realised in the production and sales of weapons and military equipment in no way form a point of departure or the source of the accumulation of new profits: once they have been produced or acquired weapons serve only to sow death and destruction or stand idle in silos until they become obsolete and have to be replaced. The economic impact of these completely unproductive expenses “will be disastrous for capital. In the face of already unmanageable budget deficits, the massive increase in military spending, which the growth of inter-imperialist antagon­isms makes necessary, is an economic burden which will only accelerate capitalism's descent into the abyss” (“Report on the International Situation”, IR 35).

 

19. After decades of gigantic debts, the massive injection of liquidity contained in the most recent economic support plans go well beyond the volume of previous interventions. The billions of dollars released by the American, European and Chinese plans have brought world debt to a record 365% of world GDP.

Debt, which has again and again been used by capitalism throughout its epoch of decadence as a palliative to the crisis of overproduction, is a way of putting things off to the future at the cost of even more serious convulsions. It has now soared to unprecedented levels. Since the Great Depression, the bourgeoisie has shown its determination to keep alive a system increasingly threatened by overproduction, by the diminishing availability of markets, through more and more sophisticated means of state intervention, aimed at exerting an overall control over its economy. But it has no way of dealing with the real causes of the crisis. Even if there is not a fixed, predetermined limit to the headlong flight into debt, a point at which this would become impossible, this policy cannot go on indefinitely without grave repercussions on the stability of the system, as shown by the increasingly frequent and widespread nature of the crises of the last decade. Furthermore, such a policy has proven to be, at least for the last four decades, less and less effective in reviving the world economy. 

Not only does the weight of debt condemn the capitalist system to ever more devastating convulsions (bankruptcy of enterprises and even of states, financial and monetary crises, etc) but also, by more and more restraining the capacity of states to cheat the laws of capitalism, it can only hinder their ability to relaunch their respective national economies.

The crisis that has already been unfolding over decades is going to become the most serious of the whole period of decadence, and its historic import will go beyond even the first crisis of this epoch, the crisis which began in 1929. Ripening after more than 100 years of capitalist decadence, with an economy ravaged by the military sector, weakened by the impact of the destruction of the environment, profoundly altered in its mechanisms of reproduction by debt and state manipulation, prey to the pandemic, increasingly suffering from all the other effects of decomposition, it is an illusion to think that in these conditions there will be any easy or durable recovery of the world economy.

 

20. At the same time, revolutionaries should not be tempted to fall into a “catastrophist” vision of a world economy on the verge of a final collapse. The bourgeoisie will continue to fight to death for the survival of its system, whether by directly economic means (such as the exploitation of untapped resources and potential new markets, typified by China’s New Silk Road project) or political, above all through the manipulation of credit and cheating the law of value. This means that there can still be phases of stabilisation in between economic convulsions with increasingly profound consequences.

 

21. The return of a kind of “neo-Keynesianism” initiated by the huge spending commitments of the Biden administration, and initiatives for corporate tax increases - though also motivated by the need to hold bourgeois society together, and by the equally pressing need to face up to sharpening imperialist tensions – shows the willingness of the ruling class to experiment with different forms of economic management, not least because the deficiencies of the neo-liberal policies launched in the Thatcher-Reagan years have been severely exposed under the glare of the pandemic crisis. However, such policy changes cannot rescue the world economy from oscillating between the twin dangers of inflation and deflation, new credit crunches and currency crises, all leading to brutal recessions.

 

 22. The working class is paying a heavy tribute to the crisis. First because it is most directly exposed to the pandemic and is the principal victim of the spread of infection, and secondly because the downward dive in the economy is unleashing the most serious attacks since the Great Depression, at all levels of working and living conditions, although not all sectors of the class will be affected in the same way.

The destruction of jobs was four times greater in 2020 than in 2009, but it has not yet revealed the full extent of the huge increase in mass unemployment that lies ahead. Although the public subsidies handed out in some countries to those who are partially unemployed are aimed at mitigating the social shock (in the United States, for example, during the first year of the pandemic, the average income of wage earners, according to official statistics, actually increased – for the first time ever, during a recession, in the history of capitalism) millions of jobs are going to disappear very soon

The exponential increase in precarious working and the general lowering of wages will lead to a gigantic increase in impoverishment, which is already hitting many workers. The number of victims of famine in the world has increased two-fold and hunger is reappearing in the western countries. For those who keep a job the workload and the rhythm of exploitation will worsen.

The working class can expect nothing from the efforts by the bourgeoisie to “normalise” the economic situation except lay-offs and wage cuts, added stress and fear, drastic increases in austerity measures at all levels, in education as well as health pensions and social benefits. In short, we will see a degradation of living and working conditions at a level which none of the post-Second World War generations have hitherto experienced. 

 

23. Since the capitalist mode of production entered its period of decadence, the pressure to fight against this decline with state capitalist measures has grown constantly. However, the tendency to strengthen state capitalist organs and forms is anything but a strengthening of capitalism; on the contrary, they express the increasing contradictions on the economic and political terrain. With the acceleration of decomposition in the wake of the pandemic, we are also witnessing a sharp increase in state capitalist measures. These are not an expression of greater state control over society but rather an expression of the growing difficulties in organising society as a whole and preventing its increasing tendency to fragmentation.

 

The perspectives for the class struggle

24. The ICC recognised at the beginning of the 90s that the collapse of the eastern bloc and the definitive opening of the phase of decomposition would create growing difficulties for the proletariat: the lack of political perspective, the inability to come to grips with its political and historical perspective which had already been a central element in the difficulties of the  class movement in the 1980s, would be seriously aggravated by the deafening campaigns about the death of communism; linked to this, the proletariat’s sense of class identity would be severely weakened  in the new period, both by the atomising and divisive effects of social decomposition, and by the conscious efforts of the ruling class to exacerbate these effects through ideological campaigns (the “end of the working class”) and the “material” changes brought about by the policy of globalisation (break up of traditional centres of class struggle, relocation of industries to regions of the world where the working class did not have the same degree of historical experience, etc).

 

25. The ICC has tended to underestimate the depth and duration of this retreat in the class struggle, often seeing signs that the reflux was about to be overcome and that we would see in a relatively short period of time new international waves of struggle as in the period after 1968. In 2003, on the basis of new struggles in France, Austria and elsewhere, the ICC predicted a revival of struggles by a new generation of proletarians who had been less influenced by the anti-Communist campaigns and would be faced by an increasingly uncertain future. To an important degree these predictions were confirmed by the events of 2006-2007, notably the struggle against the CPE in France, and of 2010-2011, in particular the Indignados movement in Spain. These movements displayed important advances at the level of solidarity between generations, self-organisation through assemblies, culture of debate, real concerns about the future facing the working class and humanity as a whole. In this sense, they showed the potential for a unification of the economic and political dimensions of the class struggle. However, it took us a long time to understand the immense difficulties that confronted this new generation, “raised” in the conditions of decomposition, difficulties which would prevent the proletariat from reversing the post-89 retreat during this period.

 

26. A key element in these difficulties was the continued erosion of class identity. This had already been apparent in the struggles of 2010-11, particularly the movement in Spain: despite the important advances made at the level of consciousness and organisation, the majority of the Indignados saw themselves as “citizens” rather than as part of a class, leaving them vulnerable to the democratic illusions peddled like the likes of Democratia Real Ya! (the future Podemos), and later to the poison of Catalan and Spanish nationalism. Over the next few years, the reflux that followed in the wake of these movements was deepened by the rapid rise of populism, which created new divisions in the international working class – divisions that exploited national and ethnic differences, and fuelled by the pogromist attitudes of the populist right, but also political divisions between populism and anti-populism.  Throughout the world, anger and discontent were growing, based on serious material deprivation and real anxieties about the future; but in the absence of a proletarian response much of this was channelled into inter-classist revolts such as the Yellow Vests in France,  into single issue campaigns on a bourgeois terrain such as the climate marches, into movements for democracy against dictatorship (Hong Kong, Belarus, Myanmar etc) or into the inextricable tangle of  racial and sexual identity politics which serve to further conceal the crucial issue of proletarian class identity as the only basis for an authentic response to the crisis of capitalist mode of production.  The proliferation of these movements – whether they appear as inter-classist revolts or openly bourgeois mobilisations – has increased the already considerable difficulties not only for the working  class as a whole but for the communist left itself, for the organisations which have the responsibility to define and defend the class terrain. A clear example of this was the inability of the Bordigists and the ICT to recognise that the anger provoked by the police murder of George Floyd in May 2020 had immediately been diverted into bourgeois channels. But the ICC has also encountered important problems in the face of this often bewildering array of movements, and, as part of its critical review of the past 20 years, will have to seriously examine the nature and extent of the errors it made in the period from the Arab spring of 2011, via the so-called candlelight protests in South Korea, to these more recent revolts and mobilisations.

 

27. The pandemic in particular has created considerable difficulties for the working class:

• The majority of workers recognise the reality of this disease and the real dangers posed by gathering together in large numbers, inhibiting the possibility of general assemblies and workers’ demonstrations; the proletariat is confronted, not only by the bourgeoisie, but also, and in a more immediate sense, by the virus. In general, situations in which natural catastrophes play a paramount role, are not conducive to the development of the class struggle. The indignation of Voltaire against nature because of the Lisbon earthquake did not generalise. Unlike the “social earthquake” of the mass strike of 1905 in Russia, the earthquake of 1906 in San Francisco did not advance the cause of the proletariat, any more than that of 1923 in Tokyo;
• As always, the bourgeoisie does not hesitate to use the effects of decomposition against the working class. While the lockdowns have been motivated primarily by the bourgeoisie’s understanding that it had no other recourse to prevent the spread of the disease, it will certainly take advantage of the situation to enforce the atomisation and exploitation of the working class, in particular through the new model of “working from home”. This new step in the atomisation of the working population has been a source of growing psychological suffering, especially among the young, even to the point of increasing cases of suicide;
• By the same token, the ruling class has used the conditions of the pandemic to step up its systems of mass surveillance and to introduce new repressive laws restricting protests and demonstrations, alongside increasingly overt police violence against all expressions of social discontent;
• The massive increase in unemployment resulting from the lockdown will not, in this situation and in the short term, be a factor in the unification of workers’ struggles but rather will tend to further reinforce atomisation;
• Although the lockdown has provoked a great deal of social discontent, when this has expressed itself openly, as in Spain in February and Germany in April 2021, it has overwhelmingly taken the form of protests “for individual freedom” which are a total dead end for the working class;
• More generally, the period of the pandemic has seen a further upsurge of “identity politics”, in which dissatisfaction with life under the present system is fragmented into a maelstrom of clashing identities based on race, gender, culture, etc, and which constitute a major threat to the recovery of the only identity capable of unifying and liberating the whole of humanity behind it: proletarian class identity. Moreover, behind this chaos of competing identities penetrating the whole population, lies the competition between different bourgeois factions of right and left, carrying with it the danger of dragging the working class into new forms of reactionary “culture wars” and even violent civil war.

 

28. Despite the enormous problems facing the proletariat, we reject the idea that the class has already been defeated on a global scale, or is on the verge of such a defeat comparable to that of the period of counter-revolution, a defeat of a kind from which the proletariat would possibly no longer be able to recover. The proletariat, as an exploited class, cannot avoid going through the school of defeats, but the central question is whether the proletariat has already been so overwhelmed by the remorseless advance of decomposition that its revolutionary potential has been effectively undermined. Measuring such a defeat in the phase of decomposition is a far more complex task than in the period before the Second World War, when the proletariat had risen openly against capitalism and been crushed by a series of frontal defeats, or the period after 1968 when the main obstacle to the bourgeoisie’s drive towards a new world war was the revival of struggles by a new and undefeated generation of proletarians. As we have already recalled, the phase of decomposition indeed contains the danger of the proletariat simply failing to respond and being ground down over a long period – a “death by a thousand cuts” rather than a head-on class confrontation. Nevertheless, we affirm that there is still sufficient evidence to show that, despite the undoubted “progress” of decomposition, despite the fact that time is no longer on the side of the working class, the potential for a profound proletarian revival– leading to a reunification between the economic and the political dimensions of the class struggle – has not vanished, as witness:

• the persistence of important proletarian movements that have appeared in the phase of decomposition (2006-7, 2010-11, etc);
   
• the fact that, just prior to the pandemic, we saw several embryonic and very fragile signs of a reappearance of the class struggle, especially in France 2019.  And even if this dynamic was then largely blocked by the pandemic and the lockdowns, there were workers’ protests in several countries even during the pandemic, particularly around issues of health and safety at work;
   
• The small but significant signs of a subterranean maturation of consciousness, manifesting itself in efforts towards a global reflection on the failure of capitalism and the need for another society in some movements (particularly the Indignados in 2011), but also through the emergence of young elements looking for class positions and turning towards the heritage of the communist left;
   
• More importantly, the situation facing the working class is not the same as it was following the collapse of the eastern bloc and the opening of the phase of decomposition in 1989. At that time, it was possible to present these events as proof of the death of communism and of the victory of capitalism and the beginning of a bright future for humanity. Thirty years of decomposition have severely undermined this ideological fraud of a brighter future, and the pandemic in particular has uncovered the irresponsibility and negligence of all capitalist governments and the reality of a society riven by deep economic divisions where we are by no means “all in it together”. On the contrary, the pandemic and the lockdown have tended to reveal the condition of the working class both as the main victim of the health crisis but also as the source of all “essential” labour and all material production, and in particular of basic necessities. This can be one of the bases for a future recovery of class identity. And, together with the growing understanding that capitalism is a totally obsolete mode of production, this has already been an element in the appearance of the politicised minorities whose motivation has above all been to understand the dramatic situation facing humanity;
   
• Finally, on a broader historical level, the process of decomposition has not eliminated the associated character of labour under capitalism. This remains the case despite the social atomisation engendered by decomposition, despite deliberate attempts to fragment the workforce through stratagems such as the “gig economy”, despite ideological campaigns aiming to present the more educated sectors of the proletariat as “middle class”. Capital mobilises more and more workers worldwide, the process of proletarianisation and thus the exploitation of living labour continues unabated. The working class today is larger and more interconnected than ever, but with the progress of decomposition social atomisation and isolation intensify. This is also expressed in the difficulties of the working class to experience its own class identity. Only through the struggles of the working class on its own class terrain it is able to create its “associative” power which express an anticipation of the associated labour of communism. The workers are brought together by capital in the production process, where the combination of labour is realised under compulsion, but the revolutionary character of the proletariat means dialectically reversing these conditions in a collective struggle. The exploitation of common labour is turned around in the struggle against exploitation and for the liberation of the social character of labour, for a society that knows how to consciously use the full potential of associated labour.

 

Thus, the defensive struggle of the working class contains the seeds of the qualitatively higher social relations which are the final goal of the class struggle – what Marx called the “freely associated producers”.  Through association, through the bringing together of all its components, capacities and experiences, the proletariat can become powerful, can become the ever more conscious and united combatant for and harbinger of a liberated humankind.

 

29. Despite the tendency for the process of decomposition to react on the economic crisis, the latter remains the “ally of the proletariat” in this phase. As the Theses on Decomposition put it: 

 “The inexorable aggravation of the capitalist crisis constitutes the essential stimulant for the class struggle and development of consciousness, the precondition for its ability to resist the poison distilled by the social rot. For while there is no basis for the unification of the class in the partial struggles against the effects of decomposition, nonetheless its struggle against the direct effects of the crisis constitutes the basis for the development of its class strength and unity. This is the case because:

• while the effects of decomposition (eg pollution, drugs, insecurity) hit the different strata of society in much the same way and form a fertile ground for aclassist campaigns and mystifications (ecology, anti-nuclear movements, anti-racist mobilisations, etc), the economic attacks (falling real wages, layoffs, increasing productivity, etc) resulting directly from the crisis hit the proletariat (ie the class that produces surplus value and confronts capitalism on this terrain) directly and specifically;
• unlike social decomposition which essentially effects the superstructure, the economic crisis directly attacks the foundations on which this superstructure rests; in this sense, it lays bare all the barbarity that is battening on society, thus allowing the proletariat to become aware of the need to change the system radically, rather than trying to improve certain aspects of it”. (Thesis 17)

 

30. Consequently, we must reject any tendency to downplay the importance of the “defensive”, economic struggles of the class, which is a typical expression of the modernist outlook which only sees the class as an exploited category and not equally as a historic, revolutionary force. It is of course true that the economic struggle alone cannot hold back the tides of decomposition: as the Theses on Decomposition put it, “The workers’ resistance to the effects of the crisis is no longer enough: only the communist revolution can put an end to the threat of decomposition”. But it is a profound mistake to lose sight of the constant, dialectical interaction between the economic and political aspects of the struggle, as Rosa Luxemburg emphasised in her work on the 1905 mass strike; and again, in the heat of the German revolution of 1918-19, when the “political” dimension was out in the open, she insisted that the proletariat still needed to develop its economic struggles as the only basis for organising and unifying itself as a class. It will be the combination of a renewed defensive struggle on a class terrain, coming up against the objective limits of decomposing bourgeois society, and fertilised by the intervention of the revolutionary minority, that will enable the working class to recover its revolutionary perspective, to move towards the fully proletarian politicisation that will arm it to lead humanity out of the nightmare of decomposing capitalism.

 

31. In an initial period, the rediscovery of class identity and class combativity will constitute a form of resistance against the corrosive effects of capitalist decomposition – a bulwark against the working class being further fragmented and divided against itself. Without the development of the class struggle, such phenomena as the destruction of the environment and the proliferation of military chaos tend to reinforce feelings of powerlessness and the resort to false solutions such as ecologism and pacifism. But at a more developed stage of the struggle, in the context of a revolutionary situation, the reality of these threats to the survival of the species can become a factor in understanding that capitalism has indeed reached the terminal phase of its decline and that revolution is the only way out. In particular, capitalism’s war-drive – above all when it involves the great powers directly or indirectly – can be an important factor in the politicisation of the class struggle since it brings with it both a very concrete increase in exploitation and physical danger, but also further confirmation that society is faced with the momentous choice between socialism and barbarism. From factors of demobilisation and despair, these threats can strengthen the proletariat’s determination to do away with this dying system.

“Similarly, in the period to come, the proletariat cannot hope to profit from the weakening that decomposition provokes within the bourgeoisie itself. During this period, it must aim to resist the noxious effects of decomposition in its own ranks, counting only on its own strength and on its ability to struggle collectively and in solidarity to defend its interests as an exploited class (although revolutionary propaganda must constantly emphasize the dangers of social decomposition). Only in the revolutionary period, when the proletariat is on the offensive, when it has directly and openly taken up arms for its own historic perspective, will it be able to use certain effects of decomposition, in particular of bourgeois ideology and of the forces of capitalist power, for leverage, and turn them against capital” (Theses on Decomposition).

 

In a way, "the communist left finds itself in a similar situation today to that of Bilan in the 1930s, in the sense that it is obliged to understand a new and unprecedented historical situation" (Resolution on the international situation of the 13th ICC Congress, 1999).[1] This observation, now more appropriate than ever, required intense debates between organisations of the proletarian political milieu (PPM) in order to analyse the meaning of the Covid-19 crisis in the history of capitalism and the consequences which flow from it. Now, in the face of the rapid extension of events, the groups of the PPM appear totally helpless and disarmed: instead of seizing the marxist method as a living theory, they reduce it to an invariant dogma where class struggle is seen as an immutable repetition of eternally valid schemas, without being able to show not only what persists but also what has changed. Thus, the Bordigist or councilist groups stubbornly ignore the entry of the system into its phase of decadence. On the other hand, the International Communist Tendency (ICT) rejects decomposition as a cataclysmic vision and limits its explanations to the truism that profit is responsible for the pandemic and to the illusory idea that the latter is only a trivial event, a parenthesis, in the bourgeoisie's attacks to maximise its profits. These PPM groups merely recite the patterns of the past without analysing the specific circumstances, timing and impact of the health crisis. As a result, their contribution to the assessment of the balance of forces between the two antagonistic classes in society, of the dangers or opportunities facing the class and its minorities, is today derisory.

A firm marxist approach is all the more necessary since mistrust of official discourse is currently giving rise to the emergence of many false and fanciful "alternative explanations" of events. Conspiracy theories, each more fanciful than the other, are emerging and are shared by millions of followers: The pandemic and today's mass vaccination are a Chinese plot to ensure their supremacy, a conspiracy of the world bourgeoisie to prepare for war or restructure the world economy, a seizure of power by a secret international of virologists or a nebulous world conspiracy of the elites (under the leadership of Soros or Gates)... This general atmosphere even provokes a disorientation of the political milieu, a veritable "Corona blues".

For the ICC, marxism is a “living thought enriched by each important historical event. (…) Revolutionary organisations and militants have the specific and fundamental responsibility of carrying out this effort of reflection, always moving forward, as did our predecessors such as Lenin, Rosa, Bilan, the French Communist Left, etc, with both caution and boldness:

- basing ourselves always and firmly on the basic acquisitions of marxism,

- examining reality without blinkers, and developing our thought "without ostracism of any kind" (Bilan).

In particular, faced with such historic events, it is important that revolutionaries should be capable of distinguishing between those analyses which have been overtaken by events and those which still remain valid, in order to avoid a double trap: either succumbing to sclerosis, or ‘throwing the baby out with the bath water’". (Orientation text on militarism and decomposition, 1991). [2]

Consequently, the Covid-19 crisis requires the ICC to confront the salient elements of this major event with the framework of decomposition that the organisation has been putting forward for more than 30 years, in order to understand the evolution of capitalism. This framework is clearly recalled in the resolution on the international situation of the 23rd International Congress of the ICC (2019):

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

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

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

It is mainly this last point, the fact that decomposition tends to become the decisive factor in the evolution of society, and therefore of all the components of the world situation - an idea that is by no means shared by the other groups of the communist left - that constitutes the major thrust of this resolution.”[3]

In this context, the aim of this report is to assess the impact of the Covid-19 crisis on the deepening of the contradictions within the capitalist system and its implications for the deepening of the phase of decomposition.

 

1. The Covid-19 crisis reveals the depth of capitalism's putrefaction

 

The pandemic is at the heart of capitalism: a first, then a second, and even a third wave of infections are sweeping across the world and in particular the industrialised countries; their hospital systems are on the verge of implosion and they are forced to repeatedly impose more or less radical lockdowns. After one year of the pandemic, the official figures, which are largely underestimated in many countries, count more than 500,000 deaths in the USA and more than 650,000 in the European Union and Latin America.

During the last twelve months, in this mode of production with unlimited scientific and technological capacities, the bourgeoisie, not only in peripheral countries but especially in the main industrialised countries, have shown itself to be unable

• to prevent the spread of the pandemic and then its resumption through a second, third, etc., wave;
• to avoid saturation of hospital systems, as in Italy, Spain, but also in Great Britain or the USA;
• to put in place techniques and instruments to control and stem the different waves;
• to coordinate and centralise vaccine research and to set up a planned and well-thought-out production, distribution and vaccination policy for the entire planet.

On the contrary, they have competed in taking inconsistent and chaotic measures and have resorted, in desperation, to measures dating from the distant past, such as lockdown, quarantine or curfews. They have condemned hundreds of thousands of people to death by selecting Covid patients admitted to overcrowded hospitals or by postponing the treatment of other serious illnesses to a distant date.

The catastrophic unfolding of the pandemic crisis is fundamentally linked to the relentless pressure of the historic crisis of the capitalist mode of production. The impact of austerity measures, which have been further accentuated since the recession of 2007-11, the ruthless economic competition between states, and the priority given, particularly in industrialised countries, to maintaining production capacities at the expense of the health of populations in the name of the primacy of the economy, have favoured the extension of the health crisis and constitute a permanent obstacle to its containment. This immense catastrophe represented by the pandemic is not the product of destiny or the inadequacy of scientific knowledge or health techniques (as may have been the case in previous modes of production); nor does it come like a thunderbolt in a serene sky, nor is it a passing digression. It expresses the fundamental impotence of the declining capitalist mode of production, which goes beyond the carelessness of this or that government, but which is on the contrary indicative of the blockage and putrefaction of bourgeois society. And above all it reveals the extent of this phase of decomposition which has been deepening for 30 years.

1.1 Its emergence highlights 30 years of sinking into decomposition.

The Covid-19 crisis did not arise out of nowhere; it is both the expression and the result of 30 years of decomposition which marked a tendency towards the multiplication, deepening and increasingly clear convergence of the various manifestations of capitalism's putrefaction.

(a) The importance and the significance of the dynamics of decomposition were understood by the ICC from the end of the 1980s:

"As long as the bourgeoisie doesn't have a free hand to impose its 'solution' - generalised imperialist war - and as long as the class struggle isn't sufficiently developed to allow its revolutionary perspective to come forward, capitalism is caught up in a dynamic of decomposition, a process of rotting on its feet which is experienced at all levels:

- degradation of international relations be­tween states as manifested in the development of terrorism

- repeated technological and so-called natural catastrophes

- destruction of the ecosphere

- famines, epidemics, expressions of the generalization of absolute pauperization

- explosion of ‘nationalities’, or ethnic conflicts

- social life marked by the development of criminality, delinquency, suicide, madness, individual atomisation

- ideological decomposition marked among other things by the development of mysticism, nihilism, the ideology of 'everyone for himself', etc ...” (Resolution on the international situation of the 8th ICC Congress, 1989).[4]

(b) The implosion of the Soviet bloc marked a spectacular acceleration of the process despite the campaigns to conceal it. The collapse from within of one of the two imperialist blocs facing each other, without this being the product either of a world war between the blocs or of the offensive of the proletariat, can only be understood as a major expression of capitalism’s entry into the phase of decomposition. However, the tendencies towards the loss of control and the exacerbation of ‘every man for himself’ expressed by this implosion was largely concealed and countered in the first instance by the revival of the prestige of ‘democracy’ because of its ‘victory over communism’ (campaigns on the ‘death of communism’ and the superiority of the democratic mode of government), then by the First Gulf War (1991), fought in the name of the United Nations against Saddam Hussein, which allowed Bush senior to impose an ‘international coalition of states under the leadership of the United States and thus to curb the tendency towards every man for himself; finally, by the fact that the economic collapse resulting from the implosion of the Eastern bloc only affected the former Russian bloc countries, a particularly backward part of capitalism, and largely spared the industrialised countries.

(c) At the beginning of the 21st century, the spread of decomposition manifested itself above all in the explosion of every man for himself and chaos on the imperialist level. The attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon by Al Qaeda on 11 September 2001, and the unilateral military response of the Bush administration, further opened the Pandora's box of decomposition: with the attack and invasion of Iraq in 2003 in defiance of international conventions and organisations and without taking into account the opinion of its main ‘allies’, the world's leading power went from being the gendarme of world order to the principal agent of every man for himself and chaos. The occupation of Iraq and then the civil war in Syria (2011) would powerfully stir up the imperialist every man for himself, not only in the Middle East but all over the world. They also accentuated the declining trend of US leadership, while Russia began coming back to the forefront, especially through a ‘disruptive’ imperialist role in Syria, and China was rapidly rising as a challenger to the US superpower.

(d) In the first two decades of the 21st century, the quantitative and qualitative growth of terrorism, fostered by the spread of chaos and warlike barbarity in the world, is taking a central place in the life of society as an instrument of war between states. This led to the establishment of a new state, the "Islamic state" (Daesh), with its army, police, administration and schools, for which terrorism is the weapon of choice and which has triggered a wave of suicide attacks in the Middle East as well as in the metropolises of the industrialised countries. "The establishment of Daesh in 2013-14 and the attacks in France in 2015-16, Belgium and Germany in 2016 represent another step in this process” (Report on decomposition from the 22nd ICC Congress, 2017).[5] This expansion of 'kamikaze' terrorism goes hand in hand with the spread of irrational and fanatical religious radicalism throughout the world, from the Middle East to Brazil, from the USA to India.

(e) In 2016-17, the Brexit referendum in Britain and the advent of Trump in the USA revealed the populist tsunami as a particularly salient new manifestation of deepening decomposition.

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

Among the current causes of the populist wave are the main manifestations of social decomposition: the rise of despair, nihilism, violence, xenophobia, associated with a growing rejection of the ‘elites’ (the ‘rich’, politicians, technocrats) and in a situation where the working class is unable to present, even in an embryonic way, an alternative.” (Resolution on the international situation of the 23rd ICC Congress, 2019)[6]

If this populist wave affects in particular the bourgeoisies of the industrialised countries, it is also found in other regions of the world in the form of the coming to power of strong and ‘charismatic’ leaders (Orban, Bolsonaro, Erdogan, Modi, Duterte...), often with the support of sects or extremist movements of religious inspiration (evangelist churches in Latin America or Africa, the Muslim Brotherhood in Turkey, racist Hindu identity movements in the case of Modi).

The decomposition phase already has 30 years of history and the brief overview of the latter shows how the decomposition of capitalism has spread and deepened through phenomena that have gradually affected more and more aspects of society, and which constitute the ingredients that caused the explosive nature of the Covid-19 global crisis. Admittedly, during these 30 years, the progression of the phenomena has been uneven, but it has taken place at different levels (ecological crisis, imperialist every man for himself, fragmentation of states, terrorism, social riots, loss of control of the political apparatus, ideological decomposition), increasingly undermining the attempts of state capitalism to counter its advance and maintain a certain shared framework. However, if the different phenomena reached an appreciable level of intensity, they appeared until then as "a proliferation of symptoms with no apparent interconnection, unlike previous periods of capitalist decadence which were defined and dominated by such obvious landmarks as world war or proletarian revolution” (Report on the Covid-19 pandemic and the period of capitalist decomposition, July 2020).[7] It is precisely the significance of the Covid-19 crisis to be, like the implosion of the Eastern bloc, highly emblematic of the phase of decomposition by accumulating all the factors of putrefaction of the system.

1.2 The pandemic results from the interaction of the manifestations of decomposition  

Like the various manifestations of decadence (world wars, general economic crises, militarism, fascism and Stalinism...), there is therefore also an accumulation of manifestations of the phase of decomposition. The scale of the impact of the Covid-19 crisis is explained not only by this accumulation but also by the interaction of ecological, health, social, political, economic and ideological expressions of decomposition in a kind of spiral never before observed, which has led to a tendency to lose control over more and more aspects of society and to an outbreak of irrational ideologies, extremely dangerous for the future of humanity.

a) Covid-19 and the destruction of nature

The pandemic is clearly an expression of the breakdown in the relationship between humanity and nature, which has reached an intensity and a planetary dimension unequalled with the decadence of the system and, in particular, with the last phase of this decadence, that of decomposition, more specifically here through uncontrolled urban growth and concentration (proliferation of overcrowded shantytowns) in the peripheral regions of capitalism, deforestation and climate change. Thus, in the case of Covid-19, a recent study by researchers from the Universities of Cambridge and Hawaii and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (in the journal Science of the Total Environment) would indicate that climate change in southern China over the past century has favoured the concentration in the region of bat species, which carry thousands of coronaviruses, and allowed the transmission of SARS-CoV-2, probably via pangolins, to humans.[7a]

For decades, the irretrievable destruction of the natural world has been generating a growing danger of environmental as well as health disasters, as already illustrated by the SARS, H1N1 or Ebola epidemics, which fortunately did not become pandemics. However, although capitalism has such technological strengths that it is capable of sending men to the moon, of producing monstrous weapons capable of destroying the planet dozens of times over, it has not been able to equip itself with the necessary means to remedy the ecological and health problems that led to the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. Man is increasingly separated from his "organic body" (Marx) and social decomposition is accentuating this trend.

b) Covid-19 and economic recession

At the same time, austerity and restructuring measures in research and health systems, which have been further intensified since the recession of 2007-11, have reduced hospital availability and slowed, if not stopped, research into viruses of the Covid family, even though various previous epidemics had warned of their dangerousness. On the other hand, during the pandemic, the primary objective of the industrialised countries has always been to keep production capacities intact as long as possible (and, by extension, crèches, day-care and primary education to enable parents to go to work), while being aware that companies and schools constitute a not insignificant source of contagion despite the measures taken (wearing a mask, keeping one's distance, etc.). In particular, during the pause in lockdown in the summer of 2020, the bourgeoisie cynically played with the health of the population in the name of the primacy of the economy, which has always prevailed, even if this risked contributing to the emergence of a new wave of the pandemic and to the return of lockdowns, to the increase in the number of hospitalisations and deaths.

c) Covid-19 and the imperialist every man for himself

The emphasis on ‘every man for himself’ between states has from the outset been a powerful incentive for the spread of the pandemic and has even encouraged its exploitation for hegemonic purposes. First, China's initial attempts to cover up the emergence of the virus and its refusal to pass on information to the WHO greatly favoured the initial expansion of the pandemic. Secondly, the persistence of the pandemic and its various waves, as well as the number of victims, were favoured by the refusal of many countries to ‘share’ their stocks of sanitary equipment with their neighbours, by the growing chaos in cooperation between the various countries, including and especially within the EU, to harmonise contamination control policies or vaccine design and purchasing policies, and again by the "vaccine race" between competing pharmaceutical giants (with juicy profits for the winners) instead of bringing together all the available expertise in medicine and pharmacology. Finally, the "vaccine war" is raging between countries: for example, the European Commission had initially refused to reserve 5 million additional doses of vaccine proposed by Pfizer-BioNTech under pressure from France, which demanded an equivalent additional order for the French company Sanofi ; the AstraZeneca/Oxford University vaccine is reserved in priority for Britain to the detriment of EU orders; moreover, Chinese (Sinovac), Russian (Sputnik V), Indian (BBV152) or American (Moderna) vaccines are widely exploited by these states as instruments of imperialist policy. The competition between states and the explosion of every man for himself have accentuated the frightening chaos in the management of the pandemic crisis.

d) Covid-19 and the loss of control of the bourgeoisie over its political apparatus

The loss of control over the political apparatus was already one of the characteristics marking the implosion of the Eastern bloc, but it appeared then as a specificity linked to the particular character of the Stalinist regimes. The refugee crisis (2015-16), the emergence of social riots against the corruption of the elites and above all the populist tidal wave (2016), all manifestations that were certainly already present but less prominent in past decades, would from the second half of the decade 2010-2020 highlight the importance of this phenomenon as an expression of the progression of decomposition. This dimension would play a determining role in the spread of the Covid-19 crisis. Populism and in particular populist leaders such as Bolsonaro, Johnson or Trump have favoured the expansion and lethal impact of the pandemic through their ‘vandalist’ policies: they have trivialised Covid-19 as a simple flu, have favoured the inconsistent implementation of a policy of limiting contamination, openly expressing their scepticism towards it, and have sabotaged any international collaboration. Thus, Trump openly transgressed the recommended health measures, openly accused China (the "Chinese virus") and refused to cooperate with the WHO.

This ‘vandalism’ is an emblematic expression of the bourgeoisie's loss of control over its political apparatus: after initially proving incapable of limiting the spread of the pandemic, the various national bourgeoisies failed to coordinate their actions and set up a broad system of ‘testing’ and ‘track and tracing’ in order to control and limit new waves of Covid-19 contagion. Finally, the slow and chaotic deployment of the vaccination campaign once again underscores the states’ difficulties in adequately managing the pandemic. The succession of contradictory and ineffective measures has fuelled growing scepticism and mistrust among the population towards government directives: "It is clear that, compared to the first wave, it is more difficult for citizens to adhere to the recommendations."[8] This concern is very present among governments in industrialised countries (from Macron to Biden), urging the population to follow the recommendations and directives of the authorities.

e) Covid-19 and the rejection of elites, irrational ideologies and rising despair

Populist movements are not only opposed to the elites but also favour the progression of nihilist ideologies and the most retrograde religious sectarianisms, already reinforced by the deepening of the decomposition phase. The Covid-19 crisis has provoked an unprecedented explosion of conspiratorial and anti-scientific visions, which are fuelling the contestation of state health policies. Conspiracy theories abound and spread totally fanciful conceptions of the virus and the pandemic. On the other hand, populist leaders such as Bolsonaro or Trump have openly expressed their contempt for science. The exponential spread of irrational thinking and the questioning of scientific rationality during the pandemic is a striking illustration of the acceleration of decomposition.

Populist rejection of elites and irrational ideologies have exacerbated an increasingly violent, purely bourgeois challenge to government measures such as curfews and lockdowns. This anti-elite and anti-state rage has stimulated the rise of rallies (Denmark, Italy, Germany) or ‘vandalist’, nihilist and anti-state riots against restrictions (to the cries of "Freedom!", "for our rights and life"), against "lockdown tyranny" or the "fraud of a virus that doesn't exist", such as those that broke out in January in Israel, Lebanon, Spain and especially in many cities in the Netherlands.

1.3 The pandemic marks the concentration of manifestations of decomposition in the central countries of capitalism.

The effects of the decomposition phase first hit the peripheral areas of the system hard: Eastern countries with the implosion of the Soviet bloc and former Yugoslavia, wars in the Middle East, war tensions in the Far East (Afghanistan, Korea, Sino-Indian border conflict), famines, civil wars, chaos in Africa. This changed with the refugee crisis, which has led to a massive flow of asylum seekers to Europe, or with the exodus of desperate populations from Mexico and Central America to the USA, then with the jihadist attacks in the USA and in the heart of Europe, and finally with the populist tsunami of 2016. In the second decade of the 21st century, the centre of the industrialised countries is increasingly affected and this trend is dramatically confirmed with the Covid-19 crisis.

The pandemic is hitting the heart of capitalism, especially the US. Compared to the crisis of 1989, the implosion of the Eastern bloc, which opened the phase of decomposition, a crucial difference is precisely that the crisis of Covid-19 does not affect a particularly backward part of the capitalist mode of production, that it cannot therefore be presented as a victory of ‘democratic capitalism’ since it impacts the centre of the capitalist system, the democracies of Europe and the US. Like a boomerang, the worst effects of decomposition, which capitalism had pushed for years to the periphery of the system, are coming back to the industrialised countries, which are now at the centre of the turmoil and far from being rid of all its effects. This impact on the central industrialised countries had certainly already been underlined by the ICC in terms of the control of the political game, in particular from 2017 onwards, but today, the American, British and German bourgeoisies (and following them those of the other industrialised countries) are at the heart of the pandemic hurricane and its consequences at the health, economic, political, social and ideological levels.

Among the central countries, it is the most powerful of them, the US superpower, which is suffering most from the impact of the Covid-19 crisis: the highest absolute number of infections and deaths in the world, a deplorable health situation, a ‘vandal’ presidential administration that has catastrophically mismanaged the pandemic and internationally isolated the country from its alliances, an economy in great difficulty, a president who has undermined the credibility of elections, called for a march on parliament, deepened divisions within the country and fuelled mistrust of science and rational data, described as "fake news". Today, the US is the epicentre of decomposition.

How can it be explained that the pandemic does indeed seem to affect the "periphery" of the system less this time (number of infections, number of deaths), and in particular Asia and Africa? There are of course a series of circumstantial reasons: climate, population density or geographical isolation (as shown by the cases of New Zealand, Australia or Finland in Europe) but also the relative reliability of the data: for example, the figure for deaths by Covid-19 in 2020 in Russia turns out to be three times higher than the official figure (185,000 instead of 55,000) according to one of the deputy prime ministers, Tatjana Golikova, on the basis of excess mortality.[9]

More fundamentally, the fact that Asia and Africa have previous experience in managing pandemics (N1N1, Ebola) certainly played in their favour. Then, there are various explanations of an economic nature (the more or less high density of international exchanges and contacts, the choice of limited lockdown allowing economic activity to continue), social (an elderly population parked by the hundreds in ‘retirement homes’), medical (a more or less high average lifespan: cf. France: 82.4 / Vietnam: 76 / China: 76.1 / Egypt: 70.9 / Philippines: 68.5 / Congo: 64.7 and a more or less high resilience to disease). In addition, African, Asian and Latin American countries are and will be heavily impacted indirectly by the pandemic e.g. through delays in vaccination in the periphery, the economic effects of the Covid-19 crisis and the slowdown in world trade, as indicated by the current danger of famine in Central America due to the economic downturn. Finally, the fact that European countries and the US avoid as much as possible imposing drastic and brutal lockdowns and controls, such as those decreed in China, is no doubt also linked to the prudence of the bourgeoisie towards a working class, disoriented but not beaten, which is not ready to let itself be ‘locked up’ by the state. The loss of control of its political apparatus and the anger among a population confronted with the collapse of health services and the failure of health policies make it all the more necessary for it to act with circumspection.

 

2. The Covid-19 crisis heralds a powerful acceleration of the process of decomposition

 

Faced with a proletarian political milieu which, after having denied past expressions of decomposition, considers the pandemic crisis as a transitional episode, the ICC must stress on the contrary that the scale of the Covid-19 crisis and its consequences implies that there will be no ‘return to normal’. Even if the deepening of decomposition, as was the case with decadence, is not linear, even if the departure of the populist Trump and the coming to power of Biden in the world's leading power may initially present the image of an illusory stabilisation, one must be aware that various trends that manifested themselves during the Covid-19 crisis mark an acceleration of the process of capitalism rotting on its feet, of the self-destruction of the system.

2.1. The decomposition of superstructures is now infecting the economic base

In 2007, our analysis still concluded that:

“Paradoxically, the economic situation of capitalism is the aspect of this society which is the least affected by decomposition. This is the case mainly because it is precisely the economic situation which, in the last instance, determines the other aspects of the life of this system, including those that relate to decomposition. (…) Today, despite all the speeches about the triumph of liberalism and the free play of the market, the states have not renounced intervening in the economies of their respective countries, or the use of structures whose task is to regulate as far as possible the relations between them, even creating new ones such as the World Trade Organisation.” (Resolution on the international situation to the 17th ICC Congress, 2007)[10]

Until then, economic crisis and decomposition had been separated by state action, the former not seeming to be affected by the latter.

In fact, the international mechanisms of state capitalism, deployed within the framework of the imperialist blocs (1945-89), had been maintained from the 1990s on the initiative of the industrialised countries as a palliative to the crisis and as a protective shield against the effects of decomposition. The ICC understood the multilateral mechanisms of economic cooperation and a certain coordination of economic policies not as a unification of capital at the world level, nor as a tendency to super-imperialism, but as a collaboration between bourgeoisies at the international level in order to regulate and organise the market and world production, to slow down and reduce the pace of the plunge crisis, to avoid the impact of the effects of decomposition on the nerve centre of the economy, and finally to protect the heart of capitalism (USA, Germany...). However, this mechanism of resistance against the crisis and decomposition was tending to erode more and more. Since 2015, several phenomena have begun to express such an erosion: a trend towards a considerable weakening of coordination between countries, particularly with regard to economic recovery (and which is in clear contrast to the coordinated response to the 2008-2011 crisis), a fragmentation of relations between and within states. Since 2016, the vote in favour of Brexit and the Trump presidency have increased the paralysis and risk of fragmentation of the European Union and intensified the trade war between the US and China, as well as the economic tensions between the US and Germany.

A major consequence of the Covid-19 crisis is the fact that the effects of decomposition, the accentuation of every man for himself and the loss of control, which until then had essentially affected the superstructure of the capitalist system, now tend to have a direct impact on the economic basis of the system, its capacity to manage economic jolts as it sinks into its historic crisis.

"When we developed our analysis of decomposition, we considered that this phenomenon affected the form of imperialist conflicts (see "Militarism and decomposition", International Review 64) and also the consciousness of the proletariat. On the other hand, we considered that it had no real impact on the evolution of the crisis of capitalism. If the current rise of populism were to lead to the coming to power of this current in some of the main European countries, such an impact of decomposition will develop.” (Report on decomposition from the 22nd ICC Congress, 2017).[11]

Indeed, the perspective put forward in 2017 has quickly materialised, and now we have to consider that the economic crisis and decomposition increasingly interfere with and influence each other.

Thus, budgetary restrictions in health policies and hospital care have favoured the expansion of the pandemic, which in turn has led to a collapse of world trade and economies, particularly in the industrialised countries (the GDPs of the main industrialised countries in 2020 will be negative at levels not seen since the Second World War). The economic recession will in turn provide a stimulus to deepen the decomposition of the superstructure. On the other hand, the growing ‘every man for himself’ mentality and loss of control that marked the Covid-19 crisis as a whole is now also infecting the economy. The lack of international consultation between central economic countries is striking (no G7, G8 or G20 meeting in 2020) and the failure of economic and health policy coordination between EU countries is also evident. Faced with the pressure of economic contradictions within the core countries of capitalism; faced with China's hesitations about its policy (whether to continue opening up to the world or to initiate a strategic nationalist withdrawal to Asia), the shocks at the level of the economic base will tend to become increasingly strong and chaotic.

2.2. Central countries at the heart of the growing instability of relations within and between bourgeoisies

In previous years, we have seen an exacerbation of tensions within and between bourgeoisies. In particular, with the coming to power of Trump and the implementation of Brexit, this has manifested itself intensely at the level of the bourgeoisies. The American and British bourgeoisies were hitherto regarded as the most stable and experienced in the world, but the consequences of the Covid-19 crisis can only sharpen these tensions even more:

- The British bourgeoisie enters the post-Brexit fog having lost the support of the US big brother because of Trump's defeat, while at the same time suffering the full consequences of the pandemic. As far as Brexit is concerned, dissatisfaction with the fuzzy agreement with the EU appears as much among those who did not want it (the Scots, the Northern Irish) as among those who wanted a hard Brexit (the fishermen), while there is no agreement (or not yet?) with the EU on services (80% of trade), and tensions between the EU and the UK are growing (over vaccines, for example). As for the Covid-19 crisis, Britain has had to lockdown again in a hurry, has passed the 120,000 deaths mark and is under terrible pressure on its health services. Meanwhile, the situation is having a deleterious impact on its main political parties, the Tories and Labour, both of which are in the throes of a serious internal crisis.

- The exacerbation of tensions between the US and other states was evident under the Trump administration: "The vandalising behaviour of a Trump, who can denounce American international commitments overnight in defiance of established rules, represents a new and powerful factor of uncertainty, providing further impetus towards ‘each against all’. It is a further indication of the new stage in which capitalism is sinking further into barbarism and the abyss of untrammelled militarism” (Point 13, Resolution on the international situation of the 23rd ICC Congress, 2019).[12] But within the US bourgeoisie itself, tensions are also high. This had already manifested itself over the strategy for maintaining its supremacy during the catastrophic Iraqi adventure of Bush junior:

"The accession of the ‘Neo-Cons’ to the head of the American state represents a real catastrophe for the American bourgeoisie. (…) In fact, the arrival of the team of Cheney, Rumsfeld and Co. to the reins of the state was not the simple result of a monumental mistake in casting by the ruling class. While it has considerably worsened the situation of the US on the imperialist level, it was already the expression of the impasse facing the US, given the growing weakening of its leadership and more generally given the development of ‘every man for himself’ in international relations which characterises the phase of decomposition.” (Resolution on the international situation of the 17th ICC Congress, 2007).[13]

But with Trump's ‘vandalist’ policy and the Covid-19 crisis, the oppositions within the US bourgeoisie appeared to be much broader (immigration, economy); and above all, the capacity of the political apparatus to maintain the cohesion of a fragmented society seems to have been undermined. Indeed, national ‘unity’ and ‘identity’ have congenital weaknesses that make them vulnerable to decomposition. For example: the existence of large ethnic and migrant communities, who have suffered racial discrimination from the very beginning of the USA and some of whom are excluded from 'official' life; the weight of churches and sects spreading irrational and anti-scientific thinking; the considerable autonomy of the states of the 'American Union' from the federal government (there is, for example, an independence movement in Texas); the increasingly sharp opposition between the states on the East and West coasts (California, Oregon, Washington, New York, Massachusetts, etc.) taking full advantage of ‘globalisation’, and the southern (Tennessee, Louisiana, etc.), rust belt (Indiana, Ohio, etc.) and deep-central (Oklahoma, Kansas, etc.) states, who are much more favourable to a more protectionist approach – all tend to favour a fragmentation of American society, even if the federal state is still far from having lost control of the situation. However, the vaudeville of contesting the process and results of the last presidential elections, as well as the ‘storming’ of the Capitol by Trump supporters in front of the whole world, as in any banana republic, confirms the accentuation of this trend towards fragmentation.

Concerning the future exacerbation of tensions within and between bourgeoisies, two points need to be clarified.

a) Biden's appointment does not change the basis of US problems

The advent of the Biden administration in no way signifies the reduction of intra- and inter-bourgeois tensions and in particular the end of the imprint on domestic and foreign policy of Trump's populism: on the one hand, four years of unpredictability and vandalism by Trump, most recently with regard to the catastrophic management of the pandemic, profoundly affect the domestic situation in the USA and the fragmentation of American society, as well as its international positioning. Moreover, Trump will have done everything during the last period of his presidency to make the situation even more chaotic for his successor (cf. the letter from the last 10 defence ministers enjoining Trump not to involve the army in the contestation of the election results in December 2020; the occupation of Congress by its supporters). Secondly, Trump's election result shows that about half of the population shares his ideas and in particular his aversion to political elites. Finally, the hold of Trump and his ideas on a large part of the Republican Party heralds a difficult management for the unpopular (apart from among the political elites) Biden administration. Its victory is due more to an anti-Trump polarisation than to enthusiasm for the new president's programme.

Thus, while in form and in certain areas, such as climate policy or immigration, the Biden administration will tend to break with Trump's policy, its internal policy of ‘revenge’ by the elites on both coasts against ‘Deep America’ (the issues of fossil fuels and the ‘Wall’ are precisely linked to this) and an external policy marked by the maintenance of Trump's attitudes in the Middle East and a strengthening of the confrontation with China (cf. Biden's harsh attitude towards Xi in their first telephone conversation and the US demand that the EU review its trade treaty with China) can only lead in the long run to increased instability within the US bourgeoisie and between bourgeoisies.

b) China is not the great victor in this situation

Officially, China presents itself as the ‘country that defeated the pandemic’. What is its situation in reality? To answer this question, it is necessary to assess the short-term (effective control of the pandemic) and medium-term impact of the Covid-19 crisis.

China has an overwhelming responsibility for the emergence and expansion of the pandemic. After the SARS outbreak in 2003, protocols were established for local authorities to warn the central authorities; already with the swine fever epidemic in 2019 it became clear that this was not working because, in Stalinist state capitalism, local officials fear for their career/promotion if they announce bad news. The same was true at the beginning of Covid-19 in Wuhan. It was the ‘democratic citizen oppositions’ who after much delay finally got the news through to the central level. The central level was in turn initially conspicuous by its absence: it did not notify the WHO and, for three weeks, Xi was absent from the scene: three precious weeks of lost time. Since then, moreover, China has still refused to provide the WHO with verifiable data on the development of the pandemic on its territory.

The short-term impact is above all indirect. At the direct level, the official figures for contamination and deaths are unreliable (these range from 30,000 to several million) and, according to the New York Times, the Chinese government itself may be unaware of the extent of the epidemic as local authorities lie about the number of infections, tests and deaths for fear of reprisals from the central government. However, the imposition of ruthless and barbaric lockdowns on entire regions, literally locking millions of people in their homes for weeks (imposed again regularly in recent months), has totally paralysed the Chinese economy for several weeks, leading to massive unemployment (205 million in May 2020) and disastrous crop failure (in combination with droughts, floods and locust invasions). For 2020, China’s GDP is down by more than 4% compared to 2019 (+6.1% to +1.9%); domestic consumption has been maintained by a massive release of credits from the State.

In the longer term, the Chinese economy is faced with the relocation of strategic industries by the United States and European countries and the difficulties of the "New Silk Road" because of the financial problems linked to the economic crisis and accentuated by the Covid-19 crisis (with its impact on Chinese financing but above all because of the level of indebtedness of ‘partner’ countries such as Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal, etc.) but also by growing mistrust on the part of many countries and anti-Chinese pressure from the United States. So, it should come as no surprise that in 2020 there has been a collapse in the financial value of the investments injected into the "New Silk Road" project (-64%).

The Covid-19 crisis and the obstacles encountered by the "New Silk Road" have also accentuated the increasingly evident tensions at the head of the Chinese state, between the ‘economist’ faction, which relies above all on economic globalisation and ‘multilateralism’ to pursue China's capitalist expansion, and the ‘nationalist’ faction, which calls for a more muscular policy and puts forward force ("China defeated Covid") in the face of internal threats (the Uighurs, Hong Kong, Taiwan) and external threats (tensions with the USA, India and Japan). In the perspective of the next People's Congress in 2022, which should appoint the new (former?) president, the situation in China is therefore also particularly unstable.

2.3. State capitalism as a factor exacerbating contradictions

"As the GCF pointed out in 1952 state capitalism is not a solution to the contradictions of capitalism, even if it can delay their effects, but is an expression of them. The capacity of the state to hold a decaying society together, however invasive it becomes, is therefore destined to weaken over time and in the end become an aggravating factor of the very contradictions it is trying to contain. The decomposition of capitalism is the period in which a growing loss of control by the ruling class and its state becomes the dominant trend of social evolution, which Covid reveals so dramatically.” (Report on the Covid-19 pandemic and the period of capitalist decomposition, July 2020)[14]

The pandemic crisis expresses in a particularly acute way the contradiction between the need for massive intervention by state capitalism in an attempt to limit the effects of the crisis and an opposite tendency to loss of control, to fragmentation, itself exacerbated by these attempts by the state to maintain its control.

The Covid-19 crisis in particular marked an acceleration in the loss of credibility of the state apparatus. While state capitalism intervened on a massive scale to deal with the effects of the pandemic crisis (health measures, lockdown, mass vaccination, generalised financial compensation to cushion the economic impact, etc.), the measures taken at the various levels have often proved ineffective or have led to new contradictions (vaccination exacerbates the anti-state opposition of the 'anti-vaxxers', economic compensation for one sector causes discontent in others). Consequently, if the state is supposed to represent society as a whole and maintain its cohesion, society sees it less and less in this way: in the face of the growing carelessness and irresponsibility of the bourgeoisie, increasingly evident in central countries too, the tendency is to see the state as a structure at the service of corrupt elites, as well as a force of repression. As a result, it is having more and more difficulty in imposing rules: in many European countries, for example in Italy, France or Poland, and also in the USA, demonstrations have taken place against government measures to close down businesses or to impose lockdowns. Everywhere, especially among young people, social media campaigns are appearing to oppose these rules, such as the hashtag "I don't want to play the game anymore" in Holland.

The inability of states to deal with the situation is both symbolised and affected by the impact of populist 'vandalism'. The disruption of the political game of the bourgeoisie in the industrialised countries manifested itself in an explicit way from the beginning of the 21st century with populist movements and parties, often close to the extreme right. Thus, let us note the surprise rise of Le Pen in the final round of the 2002 presidential election in France, the dazzling and spectacular breakthrough of the "Pim Fortuyn list" in the Netherlands in 2001-2002, the Berlusconi governments with the support of the extreme right in Italy, the rise of Jorg Haider and the FPÖ in Austria, or the rise of the Tea Party in the USA. Even then, the ICC tended to link the phenomenon to the weakness of the bourgeoisies:

"They depend on the strength or weakness of the national bourgeoisie. In Italy, the bourgeoisie’s weaknesses and internal divisions, even from the imperialist viewpoint, have led to the upsurge of a substantial populist right. In Britain on the contrary, the virtual non-existence of a specific far right party is due to the British bourgeoisie’s greater experience and superior grip over its own political game."[15]

While the trend of loss of control is global and has marked the periphery (countries like Brazil, Venezuela, Peru in Latin America, the Philippines or India in Asia), it is now hitting the industrialised countries, the historically strongest bourgeoisies (Britain) and today especially the US. While the populist wave is focused on contesting the establishment, the coming to power of populists is further undermining and destabilising state structures through their ‘vandalist’ policies (cf. Trump, Bolsonaro, but also the Five Star and Lega ‘populist government’ in Italy), as they are neither willing nor able to responsibly take over the affairs of state.

These observations go against the thesis that the bourgeoisie, through these measures, is mobilising and subduing the population in order to march towards a generalised war. On the contrary, the chaotic health policies and the inability of the states to face the situation express the difficulty of the bourgeoisies of the central countries to impose their control on society. The development of this tendency can alter the credibility of democratic institutions (without this implying in the present context the slightest strengthening of the class terrain) or, on the contrary, stimulate the development of campaigns to defend them, or even to restore ‘real democracy’: thus, regarding the assault on the Capitol, we see a clash between those who want to reconquer democracy ‘taken hostage by the elites’ ("the Capitol is our home") and those who defend democracy against a populist putsch.

The fact that the bourgeoisie is less and less able to present a perspective for society as a whole also generates a frightening expansion of irrational alternative ideologies and a growing disregard for a scientific and reasoned approach. Certainly, the decomposition of the values of the ruling class is not new. It appeared at the end of the 1960s, but the deepening of the decomposition, chaos and barbarism favours the advent of hatred and violence of nihilist ideologies and the most retrograde religious sectarianism. The Covid-19 crisis stimulates the large-scale spread of these. Movements such as QAnon, Wolverine Watchmen, Proud Boys or the Boogaloo movement in the USA, evangelical sects in Brazil, Latin America or Africa, Sunni or Shiite Muslim sects but also Hindu or Buddhist ones spread conspiracy theories and spread totally fanciful conceptions about the virus, the pandemic, about the origin (creationism) or future of society. The exponential spread of irrational thinking and the rejection of the contributions of science will tend to accelerate.

2.4. The proliferation of anti-state riots and inter-classist movements

Explosions of popular revolts against misery and warlike barbarity were present from the beginning of the phase of decomposition and are becoming more pronounced in the 21st century: Argentina (2001-02), the French suburbs in 2005, Iran in 2009, London and other British cities in 2011, the outbreak of riots in the Maghreb and the Middle East in 2011-12 (the "Arab Spring"). A new wave of social riots broke out in Chile, Ecuador or Colombia (2019), Iran (in 2017-18 and again in 2019-20), Iraq, Lebanon (2019-20), but also in Romania (2017) in Bulgaria (2013 and 2019-20) or in France with the ‘yellow vests’ movement (2018-19) and, with specific characteristics, in Ferguson (2014) and Baltimore (2016) in the USA. These revolts manifest the growing despair of populations suffering from the breakdown of social relations, subjected to the traumatic and dramatic consequences of impoverishment linked to economic collapse or endless wars. They are also increasingly targeting the corruption of ruling cliques and more generally political elites.

In the aftermath of the Covid-19 crisis, such outbursts of anger multiplied, taking the form of demonstrations and even riots. They tend to crystallise around three poles:

(a) inter-classist movements, expressing revolt at the economic and social consequences of the Covid-19 crisis (example of the 'Yellow Vests');

(b) identity movements, whether of populist (MAGA) origin or as expressions of partial struggles, tending to exacerbate tensions between components of the population (such as revolts about race, eg Black Lives Matter), but also religiously inspired movements (in India, for example);

(c) anti-establishment and anti-state movements in the name of ‘individual freedom’, of a nihilistic type, without any real ‘alternatives’, such as ‘anti-vax’ or conspiracy movements ("get my institutions back from the hands of the elites").

These types of movements often lead to riots and looting, serving as an outlet for gangs of young people from neighbourhoods undermined by decomposition. While these movements highlight the significant loss of credibility of the political structures of the bourgeoisie, none of them offer in any way a perspective for the working class. Any revolt against the state is not always a favourable terrain for the proletariat: on the contrary, they divert it from its class terrain to a terrain that is not its own.

2.5. The exploitation of the ecological threat by the bourgeoisie's campaigns

The pandemic illustrates the dramatic worsening of environmental degradation, which is reaching alarming levels, according to the findings and forecasts that are now unanimously accepted in scientific circles and which the majority of the bourgeois sectors of all countries have taken up (Paris Agreement, 2015): urban air pollution and ocean water pollution, climate change with increasingly violent meteorological phenomena, the advance of desertification, and the accelerated disappearance of plant and animal species that increasingly threaten the biological balance of our planet.

“The scale and the proliferation of all these economic and social calamities, which spring generally speaking from the decadence of the system itself, reveals the fact that this system is trapped in a complete dead-end, and has no future to propose to the greater part of the world population other than a growing and unimaginable barbarity. This is a system where economic policy, research, investment are all conducted to the detriment of humanity’s future, and even to the detriment of the system itself.” (Point 7, Theses on Decomposition, 1990)[16]

The ruling class is unable to implement the necessary measures because of the very laws of capitalism and more specifically because of the exacerbation of contradictions caused by the sinking into decomposition; consequently, the ecological crisis can only worsen and lead to new catastrophes in the future. However, in recent decades, the bourgeoisie has tried to recuperate the ecological dimension in an attempt to put forward a perspective of ‘reforms within the system’. In particular, the bourgeoisies in the industrialised countries are placing the ‘ecological transition’ and the ‘green economy’ at the centre of their current campaigns to gain acceptance for a perspective of drastic austerity as part of their post-Covid economic policies aimed at restructuring and strengthening the competitive position of the industrialised countries. Thus, they are at the centre of the European Commission's ‘recovery plans’ for EU countries and the Biden administration's stimulus package in the US. In the coming years, therefore, the question of ecology will be more than ever be the source of major mystifications to be fought by revolutionaries.

 

3. Conclusions

 

This report has shown that the pandemic does not open a new period, but that it is first of all a revelation of the level of putrefaction reached during the 30 years of the phase of decomposition, a level that has often been underestimated until now. At the same time, the pandemic crisis also heralds a significant acceleration of various effects of decomposition in the period ahead, which is illustrated in particular by the impact of the Covid-19 crisis on the management of the economy by states and by its devastating effects on the central industrial countries, and in particular on the US superpower. There are possibilities for occasional countertrends, which may impose a pause or even a certain resumption of control by state capitalism, but these specific events will by no means mean that the historical dynamics of sinking into the phase of decomposition, highlighted in this report, will be called into question.

If the perspective is not for a generalised world war (between imperialist blocs), the current plunge into every man for himself and fragmentation nevertheless brings the sinister promise of a multiplication of murderous warlike conflicts, revolts without perspectives or catastrophes for humanity.

"The course of history cannot be turned back: as its name suggests, decomposition leads to social dislocation and putrefaction, to the void. Left to its own devices, it will lead humanity to the same fate as world war. In the end, it is all the same whether we are wiped out in a rain of thermonuclear bombs, or by pollution, radioactivity from nuclear power stations, famine, epidemics, and the massacres of innumerable small wars (where nuclear weapons might also be used). The only difference between these two forms of annihilation lies in that one is quick, while the other would be slower, and would consequently provoke still more suffering”. (Point 11, Theses on Decomposition)

The progression of the phase of decomposition can also lead to a decline in the capacity of the proletariat to carry out its revolutionary action. The proletariat is thus engaged in a race against time against the sinking of society into the barbarity of a historically obsolete system. Of course, workers' struggles cannot prevent the development of decomposition, but they can stop the effects of it, of every man for himself. As a reminder, "capitalism’s decadence was necessary for the proletariat to be able to overthrow the system; by contrast, the appearance of this specific phase of decomposition as a result of the continuation of the decadent period without its leading to a proletarian revolution, is in no way a necessary stage for the proletariat on the road towards its emancipation." (Point 12, Theses on Decomposition)

The Covid-19 crisis is therefore creating an even more unpredictable and confusing situation. Tensions on different levels (health, socio-economic, military, political, ideological) will generate major social upheavals, massive popular revolts, destructive riots, intense ideological campaigns, such as the one around ecology. Without a solid framework for understanding events, revolutionaries will not be able to play their role as the political vanguard of the class, but will on the contrary contribute to its confusion, to the decline of its ability to carry out its revolutionary action.

This report follows on from the report adopted by the 24th Congress of RI.[1] Several aspects are adequately dealt with in that report, including the measures taken in the economic field in the face of the pandemic; the violent incursion of decomposition onto the economic terrain, and the attack on workers' living conditions becoming a real nightmare. We will not develop these elements but will concentrate on the perspective: where is the world economy heading after the great cataclysm that erupted with the Covid pandemic?

1. A widely predicted crisis

The Report on the economic crisis adopted by the 23rd ICC Congress announced that: “we must consider the possibility of significant shocks in the global economy in 2019-2020. Negative factors are accumulating increasingly uncontrollable debt; the trade war that is raging; sharp devaluations of overvalued financial assets; a -0.1% contraction of the German economy in the third quarter of 2018, with the Chinese economy falling to its lowest rate in the last decade.”

For 2020, the World Bank recorded a global fall in output of 5.2%, which is 7% for the world's top 23 economies and 2.5% in the 'developing economies'. According to the World Bank, the fall in output is the worst since 1945 and "the first time since 1870 that so many economies have experienced a simultaneous fall in output".[2] A very important phenomenon is the fall in world trade. One indicator is the drop in world seaborne trade, which fell by 10% in 2020. But, paradoxically, "container prices have on average quadrupled in the last two months. From around $1,500 to almost $5,000. And in some cases, it has been as high as $12,000. This is because countries like China use their ships and containers for their own use, taking them away from global traffic.”[3]

For 2021 a rebound of the world economy is forecast; however, this would be on condition that the pandemic has been overcome by June 2021, otherwise the forecasts are much more pessimistic. There will be feverish increases in growth, but beyond that, we should consider that the most serious forecasts point to a stabilisation of the world economy from 2023 onwards. The experience of the post-2008 recovery is that it took a long time to take hold (from 2013 onwards), was rather anaemic and in 2018 showed signs of exhaustion. As we will see throughout this report, the current conditions of the global economy are much worse than in 2008, and, rather than making predictions, the important thing is to understand this significant deterioration.

On one hand, the 'experts' give a misleading picture of the effects of the pandemic crisis on the economy. They start from the axiom that such a crisis will not have irreversible effects on the economic apparatus and that the economy will recover at a higher level than in the previous period. Such an assumption underestimates the significant deterioration of the long-standing productive, financial and commercial tissue, which the pandemic crisis is likely to profoundly weaken. It is estimated that 30% of companies may disappear permanently in OECD countries. Behind us we have more than 100 years of capitalist decadence, with the economy deformed by the war economy and the effects of environmental destruction, profoundly altered in its reproductive mechanisms by indebtedness and state manipulations, eroded by pandemics, and increasingly affected by the effects of decomposition. In such conditions it is illusory to think that the economy will recover without the slightest scratch.

On the other hand, the profound weakness of the proclaimed 'recovery' of 2013-2018 already heralded the current situation. Outside the United States, China, and to a lesser extent Germany, production in all the major countries of the world has stagnated or fallen (according to World Bank estimates) - something that has not happened since the Second World War.

2. The irruption of decomposition on the economic terrain

Already at the 22nd Congress we noticed the growing impact of the effects of decomposition on the economic terrain and particularly on the state capitalist management of the crisis. We were aware of this tendency in the economic crisis report adopted by the 23rd Congress that noted this irruption of decomposition as one of the main factors in the evolution of the economic situation and, finally, the report on the crisis adopted by the 24th Congress of RI deepened this analysis and focused on the pandemic in a double sense: as a result of decomposition and of the aggravation of the economic crisis, but at the same time a powerful factor in the acceleration of the latter.

It’s important to underline our approach to the question: one of the features of decadence is that the capitalist system tries to stretch all the possibilities contained in its relations of production to their extreme limits, even at the risk of violating its own economic laws. So,

“one of the major contradictions of capitalism is that arising from the conflict between the increasingly global nature of production and the necessarily national structure of capital. By pushing to its limits, the economic, financial and productive possibilities of the 'associations' of nations, capitalism has obtained a significant 'breath of fresh air' in its fight against the crisis, but at the same time it has put itself in a risky situation” (23rd Congress Report).

This 'risky situation' has been demonstrating its serious consequences linked to the impact of decomposition on the economic terrain, especially in the last five years of the 2010s.

The pandemic is the expression of the acceleration of decomposition and, at the same time, aggravates it further. The report on the economic crisis is focussed on this fundamental reality. The Resolution on the Situation in France of the 24th RI Congress shows this central axis quite clearly:

"In 2008, during the 'subprime crisis', the bourgeoisie was able to react in a coordinated manner on an international scale. The famous G7, G8, ... G20 (which were in the headlines) symbolised this capacity of states to agree at the very least to try to respond to the 'debt crisis'. 12 years later, division, the 'war of masks' and then the 'war of vaccines', the cacophony of decisions to close borders against the spread of the COVID 19, the lack of consultation at the international level (except for Europe, which is struggling to protect itself against its competitors) to limit the economic collapse, are signs of the advance of 'every man for himself' and the plunge of the highest political circles of capitalism into an increasingly irrational management of the system.”

This tendency is becoming even stronger, particularly in the US where a long trend of economic decline is combined with an unprecedent aggravation of decomposition in its political apparatus and its social tissue.

However, it would be a mistake to think that this tendency is limited to the United States. In Europe, Germany seems to have reacted, but tensions within the EU are increasingly evident, and the shock of Brexit will have consequences that have not yet surfaced. China's 'stability' is more apparent than real.

Consequently, we can say that the effects of the breakdown in the economic sphere and in state management of the economy are here to stay and will have an increasingly strong influence on economic developments. It is true that the bourgeoisie is going to set in motion countertendencies (for example, the EU agreements on partial mutualisation of the debt or Biden's annulment of certain measures adopted by Trump). However, beyond the brakes or the reversal measures, the weight of decomposition on the economy and on the state management of the latter is going to become stronger, with consequences that are for the moment difficult to predict. Rather than making predictions, we need to monitor developments closely and draw conclusions within the overall framework we set up.

3. Bailing out the economy cannot be done under the same conditions as in 2008.

With the response that capital in most countries has been forced to give to the pandemic (the lockdown that has not yet ended), one of the worst recessions in history has occurred.

To prevent a generalised collapse, the bourgeoisie has been forced to inject billions. This has allowed it to 'muddle through', to 'weather the storm'.[4] It will be necessary to 'rescue the world economy'. And how will this complicated operation be carried out?

We can say that it will be done in much worse conditions than in 2008, that it will entail a violent dose of austerity and that the world economy will be left in a much more deteriorated condition, with less capacity for recovery, and will experience greater chaos and significant convulsions.

Five factors explain these worse conditions:

1. The growing weight of decomposition on the economy and state capitalism

2. China will no longer be able to play the role of a locomotive providing a lifeline as it did in response to 2008

3. Environmental disaster

4. The weight of the war economy

5. The crushing weight of debt.

4. The gradual dislocation of the economic edifice of globalisation

With the pandemic we have witnessed a chaotic and irrational response by states, starting with the largest and most powerful ones. The WHO has been ignored by all states, thus preventing the required international strategy based as much as possible on scientific criteria. Each state has tried to close its economy as late as possible in order not to lose competitive and imperialist advantages over its rivals. By the same token, economies have been reopened with the aim of gaining advantages over rivals, and the closures provoked by the worsening of the pandemic have been trapped in the contradiction between the need to maintain and increase production in the face of rivals and the need to prevent the productive apparatus and social cohesion from being undermined by new waves of contagion.

The mask war has been a degrading spectacle: states considered 'serious' such as France or Germany were blatantly stealing shipments of masks destined for other national capitals. The same has happened with equipment such as breathing apparatus, oxygen, personal protective equipment, etc.

In the current war over vaccines: their manufacture, their distribution, and the vaccinations themselves, are all revealing the growing disorder which the world economy is sliding into.

In vaccine research and manufacture, we have seen a chaotic race between states in fierce competition. Britain, China, Russia, the United States ... have been in a race against the clock to be the first to have the vaccine. International coordination has been absent. Vaccines have been tested in record time with no real guarantee of efficacy.

Distribution is equally chaotic. The EU's conflict with the British company AstraZeneca is testimony to this. The richer countries have left the poorer ones unprotected. Israel has vaccinated its nationals while side-lining the Palestinians. Russia uses misleading propaganda to present its vaccine as the best. It is evidence that the vaccine is used as an instrument of imperialist influence. Russia and China make no secret of this and openly proclaim that they will offer lower prices to those countries that bow to their economic, political and military demands.

Finally, the way in which the population is being vaccinated is mind-bogglingly disorganised and undisciplined. In France, Germany, Spain, Italy, to give just a few examples, there is a constant lack of supply, causing delays in vaccination even in the groups identified as priority (health workers, the over-65s). Vaccination plans have been delayed several times. Often the first dose is administered and the second is delayed sine die, thus nullifying the effectiveness of the vaccine. Rulers, politicians, businessmen, the military etc. have bypassed the list of priority groups and have been vaccinated first.

What this degrading spectacle around vaccines shows us is a growing tendency for capitalism to undermine the capacity for 'international cooperation' that had managed to mitigate the economic crisis in the period 1990-2008. Capitalism is founded on competition to the death - and this constituent feature of capitalism did not disappear in the heyday of 'globalisation' - but what we see now is an exacerbated competition, taking as its field something as sensitive as health and epidemics. If in the ascendant period of capitalism competition between capitals and nations was a factor of expansion and development of the system, in decadence it is, on the contrary, a factor of destruction and chaos: destruction with the barbarism of imperialist war; chaos (that also includes destruction and wars) especially with the irruption of the effects of decomposition on the economic terrain and its state management. This chaos will increasingly affect global production and supply chains, the planning of production, the ability to combat 'unexpected' phenomena such as pandemics or other catastrophes.

The repatriation of production to the home country by multinationals was already underway since 2017 but seems to have accelerated with the pandemic:

"A study released this week by Bank of America, on 3,000 companies with a total market capitalisation of $22 trillion and located in 12 major global sectors, states that 80% of these companies have relocation plans to repatriate part of their production from abroad. 'This is the first turning point in a decades-long trend,' the authors proclaim. In the last three years, some 153 companies have returned to the US while 208 have done so in the EU."[5]

Are these measures irreversible? Are we witnessing the end of the phase of 'globalisation', i.e. global production, strongly interconnected with an international division of labour, with production, transport and logistics chains organised on a global scale?

The first consideration is that the pandemic is taking longer than expected. On 28 September 2020, the figure of one million deaths was reached; on 15 January, less than three months later, this reached two million. Although vaccines are being applied, the WHO's scientific director, Soumya Swaminathan, predicts that we will have to wait until 2022 to reach reasonable immunisation of the population in Europe. It is likely that the disruption and interruptions in production will continue throughout 2021.

Secondly, if we look at historical experience, we can see that the measures of state capitalism that were taken in response to the First World War did not disappear completely after the end of the war; and 10 years later, with the crisis of 1929, they made a gigantic leap, confirming the correct prediction of the First Congress of the Communist International:

“All the fundamental questions of the world's economic life are no longer regulated by free competition, not even by combinations of national and international trusts or consortiums. They have fallen under the yoke of military tyranny to serve as its safeguard from now on. If the absolute subjection of political power to finance capital has led mankind to imperialist butchery, this butchery has allowed finance capital not only to militarise the state to the end, but to militarise itself, so that it can only fulfil its essential economic functions with iron and blood.”[6]

By the same token, it’s likely that the measures taken in response to the pandemic on the economic terrain will remain in place, even if there will be partial setbacks.

This is confirmed by the fact that, since 2015, as we made clear in the report of the 23rd Congress, China, Germany and the United States have been moving in this direction. The measures taken during the pandemic only deepen an orientation that was already present in the 2010s.

That the big powers have not, for the moment, coordinated their financial and economical responses to the danger of bankruptcy is evidence of this. While, in the 2008 crisis, meetings of the G8, G20 etc proliferated, this kind of meeting is now obviously absent.[7]

However, the globalised structure of world production offers major advantages to the most powerful economies, and they will take actions to correct the major disruptions outlined above. A really clear example: the plan to mutualise debts in the EU particularly benefits Germany which will consolidate its exports to Spain, Italy, etc. These countries, presented as 'the great beneficiaries', will in the end be the big losers, as their industrial tissue will be weakened by the overwhelming competition from German exports. In fact, debt mutualisation will help Germany to counter the Chinese presence in southern European countries, which has strengthened since 2013. We are not witnessing a dismantling of globalisation, but rather its increasing dislocation (for example, through the tendency towards fragmentation into regional areas), the much greater weight of protectionist tendencies, the relocation of production areas, the multiplication of measures that each country takes on its own, in breach of international agreements. In short, a growing chaos in the functioning of the world economy.

5. Chinese policy

In the period 2009-2015, China played an essential role with its purchases and investments in the weak revival of the world economy after the severe upheaval of 2008. In the face of the present situation, can China play the same role as the locomotive of the world economy?

We think that this is very unlikely for at least 4 reasons:

1) China's current situation is much weaker than it was then: growth in output continues to decline slowly but surely; according to the IMF, China will have the worst growth in 35 years: only 1.2%. This how the International Communist Party (Bordigist) expressed it:
"in China, the official unemployment rate was 6% at the end of April; but a study by a Chinese organisation estimated real unemployment at the same date at 20.5% (or 70 million unemployed); the study was withdrawn and the organisation's management punished by the authorities, but Western economists put forward figures of the same order.” (cited in our internal bulletin, 2020)

China's level of indebtedness is gigantic (300% of GDP in 2019); the situation of many of its companies is very fragile. For example, in China 30% of companies are ‘zombies’,[8] which is the highest percentage in the world (in Germany and France it is estimated at 10%). Also state-owned companies still hold a large share in the economy and these companies have the highest debt burden.

2. The Silk Road project - a 60-country plan of commercial, economic and imperialist expansion - seeks to define a global economic area exclusive to China, with the result that the role it can play in stimulating world trade will diminish. China's rivals and especially the USA have responded with a trade war and in the Asia-Oceania area with the Trans-Pacific Economic Cooperation Agreement that links 12 countries in the area. And, among those countries that had to become indebted to China in their participation in the Silk Road project, some have been hardest hit by the economic consequences of the Corona pandemic, threatening their solvency.

3. These 'agreements' show that the dynamic that will dominate the coming years - barring a change in trend, which is highly unlikely - is not one of 'cooperation' but rather a large fragmentation of world production into reserved areas under Chinese, American, German tutelage.

4. The pile of debts, which after 2008 served to 'fuel' the Chinese engine, managed to allow double digit growth in China and also to create bigger markets in China itself for many exporters from the US, East Asia and Europe. But the conditions for this to be repeated do not exist. All countries have become more protectionist. Moreover, the workforce in China, which had been receiving some of the lowest wages, have been receiving higher wages, which has led to considerable job transfers from China to other, still cheaper countries (South-East Asia, Africa).

6. Environmental disaster

The process of ecological destruction (devastation and pollution of environmental and natural resources) goes back a long way. Imperialist war and the war economy have contributed to this process to an important extent. However, the question that arises is to what extent has this process negatively influenced the capitalist economy by hindering accumulation?

In the framework of this report, we cannot give an elaborate answer. However, it’s likely that in the context of the increasing difficulties in collaboration between countries, with the nationalist manoeuvring of each state, ecological destruction will have an increasingly negative impact on the reproduction of capital and will contribute to making the moments of economic recovery in the coming period much weaker and more unstable than in the past.

Air pollution is estimated to kill 7 million people every year. Consumption of contaminated water causes approximately 485,000 deaths every year.[9]

During the 20th century, 260 million people died from indoor air pollution in the Third World – about twice the toll in all the century’s wars. This is more than 4 times more than died from outdoor air pollution.[10]

Extreme weather, mass extinctions, falling agricultural yields, and toxic air and water are already damaging the global economy, with pollution alone costing 4.6 trillion USD every year.[11]

The mere protection of cities along the coasts will swallow large sums – equal to if not superior to all the rescue packages which have had to be adopted under the Corona pandemic. The economic implications of this chaos are very real and the impact of this process of self-destruction is staggering. It is calculated that if climate change increases the temperature by 4ºC, global GDP will fall from 2010 levels by 30% (the fall during the depression of the 30s was 26.7%). The present fall will be permanent: 1,2 billion jobs could be lost. These figures do not consider the deepening economic crisis or the impact of Covid.

All these damages are considerably aggravated by the Covid crisis, even if will take a while to assess its impact. In fact, the Covid crisis itself is a clear expression of the consequences for the economy of ecological destruction:

"The colonisation of natural areas and human contact with animals that are reservoirs of viruses and pathogens is the first link in the chain that explains the pandemics. The destruction of forest habitats in tropical areas means that many pathogens that were previously confined to inaccessible places can be transmitted to humans. People meet species with which they were not previously associated, thus increasing the chances of becoming infected with animal-borne diseases. Animal markets, transport and globalisation then spread them.”[12]

Institutions such as the World Bank clearly warn of the consequences of ecological destruction, for example in terms of the expansion of poverty:

“New research estimates that climate change will push between 68 million and 135 million people into poverty by 2030. Climate change is a serious and specific threat to countries in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, the regions where most poor people are concentrated. In several countries, a large proportion of the poor live in conflict-affected areas with a high degree of exposure to flooding, such as Nepal, Cameroon, Liberia and the Central African Republic.”[13]

The breakdown of international cooperation around the Covid pandemic is a foretaste of the dog-eat-dog attitude that will predominate faced with climate change. The increased economic competition resulting from Covid can only accelerate this dynamic. Capitalism's ability to limit the increase in global temperature is growing weaker.

“Taken together, rapid action against rising temperatures and a renewed commitment to globalisation would put the world economy on track for 2050 output of $185 trillion. Delaying moves to cut carbon emissions, and allowing cross-border ties to fray, could cap it at $149 trillion - the equivalent of kissing goodbye to the entire GDP of the U.S. and China last year.”

The contradiction between the interests of the capitalist nation and the whole capitalist system with the future of humanity could not be clearer. If determined action is taken against climate change, imperialist and economic tensions will be ramped up qualitatively, with the rise of China to becoming the world’s main economy. If no action is taken, the world economy will shrink by 30% with all the consequences that this will bring.

This can only exponentially develop capitalism's destruction of the environment and lay the ground for further pandemics as the conditions for them are expanded, as several internal contributions have shown.[14]

7. The barrier of the war economy

The war economy, as Internationalisme reminded us, is a dead weight on the world economy. In spite of the clear position of the orientation text on militarism and decomposition,[15] parts of the organisation have tended to think that under decomposition, war spending would tend to be reduced and would not have the enormous impact it had in the period of the blocs and the Cold War. This view is false, as the report adopted by the 23rd Congress underlined: "Global military spending experienced - in 2019 - the largest increase in ten years. Over the course of 2019, military spending reached $1.9 trillion (€1.8 trillion) worldwide, an increase of 3.6 percent in one year, the largest since 2010. ‘Military spending reached its highest level since the end of the Cold War,’ said Nan Tian, a researcher at SIPRI.”[16]

The need to address COVID has not diminished the rearmament. The Bundeswehr's budget is up by 2.85% by 2021, Spain is increasing military spending by 4.7, France by 4.5, while the UK is rising by an additional 18.5 billion euros.[17]

In the United States, stirring up anti-China hysteria, the Senate has approved an astronomical increase in military spending, which by 2021 will reach 740 billion dollars. In Japan, "Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga on Monday approved the ninth consecutive increase in the military budget, setting the new all-time record at 5.34 trillion yen (about $51.7 billion), an increase of 1.1% over the previous year's budget".[18]

“The U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Pakistan have cost American taxpayers $6.4 trillion since they began in 2001. That total is $2 trillion more than all federal government spending during the recently completed fiscal year”[19].

There is no available data for China for 2021 but military spending apparently grew less in 2020 than in 2019. However, "the People's Liberation Army reached two major milestones, unveiling its first 100% indigenous aircraft carrier and its first intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching the United States. China also built its first overseas military base in Djibouti in 2017. Beijing is also designing a new generation of destroyers and missiles to strengthen its deterrence against its Asian neighbours and the US Navy.”[20]

Russia dramatically increased military spending in the three-year period 2018-21, Australia "has launched in the last two years an ambitious naval programme to create an ocean-going fleet with twelve new submarines to be built by the French shipyard DCNS, nine frigates (a programme for which Navantia is bidding), two logistics ships and twelve patrol vessels; it will also receive 72 US F-35 fighter planes from Lockheed Martin by 2020. The Australian authorities even plan to double its budget within a decade to 21 billion dollars a year". Scandinavian countries "see Russian threats to their airspace and in the Arctic as less and less a work of fiction, and in the case of Sweden, the revival of compulsory military service and significant increases in the defence budget have been announced."[21]

This tour through the bloody jungle of military spending shows that the war economy and armaments, beyond the initial boost they can give, end up being an increasingly heavy burden for it, and we can foresee that they will participate in the tendency to make the economic recovery that capitalism is seeking for the post-COVID period more fragile and convulsive.[22]

8. The crushing weight of debt

In 1948 the Marshall Plan involved a total amount of loans of 8 billion dollars; the Brady Plan to save South American economies in 1985 involved 50 billion dollars; expenditure to get out of the quagmire of 2008 reached the astronomical figure of 750 billion dollars.

The current figures turn these injections into the economy into small change. The EU has deployed a 750-billion-euro package. In Germany “The government is deploying the largest assistance package in the history of the Federal Republic. To finance this package, the Federation will take out new loans totalling roughly €156 billion.”[23] Biden has proposed a $1.9 trillion economic stimulus and support programme to Congress. The total stimulus poured into the US economy in 2020 is estimated at $4 trillion.

World debt in the third quarter of 2020 was €229 trillion, 365% of world GDP (a new historical record). This debt is 382% in industrialised countries. According to the International Institute of Finance this escalation has been accelerating since 2016 with an increase in the last 4 years of 44 trillion euros. It is within this framework that we must address the consequences of the current escalation of global indebtedness.[24]

The accumulation of capital (the expanded reproduction defined by Marx) has as its basis of development the extra-capitalist markets and the areas insufficiently integrated into capitalism. If both become smaller, the only way out for capital, organised by the state, is indebtedness, which consists of throwing ever larger sums of money into the economy on account of the expected production of the coming years.

If there are no inflationary shocks in the major economies, it is for three reasons:

1) The deflationary tendency that has affected the world economy since 2008.

2) The overvaluation of the assets of companies and even states has become chronic and degraded the economic figures that have ceased to be reliable for decades.

3) Zero-interest rates or even negative interest rates.

One of the factors that allowed global capital to cushion the effects of debt was the international coordination of monetary policies, a certain degree of coordination and organisation of financial transactions on a global scale. If this factor is beginning to fail and 'everyone for themselves' has prevailed, what consequences are to be expected?

Capitalism has deployed the equivalent of three and a half years of world production. Is this an unimportant figure that could be stretched to infinity? Absolutely not. This gigantic gangrene is the breeding ground not only for crazy speculative rallies that have ended up being institutionalised in the indecipherable labyrinth of financial transactions, but also for monetary crises, gigantic bankruptcies of companies and banks and even of significant states. Logically, this process implies that the internal market for capital cannot grow infinitely, even if there is no fixed limit in the matter. It is in this context that the crisis of overproduction at the current stage of its development poses a problem of profitability for capitalism. The bourgeoisie estimates that around 20% of the world’s productive forces are unused. The overproduction of means of production is particularly visible and affects Europe, the United States, India, Japan, etc.[25]

Since 1985, when the USA abandoned its position as creditor to become one of the biggest debtors, the world economy has been suffering from the aberrant situation that practically all countries are in debt; the biggest creditors are in turn the biggest debtors, and everyone knows that. Today after decades of gigantic debts these recent rescue packages have surpassed all previous interventions. However now the big players are all so much in debt, the risk of 'detonations'/avalanches of debts is increasing. Now the 'zero-interest' situation is still facilitating the policy of increasing debt burdens, but - leaving all other factors aside - should interest rates go up, something will tumble...

9. A weakened and unstable world economy

The brutal closure of production has consequences. First, China and Germany, as well as other major producing countries, will find themselves with a huge production overcapacity that cannot be immediately compensated. In general, the machinery sector, electronics, IT, raw material supply, transport etc. will find themselves with huge stocks and a slow revival of demand.

Although there will undoubtedly be moments of recovery in production (which will be enthusiastically cheered in capitalist propaganda), and although there will be countertendencies that the most intelligent sectors of capital will set in motion,[26] what is indisputable is that the world economy will be shaken and weakened in the coming decade.

Over the last half century capitalism has shown a capacity to 'carry on' in the face of the many upheavals it has undergone (1975, 1987, 1998, 2008). However, the global conditions we have just analysed allow us to suggest that this capacity has been considerably weakened. There will not be - as councilists and Bordigists hope - a Great Final Collapse, but because it is the heart of the world economy that is being destabilised - particularly the USA and in an increasing manner also parts of Europe - it will make it more difficult to coordinate a response to the crisis on an international level. Along with the crushing weight of debt, this provides a clear confirmation of the perspective outlined by the 23rd Congress report on the crisis:

“The destabilising weight of unbridled indebtedness; the growing saturation of markets; the growing difficulties of 'globalising management' of the world economy caused by the irruption of populism, but also the sharpening of competition and the weight of the enormous investments demanded by the arms race; lastly, a factor that should not be neglected, the increasingly negative effects of the galloping destruction of the environment and the uncontrolled upheaval of the 'natural' balances of the planet.”

One of the policies that states are going to launch to give a boost to the economy are the so-called 'green economy' plans. These are driven by the need to replace old heavy industry and fossil fuels with electronics, computerisation, AI, lightweight materials and new energy sources that allow for higher productivity, cost reduction and labour savings. For a while, the large investments that such a revival of the economy will require - which will also include arms production - may give a boost to the economies of the countries that are best positioned in the process, but the spectre of overproduction will once again return to haunt the world economy.

10. Workers’ resistance - a key factor in the evolution of the situation

The deterioration of workers' living conditions was very gradual in the period 1967-80.

It first began to accelerate in the 1980s when welfare benefits began to be limited, mass lay-offs took place, and the precariousness of work began to be established.

In the period 1990-2008 the deterioration continued: the systematic reduction in the number of workers employed became ‘normal’. A housing crisis also began. Mass migration put downward pressure on wages and working conditions in the central countries. However, the fall in living conditions in the central countries was still gradual and limited. There was something perverse that masked the fall: the development of massive credit in proletarian households.

In the Report adopted by the 23rd Congress we showed the huge worsening of the living standards of the proletariat in the central countries, significant cuts in pensions, health, education, social services, social benefits etc., the rise in unemployment and especially the spectacular development of job insecurity. The 2010s have seen a major escalation of the degradation of working class living conditions in the central countries. The gradual attacks that we saw between 1970-2008 began to accelerate in the decade 2010-2020.

The pandemic crisis has intensified the attacks on workers' living conditions. First, in all countries, workers have been sent to the slaughterhouse because they have been forced to go to work in overcrowded public transport and have found themselves without protective equipment in the workplace (in fact there were a lot of protests in factories, warehouses etc. at the beginning of lockdown because of this). However, it should be noted that health care workers and workers in old people's homes have suffered a high number of infections and deaths. Workers in the food industry have also been hard hit,[27] as have agricultural workers, most of whom are migrants.[28]

Attacks against the working class in all countries, but particularly in the central countries, are clearly on the agenda. The ILO's report COVID-19 and the World of Work is blunt: “the COVID-19 pandemic has caused the world of labour the most serious crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s.”

Unemployment. The over-capacities in industry, and the slow and weak recovery of demand, will act as a strong stimulus for massive lay-offs. During the period of strict lockdown, the huge state subsidies to the part-time unemployed masked the gravity of the situation of many workers suffering from a drastic reduction in their incomes. However, a gradual ‘normalisation’ of economic functioning will bring about a further worsening of workers' living conditions, making it in many cases irreversible. According to the ILO, a global loss of 36 million jobs is the best-case scenario and 130 million is the worst-case scenario estimated for 2021.[29]

We can illustrate this in an analysis of the dismal perspective for the car industry:

“An expert of the German car industry gave the following overview/forecast: According to the forecast, all major auto-mobile markets will shrink by double-digit percentages. France and Italy will be hardest hit, with a decline of 25 percent each, Spain with 22 percent, and Germany, the USA and Mexico with 20 percent each. For the world's largest auto mobile market, China, Dudenhöffer expects a decline in sales of around 15 percent. In the German plants, there is suddenly surplus capacity of 1.3 to 1.7 million vehicles. Short-time work only can bridge short periods. No company could keep unused production capacity for years. That is why 100,000 of the 830,000 jobs at car manufacturers and suppliers in Germany today are at risk – ‘under optimistic assumptions’, Dudenhöffer wrote.”[30]

Precariousness. The ILO calls precariousness "underutilised employment" and estimates that there are 473 million workers in the world in this condition (2020). Equally important is informal work: "more than 2 billion workers are engaged in economic activities which are not sufficiently covered, or not covered at all, by formal systems in law or in practice." According to the ILO, “630 million workers worldwide do not earn enough from their work to lift themselves and their families out of poverty.”[31]

Wages. On wages, the ILO has assessed the global decline in wages worldwide at 8.3% up to 2020. Despite government support measures, wages fell in 2020 by 56.2% in Peru, 21.3% in Brazil, 6.9% in Vietnam, 4.0% in Italy, 2.9% in the UK and 9.3% in the USA (ILO data).

The above-mentioned ILO report warns that

"the crisis has had a particularly devastating impact on many population groups and devastating effects on many population groups and vulnerable sectors around the world. Young people, women and low-skilled workers and low-wage earners will find it more difficult to benefit from an early recovery and are at a very high risk of suffering long-term consequences and exclusion from the labour market.”

The incredible level of national indebtedness cannot be sustained indefinitely; from a certain point onwards, it will necessarily lead to the adoption of drastic austerity measures affecting education, health, pensions, subsidies, social benefits, etc.

Nothing can be expected from the ‘intelligent management’ of state capitalism: only austerity, misery, chaos and no future. The future of humanity is in the hands of the proletariat, its resistance against brutal austerity, and the politicisation of this resistance will be key in the coming period.

Part 1: building on the work of our 23rd Congress

At its 23rd International Congress, the ICC made it clear that we have to draw a distinction between the concept of the balance of forces between the classes, and the concept of the historic course. The first applies to all phases of the class struggle, in ascendance as well as decadence, whereas the second only to decadence and then only in the period between the lead-up to the First World War and the collapse of the eastern bloc in 1989. The idea of a historic course only makes sense in phases where it becomes possible to predict the general movement of capitalist society towards either world war or decisive class confrontations. Thus, in the 1930s, the Italian Left was able to recognise that the prior defeat of the world proletariat in the 1920s had opened a course towards World War Two, while after 1968 the ICC was correct to argue that, without a frontal defeat of a resurgent working class, capitalism would not be able to enlist the proletariat for a Third World War. By contrast, in the phase of decomposition, product of a historic stalemate between the classes, even if world war has been taken off the agenda for the foreseeable future by the disintegration of the bloc system, the system can slide into other forms of irreversible barbarism without a head-on confrontation with the working class. In such a situation, it becomes much more difficult to recognise when a “point of no return” has been reached and the possibility of a proletarian revolution has been buried once and for all.

But the “unpredictability” of decomposition by no means signifies that revolutionaries are no longer concerned with assessing the global balance of forces between the classes. This point is obviously affirmed by the title of the 23rd Congress resolution on the class struggle: “Resolution on the balance of forces between the classes”. There are two key elements of this resolution which we need to stress here:

1. “in the balance of forces between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, it is always the ruling class that is on the offensive, except in a revolutionary situation” (point 9). At certain moments the defensive struggles of the working class may be able to push back the attacks of the bourgeoisie, but in decadence the tendency is for such victories to become increasingly limited and short-lived: this is a central factor in ensuring that the proletarian revolution becomes a necessity as well as a possibility in this epoch;

2. The primary means to “measure” the balance of forces is the observation of the tendency for the working class to develop its class autonomy and pose its own solution to the historic crisis of the system. In short, the tendency towards politicisation – the development of class consciousness to the point where the working class understands the necessity to confront and overthrow the political machinery of the ruling class and replace it with its own class dictatorship.

These themes are the “red thread” running through the resolution, as announced in the opening section:

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

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

Faced with a dynamic towards the politicisation of workers' struggles, the bourgeoisie (which had been surprised by the May 1968 movement) immediately developed a large-scale and long-term counter-offensive in order to prevent the working class from providing its own response to the historical crisis of the capitalist economy: the proletarian revolution”[1].

The resolution then traces in broad lines how the bourgeoisie, the Machiavellian class par excellence, used all the means at its disposal to block this dynamic:

• “In an initial period, by offering the working class a purely bourgeois political alternative. In the late 60s and early 70s, by derailing its aspirations towards the false dawn of left wing governments capable of humanising capitalism and even bringing in a socialist society, and from the late 70s onwards, through the division of labour between a hard right in power carrying out the brutal reductions in working class living standards demanded by the economic crisis, and a ‘left in opposition’ better placed to soak up the threat posed by the waves of struggle that characterised this period;
• The extensive use of the extreme left of capital (Maoists, Trotskyists etc) to recuperate the growing search for political answers by a significant minority of the new generation;
• The use of radical trade unionism and even ‘extra union’ forms of organisation manipulated by the extreme left to derail the workers’ growing disenchantment with the trade unions and the danger of workers arriving at a political understanding of the role of trade unions in the decadent epoch;
• The use of corporatist and nationalist ideology to isolate important workers’ struggles and, where necessary, to crush them through direct state repression (cf the miners’ strike in Britain and, on a much bigger scale, the mass strike in Poland in 1980);
• The conscious re-organisation of global production and exchange which took flight from the 1980s onwards: the policy of ‘globalisation’, though fundamentally determined by the need to respond to the economic crisis, also contained a directly anti-working class element in that it sought to break up traditional centres of proletarian combativity and undermine class identity;
• Turning the very decomposition of capitalist society against the working class. Thus, the tendency towards ‘every man for himself’ magnified in this new phase was used to reinforce social atomisation and corporatist divisions. Above all, the collapse of ‘really existing socialism’ in the Eastern bloc was the launch-pad for a gigantic campaign around the death of communism, which deepened and extended the difficulties of the working class to develop its own revolutionary perspective”.

While these difficulties were already growing in the 1980s – and were at the root of the stalemate between the classes – the events of 1989 not only definitively opened up the phase of decomposition but brought about a profound retreat in the class at all levels: in its combativity, in its consciousness, in its very capacity to recognise itself as a specific class in bourgeois society. Furthermore, it accelerated all the negative tendencies of social decomposition which had already begun to play a role in the previous period: the cancerous growth of egoism, nihilism and irrationality which are the natural products of a social order which can no longer offer humanity any perspective for its future[2].

The resolution from the 23rd conference, it should be noted, also reaffirms that, despite all the negative factors of the phase of decomposition weighing on the scales, there were still signs of a proletarian counter-tendency. In particular, the students’ movement against the CPE in France in 2006, and the Indignados movement in Spain in 2011, together with the re-emergence of new elements looking for genuinely communist positions, provide concrete evidence that the phenomenon of the subterranean maturation of consciousness, the digging of the “Old Mole”, still operates in the new phase. The quest of a new generation of proletarians to understand the impasse of capitalist society, the renewed interest in previous movements which had raised the possibility of a revolutionary alternative (1917-23, May 68 etc) confirmed that the perspective of a future politicisation had not been drowned under the sludge of decomposition. But before advancing any further towards a better understanding of the balance of class forces in the last decade or so, and above all in the wake of the Covid pandemic, it is necessary to go deeper into what exactly is meant by the term politicisation.

 

Part 2. The meaning of politicisation

Throughout its history, the marxist vanguard of the workers’ movement has fought to clarify the inter-relationship between different aspects of the class struggle: economic and political, practical and theoretical, defensive and offensive. The profound connection between the economic and the political dimensions were emphasised by Marx in his first polemic with Proudhon:

“Do not say that social movement excludes political movement. There is never a political movement which is not at the same time social.

It is only in an order of things in which there are no more classes and class antagonisms that social evolutions will cease to be political revolutions”[3]

This polemic continued in the days of the First International in the struggle against the doctrines of Bakunin. In this period, the need to affirm the political dimension of the class struggle was mainly linked to the struggle for reforms, and thus to intervention in the bourgeoisie’s parliamentary arena. But the conflict with the anarchists, as well as the practical experience of the working class, also raised questions relating to the offensive stage of the struggle, above all the events of the Paris Commune, the first example of working class political power.

During the period of the Second International, above all its phase of degeneration, a new battle was launched: the struggle of the left currents against the growing tendency to rigidly separate the economic dimension, seen as the speciality of the trade unions, and the political dimension, increasingly reduced to the party’s efforts to win seats in bourgeois parliaments and local municipalities.

With the dawn of capitalism’s decadent epoch, the dramatic appearance of the mass strike in 1905 in Russia, and the emergence of the soviets, reaffirmed the essential unity of the economic and political dimensions, and the necessity for independent class organs which combined both aspects. As Luxemburg put it in her pamphlet on the mass strike, which was essentially a polemic against the outmoded conceptions of the social democratic right and centre:

“There are not two different class struggles of the working class, an economic and a political one, but only one class struggle, which aims at one and the same time at the limitation of capitalist exploitation within bourgeois society, and at the abolition of exploitation together with bourgeois society itself”[4].

However, it is necessary to recall that these two dimensions, while forming part of a unity, are not identical, and their unity is often not grasped by the workers engaged in actual struggles. Thus, even when a strike around economic demands may rapidly be confronted with the active opposition of organs of the bourgeois state (government, police, trade unions, etc) the “objectively” political context of the struggle may well be apparent only to a militant minority of the workers involved.

Furthermore, this emphasises that within the movement towards consciousness of the political implications of the struggle, two different dynamics are at play: on the one hand, what could be called the politicisation of struggles, and on the other hand, the emergence of politicised minorities who may or may not be linked to the immediate upsurge of the open struggle.

And again, in the first case, we are looking at a process which moves through different phases. In decadence, while there can no longer be a proletarian intervention in the bourgeois political sphere, there can still be defensive political demands and debates which do not yet pose the question of political power or of a new society, for example when proletarians discuss how to respond to police violence, as during mass strikes in Poland in 1980 or the anti-CPE movement in 2006. It is only at a very advanced stage in the struggle that the workers can envisage the seizure of political power as a real goal of their movement. Nevertheless, what generally characterises the politicisation of struggles is the outburst of a massive culture of debate, where the workplace, the street corner, the public square, universities and schools are the scene of passionate discussions about how to take the struggle forward, about who are the enemies of the struggle, about its methods of organisation and overall objectives, such as Trotsky and John Reed described in their books on the Russian revolution of 1917, and which were perhaps the main “warning sign” to the bourgeoisie about the dangers posed by the events of May-June 1968 in France.

For marxism, the communist minority is an emanation of the working class, but of the working class seen as a historic force in bourgeois society; it is not a mechanical product of its immediate struggles. Certainly, the experience of bitter class conflict may drive individual workers towards revolutionary conclusions, but communists can also be “made” by reflecting on the general conditions of the proletariat and of capitalism generally, and they may also have their sociological origins in strata outside the proletariat. This is how Marx expresses it in The German Ideology: 

“In the development of productive forces there comes a stage when productive forces and means of intercourse are brought into being, which, under the existing relationships only cause mischief, and are no longer productive but destructive forces...and connected with this a class is called forth, which has to bear all the burdens of society without enjoying its advantages, which, ousted from society, is forced into the most decided antagonism to all other classes; a class which forms the majority of all members of society, and from which emanates the consciousness of the necessity of a fundamental revolution, the communist consciousness, which may, of course, arise among the other classes too through the contemplation of the situation of this class."

Obviously, the convergence of the two dynamics – the politicisation of struggles and the development of the revolutionary minority - is essential for a revolutionary situation to emerge; and we can even say that such a convergence, as noted by the opening section of the resolution with regard to May 68 in France, can be the expression of a shift in the course of history towards major class confrontations. Similarly, the advances in the general struggle of the working class, and the appearance of politicised minorities are both, at root, products of the subterranean maturation of consciousness, which can continue even when the open struggle has vanished from sight. But to mix up the two dynamics can also lead to false conclusions, particularly an overestimation of the immediate potential of the class struggle. As the English expression has it: a single swallow does not a summer make.

The resolution (point 6) also warns us about the very considerable difficulties that stand in the way of the working class becoming aware that it is “revolutionary or nothing”. It talks about the nature of the working class as an exploited class subject to all the pressures of the dominant ideology, so that “class consciousness cannot advance from victory to victory but can only develop unevenly through a series of defeats”; it also notes that the class faces added difficulties in decadence, for example: the non-permanence of mass organisations in which workers can maintain and develop a political culture; the non-existence of a minimum programme, which means that the class struggle has to scale the dizzy heights of the maximum programme; the use of former instruments of the working class organisations against the class struggle which – in the case of Stalinism in particular – has helped to create a gulf between genuine communist organisations and the mass of the working class. Elsewhere, the resolution, echoing our Theses on Decomposition, stresses the new difficulties imposed by the particular conditions of the final phase of capitalist decline.

One of these difficulties is considered at some length in the resolution: the danger posed by inter-classist struggles like the Yellow Vests in France or the popular revolts provoked by the increasing immiseration of the masses in the less “developed” countries. In all these movements, in a situation where the working class has a very low level of class identity and is still far from gathering its forces to the point where it can give a perspective to the anger and discontent building up throughout society, the proletarians participate not as an independent social and political force but as a mass of individuals. In some cases, these movements are not merely inter-classist, mixing up proletarian demands with the aspirations of other social strata (as in the case of the Yellow Vests) but espouse openly bourgeois goals, such the democracy protests in Hong Kong, or the illusion of sustainable development or racial equality inside capitalism, as in the case of the Youth for Climate marches and the Black Lives Matter protests. The resolution is not altogether precise about the distinction to be made here, a reflection of wider problems in the ICC’s analyses of such events: hence the need for a specific section of this report clarifying these issues.

 

Part 3: The central danger of interclassism

“Because of the current great difficulty of the working class in developing its struggles, its inability for the moment to regain its class identity and to open up a perspective for the whole of society, the social terrain tends to be occupied by inter-classist struggles particularly marked by the petty bourgeoisie…These inter-classist movements are the product of the absence of any perspective which affects society as a whole, including an important part of the ruling class itself… The struggle for the class autonomy of the proletariat is crucial in this situation imposed by the aggravation of the decomposition of capitalism:

- against inter-classist struggles;

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

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

Recurrent difficulties in analysing the nature of social movements which have appeared in recent years

Interclassist struggles and partial struggles are obstacles to the development of the workers’ struggle. We have seen recently how hard the ICC has found it to master these two questions:

• With regard to the Yellow Vests, the movement was seen at the beginning as having positive elements for the class struggle (through the issue of the rejection of the unions)
• In the youth movement around the climate question, which is a partial struggle, the mobilisation of the young people was seen as something positive, forgetting point 12 of the platform
• On the murder of George Floyd, there were tendencies to see it as an interclassist movement when the indignation it provoked led to a mobilisation on a directly bourgeois terrain, calling for a more democratic police and judiciary

Long-standing difficulties

The balance sheet of the movements in the Middle East: a question to be clarified

The presentation on the class struggle to the 23rd Congress recalled that the analysis of the movements of the Arab Spring had not been included in the critical balance sheet we have been undertaking since the 21st Congress despite the existence of unresolved differences, in particular “questions of opportunist slidings we have made in the past towards for example the inter-classist movements of the Arab Spring and others”[5]

Going back to our analysis of the movements of 2011

If the organisation, in its intervention, didn’t use the term “interclassism” to qualify these movements, it described them in a way which developed all the characteristics of an interclassist movement, showing that it was not totally in the dark about their nature: “The working class has not yet presented itself in these events as an autonomous force capable of assuming the leadership of the movements, which have often taken the form of revolts by the whole non-exploiting population, from ruined peasants to middle strata on the road to proletarianisation”.[6]

The position developed at the time – “The working class has, in general, not been in the leadership of these rebellions but it has certainly had a significant presence and influence which can be discerned both in the methods and forms of organisation thrown up by the movement and, in certain cases, by the specific development of workers’ struggles, such as the strikes in Algeria and above all the major wave of strikes in Egypt”[7] – did not succeed in precisely situating the class terrain on which they were developing or in drawing out the dynamic of the working class component which could be found in these movements;

• Our analysis was based on an approach marked by empiricism: the comparison with Iran in 1979, certainly inspiring, was used without placing them in the new situation, without recontextualising them with the aid of our framework: “In trying to understand the class nature of these rebellions, we therefore have to avoid two symmetrical errors: on the one hand, a blanket identification of all the masses in movement with the proletariat (a position most characteristic of the Groupe Communiste Internationaliste), and on the other hand a rejection of anything positive in revolts which are not explicitly working class”[8] . The second part of the quote makes concessions to an approach that looks at “positive points” and “negative points” without basing it on their class nature
• An overestimation of these movements: “All these experiences are important stepping stones towards the development of a genuinely revolutionary consciousness. But the road in that direction is still a long one, and is obstructed by many and obvious illusions and ideological weaknesses”[9] ; “All of these revolts constitute a formidable bank of experience on the road that leads to revolutionary consciousness”. [10]

Weaknesses in the application of our political framework

Forgetting the framework of the critique of the weak link

Although the organisation was right to point out that the Indignados movement and the uprisings of the exploited classes and particularly of the working class in the Middle East had a common origin in the effects of the world economic crisis, it did so by putting all the movements, whether they came from the central countries or the peripheral countries, on the same level, or by amalgamating them. That’s to say without placing them in the framework of the critique of the theory of the weak link (see the resolution on the international situation from the 20th congress)[11].

The ICC defined the Indignados[12] movement as a movement of the working class marked:

• by a loss of class identity: “This partly explains why the participation of the proletariat as a class has not been dominant even though it was present through the participation of individual workers (employed, unemployed, students, retired...) who attempted to clarify, to get involved according to their instincts, but who lacked the strength, cohesion and clarity there would be if the class participated collectively as a class”.
• by a “strong presence of non-proletarian social strata, especially a middle layer that is in the throes of proletarianisation”. “If the movement appears vague and poorly defined, this cannot put into question its class character, especially if we view things in their dynamic, in the perspective of the future…The presence of the proletariat is visible neither as a force leading the movement, nor through a mobilisation in the workplace. It lies in the dynamic of searching, clarification, preparation of the social terrain, of recognition of the battle that is being prepared. That is where its importance is found, despite the fact that this is only an extremely fragile small step forward.

Our texts from this period do not make a distinction between the Indignados movement in Spain and the revolts in the Arab countries. However, there are very important differences: in Spain, even if the proletarian wing didn’t dominate the Indignados movement, it did fight for its own autonomy faced with the efforts of “Democracy Now” to destroy it. In the Arab countries, the proletariat, at best, was not able to maintain itself on its own terrain, or to use its own methods of combat to develop its consciousness, allowing itself to be mobilised behind nationalist and democratic factions[13].

Absence of the framework of decomposition

Without ever denying its existence or the weight of the profound difficulties in these movements, by stressing the “positive aspects” of the social revolts[14], the analysis of these movements in the Arab countries was not placed in the context of decomposition[15]. This led to lessening the firm denunciation of the democratic and nationalist poison which was so powerful in these countries, and the danger that this represented above all in these parts of the world, but also and above all faced with the propaganda of the western bourgeoisies towards the European proletariat, underlining the necessity for democracy in the Arab countries.

More general weaknesses of the organisation determining its analyses and statements of position

Impatience to see everywhere and rapidly an exit from the retreat after 1989 following the revival of struggles in 2003 was a heavy burden: “The present international wave of revolts against capitalist austerity is opening the door to another solution altogether: the solidarity of all the exploited across religious or national divisions; class struggle in all countries with the ultimate goal of a world-wide revolution which will be the negation of national borders and states. A year or two ago such a perspective would have seemed completely utopian to most. Today, increasing numbers are seeing global revolution as a realistic alternative to the collapsing order of global capital.” [16]

The position of the ICC was marked not only by a general overestimation of the situation, but within that an overestimation of the significance of the movements in the Arab countries for the development of a proletarian perspective. Similarly, the tendency to neglect the importance of debate in the proletarian political milieu also had a negative influence: whereas the contribution of the Nucleo Comunista Internacional to the analysis of the Piqueteros movement in Argentina in 2002-4 had been very important, later on, in 2011, the ICC was not able to take into account the criticisms made of it by the Internationalist Voice group.

Did we make opportunist errors in the analysis of the Arab movements?

We can conclude from the preceding elements that although ICC analysed the movements in the Arab countries in 2011, with their massive character, their simultaneity with other movements in the western countries, the forms taken by these movements (assemblies etc), the presence of the working class (different from the chaotic nature of a number of the interclassist riots or mobilisations dominated by leftist groups like the Piqueteros for example), we did not take a step back and come to a lucid view of what they really represented, in a context where the most experienced parts of the world proletariat was not able to provide a perspective and a direction. This approach was caught up in immediatism.

In the overall context that favoured the impatience and precipitation which existed in the organisation, imagining that the world proletariat was already overcoming the post-89 retreat on a massive scale, this immediatism was certainly the antechamber to opportunism, the point of departure for a slide towards opportunism and the abandoning of class positions, as can be attested by the different ways this immediatism manifested itself:

• The rather contradictory nature of our statements of position on the revolts in the Middle East;
• The absence of coherence and articulation based on the cardinal positions of the organisation underlying our political analyses, or even forgetting or abandoning them (for example, replacing the concept of interclassist struggles by the term “social revolts”, and without really explaining what we meant by “social revolts”.

• The rather empirical and superficial approach which tended to stay at the surface of things and which tended to substitute itself for our political framework;
• The major role played by our view of indignation as a unilaterally positive factor for the development of proletarian consciousness (or even as an indication of a movement’s positive nature, applied to all kinds of movements);
• The tendency to see positive elements where the situation was dominated by the greatest dangers for the class, leading to a weakening of the denunciation of bourgeois ideology by the organisation.

While all these elements combined bring together the conditions for openly opportunist positions - if there is no barrier to these deleterious tendencies posed by proletarian clarity and the defence of class positions by the ICC - it should be underlined that the ICC didn’t take up positions that directly contradicted its platform and class positions. We have to situate these difficulties at the level of what they really represented (which doesn’t mean relativising their importance and dangers). The analysis and intervention of the ICC was weakened by immediatism (with all that this implies at the level of ambiguity, superficiality, lack of rigour, forgetting the defence of our framework and political positions, and a dynamic opening the door to opportunism), but we can’t conclude that it took up directly opportunist positions (which was the case regarding the youth movement around ecology).

Relationship between partial struggles and interclassism

The deviation on the youth movement against ecological destruction showed a forgetting of point 12 of our platform: “The ecological question, like all social questions (whether education, family and sexual relations or whatever) are destined to play an enormous role in any future coming to consciousness and any communist struggle. The proletariat, and it alone, has the capacity to integrate these questions into its own revolutionary consciousness. In so doing it will broaden and deepen this consciousness. It will thus be able to lead all ‘partial struggles’ and give them a perspective. The proletarian revolution will have to confront all of these problems very concretely in the struggle for communism. But they cannot be the point of departure of the development of a revolutionary class perspective. In the absence of the proletariat, they are at worst the point of departure for new rounds of barbarism. The leaflet and the article of the ICC in Belgium are glaring examples of opportunism. This time, it is not opportunism on organisational matters, but opportunism in relation to the class positions as expounded in our platform” (comrade S, contribution to an internal bulletin in 2019)

We can say that the report on the class struggle to the 23rd Congress was not without ambiguities at this level. It took an ambiguous position on the nature of these movements and left the door open to the idea that they could play a positive role in the development of consciousness[17].

We have found it hard to see what distinguishes these two types of movement, with a tendency to amalgamate them, to put them at the same level. So what is it that distinguishes interclassist struggles and partial struggles? In interclassist movements, workers’ demands are diluted and mixed up with petty bourgeois demands (cf the Yellow Vests). This is not the case with partial or “single issue” struggles which manifest themselves essentially at the level of the superstructures, their demands focusing on themes which leave out the foundations of capitalist society, even if they can point to capitalism as being responsible, as with the climate question, or with the oppression of women which is blamed on the capitalist patriarchy. They are also factors of division within the working class, divisions with workers employed in the energy sector in the first case, or by reinforcing divisions between the sexes. Workers may be drawn into partial struggles but this doesn’t make them interclassist. It’s a question of clarifying the difference between partial struggles and interclassist struggles, and what they may have in common.

On indignation

In the 2010s, the ICC recognised indignation as an important component of the class struggle of the proletariat and a factor in its coming to consciousness, However, the ICC has had a tendency to define its importance “in itself”, in a somewhat metaphysical way. One of the roots of our difficulties lies in the inappropriate and unilateral use of the concept of indignation as something necessarily positive, an indication of reflection and even of the development of class consciousness, without taking into account the class nature of its origin, or the class terrain on which it is being expressed. With the further plunge into decomposition there will be many movements driven by indignation, disgust, anger among large layers of society against the phenomena of this period.

The report on the class struggle to the 23rd ICC Congress develops on the spread of social indignation against the destructive nature of capitalist society (eg in reaction against the murder of black people, the climate question or the harassment of women). But by affirming that that the anger expressed by these movements can be recuperated by the proletariat when the latter has regained its class identity and is struggling on its terrain, an ambiguity is introduced about whether the proletariat can “take over” the leadership of such movements in their present form. In reality, such movements would have to “dissolve” before the elements participating in them could join the proletarian struggle. This is in contradiction to what is said in point 12 of the platform: “The struggle against the economic foundations of the system contains within it the struggle against all the super-structural aspects of capitalist society, but this is not true the other way around”. Furthermore, such partial struggles tend to hinder the combat of the working class, its autonomy, and this is why the bourgeoisie knows very well how to recuperate them to preserve the capitalist order. In this sense indignation in itself is not a factor in the development of class consciousness: everything depends on the terrain on which it is expressed. This emotional reaction which may come from different classes does not automatically lead to a reflection that can contribute to the development of class consciousness.

The organisation needs to clarify what would be the conditions, on the historical scale, for an autonomous proletarian movement to give an entirely new focus and direction to all the different grievances and oppressions imposed by capitalist society, and which today, in the absence of proletarian leadership, find their only outlet on the terrain of interclassist or bourgeois mobilisations.

The impact of the capitalist crisis on the whole of society poses another question to be clarified: what is the relationship of the struggle of the proletariat to other classes, intermediate or non-exploiting layers, still existing in capitalism and capable of developing their own mobilisations against the policy of the state (such as peasant movements).

 

Part 4. What has changed since the 23rd Congress?

Almost a decade has passed since the Indignados movement. Important though it was, it by no means marked a reversal of the retreat that began in 1989. We also know that the bourgeoisie – above all in France where the danger of contagion was most evident - took counter-measures to prevent a similar, or more advanced, movement erupting in the traditional “home” of revolutions.

In many ways, the retreat of the class deepened after the subsidence of the movements around 2011. The illusions that predominated in the Arab Spring, given the inability of the working class to provide leadership to the various revolts, have been drowned in barbarism, war, terrorism, and ferocious repression. In Europe and the US, the populist tide, in part fed by the barbaric developments in Africa and the Middle East which precipitated the refugee crisis and the blow-back of Islamic terrorism, has undoubtedly had an impact on a part of the working class. In the “Third World”, mounting economic misery tended to provoke popular revolts in which the working class was again unable to manifest itself on its own terrain; even more significantly, the tendency of social discontent to take on an interclassist nature was clearly expressed in a central country like France, with the Yellow Vest demonstrations that persisted for a whole year. From 2016, with the accession to power of Trump and the vote for Brexit in the UK, the rise of populism reached spectacular levels, dragging a part of the working class into its campaigns against the “elites”. And in 2020, this whole process of decomposition accelerated even more dramatically with the pandemic. The climate of fear generated by the pandemic, and the resulting lock-down, have further increased the atomisation of the working class and created profound difficulties for a class response to the devastating economic consequences of the Covid-19 crisis.

And yet, not long before the pandemic hit, we were seeing a new development of class movements: the teachers’ and GM autoworkers strikes in the US; the widespread strikes in Iran in 2018, which posed the question of self-organisation even if, contrary to the exaggerations of parts of the milieu, they were still a long way from the formation of soviets. In particular, the latter strikes raised the question of class solidarity in the face of state repression.

Above all, we saw the struggles in France at the end of 2019, where key battalions of the working class were in the streets around class demands, pushing aside the Yellow Vest movement which was reduced to a symbolic presence at the back of the marches

There were parallels in other countries, for example Finland. But then the pandemic struck the heart of Europe, to a large extent paralysing the possibility that the struggles in France could take on an international dimension, despite the fact that in the first phase of the lock-down there were many strikes by workers in defence of their working conditions faced with the totally inadequate health measures taken by the state and the employers[18]. These movements were unable to develop further given the restrictive conditions of the lock-down, although the central role of the working class in keeping life in this society going was highlighted by those sectors who had no choice but to carry on working during the lock-down: health, transport, food supply, etc. The ruling class made strong efforts to present these workers as heroes serving the nation, but the hypocrisy of governments – and thus the class basis of the “sacrifices” of these workers – was evident to many. In Britain, for example, there were angry protests by health workers when it became clear that their “heroism” wasn’t worth a wage rise[19].

On top of the pandemic, the working class was quickly faced by further obstacles to the development of class consciousness, above all in the US where the Black Lives Matter protests focused attention on the “single issue” of race, followed swiftly by the huge election campaign which gave a new boost to democratic illusions. Both these campaigns had a major international impact. In the US in particular, the danger of the working class being pulled, via identity politics of right and left, into violent confrontations behind competing bourgeois factions remains very real: the dramatic assault on the Capitol by Trump supporters demonstrates that even if Trump has been removed from government, Trumpism remains as a powerful force on the level of the streets. Finally, workers are now facing a second wave of the pandemic and a new series of lock downs, which not only renew the state-enforced atomisation of the class but have also led to explosions of frustration against the lock-downs which have drawn some parts of the class into reactionary protests fuelled by conspiracy theories and the ideology of the “sovereign individual”.

For the moment, the combination of all these issues, but above all the conditions imposed by the pandemic, have acted as an important brake on the fragile revival of the class struggle between 2018 and 2020. It is difficult to predict how long this situation will persist and therefore we cannot provide any concrete perspectives for the development of the struggle over the coming period. What we can say, however, is that the working class will be faced by brutal attacks on its living conditions. This has already begun in a number of sectors where employers have drastically reduced their workforces. The governments of the central countries of capitalism are still showing a certain caution in dealing with the class, subsidising firms to enable them to hold on to employees, “furloughing” locked-down workers who can’t work from home in order to prevent an immediate plunge into impoverishment, taking measures to avoid evictions of tenants unable to pay their rents, and so on. This is costing governments vast sums, greatly increasing an already swollen burden of debt. We know that, sooner or later, the workers will be asked to pay for this.

 

Part 5. Debates about the balance of class forces

The dramatic developments in the world situation since the last ICC congress has inevitably given rise to debates both within the organisation and among our milieu of contacts and sympathisers. These debates have focused on the significance of the pandemic and the acceleration of decomposition, but they have also posed new questions about the balance of class forces. At the RI Congress in the summer of 2020, criticisms were made of the report on the class struggle, notably its assessment of the movement against pension reforms in France in early 2019. In a text in our internal bulletin in 2021, Comrade M in particular argued – we think correctly - that the report claimed that the movement had attained a certain level of politicisation, without providing sufficient evidence for such an advance; at the same time, there was a lack of clarity in the report regarding the distinction between the politicisation of struggles, and the politicisation of minorities – a distinction which the present report has aimed to elucidate. In this text, comrade M warns against an overestimation of the present level of the class struggle (a mistake we have often made in the past -cf the report to the 21st Congress):

“The tendency to politicise the struggles was by no means revealed in the movement against pension reform in France. There was no space for proletarian debate, no general assembly. The politicisation of the working class on its own class terrain will be inseparable from its emergence from the profound retreat it has undergone since 1989. The proletariat in France, as in all countries, has not yet found the way back to its revolutionary perspective, a path blocked by the collapse of the Eastern bloc. With the aggravation of the crisis and the attacks on its living conditions, it is obvious that the working class is today becoming more and more aware that capitalism has no future to offer it. It is looking for a perspective, but it does not yet know that it is in its hands and in its struggles that this perspective is hidden and buried. This awareness of the monstrous reality of today's world does not mean a politicisation on its own class terrain, i.e. outside the framework of bourgeois democracy. Despite its enormous potential for combativity (which has not been exhausted by the irruption of the pandemic), the proletariat in France does not yet pose the question of proletarian revolution. Even if the word ‘revolution’ has come back on some banners, what content is there? I don't think it's a question of ‘proletarian’ revolution. The working class in France has not yet recovered its class identity (which was still very embryonic in the movement against pension reform). There is still within it a rejection or at least a very deep mistrust of the word ‘communism’".

Furthermore, M argues that this overestimation of the tendency towards politicisation can open the door to a councilist vision: “The politicisation of struggles can only be verified when the revolutionary vanguard begins to have a certain influence in workers' struggles (especially in the general assemblies). This is not the case today. The RI Congress Report therefore opens the door to a councilist vision by affirming that there already exist ‘the indications of a politicisation of the struggle’".

The danger of a councilist vision is also raised in the divergencies expressed by comrade S during and after the 23rd Congress, though not from the same point of departure. These divergencies have since deepened and given rise to a public debate which has in turn had a certain impact on some of our contacts. Insofar as they relate to the problem of the balance of class forces, these divergencies touch on three key questions:

• The potential and limits of the economic struggles
• The question of subterranean maturation
• The question of “political defeats”. Here, the publication of the first round of the debate on the divergencies has led some of our contacts to pose questions about what happened in the 1980s.

Economic struggles and subterranean maturation

In his reply to our reply, in an internal bulletin in 2021, comrade S affirms where he agrees with the ICC on the necessity for the economic struggle: because workers have to defend their physical existence against capitalist exploitation; because workers need to fight to “have a life” beyond the working day so that they can have access to culture, to political debates, and so on; and because, as Marx put it, a class which cannot fight for its interests at this level certainly cannot put itself forward as a force capable of transforming society. But at the same time, he argues, in the conditions of decomposition, not least as a result of the undermining of a perspective for social revolution by the impact of the collapse of the eastern bloc, the historic links between the economic and the political dimensions of the struggle have been broken to the point where this unity cannot be restored by a development of the economic struggles alone. And here he quotes Rosa Luxemburg in Reform or Revolution to warn the ICC against any relapse into a councilist vision in which the “workers themselves”, without the indispensable role of the revolutionary organisation, can recover their revolutionary perspective: “Socialism is not at all a tendency inherent to the daily struggles of the working class. It is inherent only to the sharpening objective contradictions of the capitalist economy on the one side, to the subjective understanding of the indispensability of overcoming it through a socialist transformation on the other”.

From this, comrade S concludes that the main danger facing the ICC is a councilist deviation in which the organisation leaves it to the revival of economic struggles to “spontaneously” politicise themselves, and thus ignores what should be its primary task: carrying out the necessary theoretical deepening which would enable the class to regain confidence in marxism and the possibility of a communist society.

We have seen that the danger of councilism cannot be dismissed when it comes to understanding the process of politicisation: we have learned to our cost that the danger of becoming over-enthusiastic about the possibilities and depth of the immediate struggles is ever-present. We also agree with Luxemburg - and with Lenin – that socialist consciousness is not the mechanical product of the day-to-day struggle but is a product of the historic movement of the class, which certainly includes the theoretical elaboration and intervention of the revolutionary organisation. But what is missing from comrade S’s argument is any explanation of the actual process through which revolutionary theory can once again “grip the masses”. In our view, this is linked to a disagreement on the question of subterranean maturation.

In his text, he says: “the Reply asks if I consider the situation today to be worse than it was in the 1930s (when groups like Bilan contributed to a political and theoretical ‘subterranean maturation’ of consciousness despite the defeat of the class), whereas I deny the existence of such a maturation at present. Yes, at the level of subterranean maturation the situation is indeed worse than in the 1930s, since today the tendency among revolutionaries is more towards political and theoretical regression”.

In order to respond to this, it is necessary to go back to our original debate on the question of subterranean maturation – to the struggle against the councilist view that class consciousness only develops in phases of open struggle.

Thus, MC’s[20] argument in his text on “On subterranean maturation”, in October 1983, was that the rejection of subterranean maturation profoundly underestimated the role of the revolutionary organisation in the elaboration of class consciousness: ”The class struggle of the proletariat goes through ups and downs, but this isn’t the case with class consciousness: the idea of the regression of consciousness with the retreat of the class struggle is contradicted by the whole history of the workers’ movement, a history in which the elaboration and deepening of theory continues in a period of retreat. It’s true that the field, the extent of its action narrows, but not its elaboration in depth”.

Comrade S does not of course deny the role of the revolutionary organisation in the development of theory. So when he speaks about “subterranean regression” he means that the communist political vanguard (and thus the ICC) is failing to carry out the theoretical work needed to restore the confidence of the working class in its revolutionary perspective – that it is regressing theoretically and politically.

But we should recall that MC’s text does not restrict subterranean maturation to the work of the revolutionary organisation:

“The work of reflection goes on in the heads of the workers and will manifest itself in the upsurge of new struggles. There exists a collective memory of the class, and this memory also contributes to the development of the coming to consciousness and its extension in the class”. Or again: “This process of developing consciousness is not uniquely reserved to communists for the simple reason that the communist organisation is not the only seat of consciousness. This process is also the product of other elements of the class who remain firmly on a class terrain or tend in that direction”.

This is important because comrade S seems precisely to restrict subterranean maturation to the revolutionary organisation alone. If we understand him correctly, since the ICC is tending towards theoretical and political regression, this is evidence for the “subterranean regression” he speaks about. Of course, we don’t agree with this assessment of the current situation of the ICC, but that is another discussion. The point to focus on here is that that the communist organisation and the proletarian political milieu are merely the tip of the iceberg in a deeper process going on in the class:

In a polemic with the CWO in International Review 43 on the problem of subterranean maturation, we defined this process as follows:

“- at the least conscious level, and also in the broadest layers of the class, it (subterranean maturation) takes the form of a growing contradiction between the historic being, the real needs of the class, and the workers' superficial adherence to bourgeois ideas. This clash may for a long time remain largely unadmitted, buried or repressed, or it may begin to surface in the negative form of disillusionment with, and disengagement from, the principal themes of bourgeois ideology;

- in a more restricted sector of the class, among workers who fundamentally remain on a proletarian terrain, it takes the form of a reflection on past struggles, more or less formal discussions on the struggles to come, the emergence of combative nuclei in the factories and among the unemployed. In recent times, the most dramatic demonstration of this aspect of the phenomenon of subterranean maturation was provided by the mass strikes in Poland 1980, in which the methods of struggle used by the workers showed that there had been a real assimilation of many of the lessons of the struggles of 1956, 1970 and 1976….

- in a fraction of the class that is even more limited in size, but destined to grow as the struggle advances, it takes the form of an explicit defence of the communist programme, and thus of regroupment into the organized marxist vanguard. The emergence of communist organizations, far from being a refutation of the notion of subterranean maturation, is both a product of and an active factor within it”[21]

What’s missing from this model is another layer – elements, often not direct products of class movements, who are searching for communist positions, thus the swamp (or part of it – the part that is a product of a political advance, even if confused, rather than those degenerating elements who express a regression from a higher level of clarity), and those more explicitly moving towards the revolutionary organisations.

The emergence of such a layer is not the only indication of subterranean maturation, but it is certainly the most obvious. Comrade S has argued that the appearance of this layer can be explained merely by referring to the revolutionary nature of the working class, but since we understand the class not as a static, but as a dynamic force, it is more accurate to see this layer as a product of a movement towards the development of consciousness within the class. And it is certainly necessary to study the movement within the movement: to understand whether there is a process of maturation taking place in this layer– in other words, does the milieu of searching elements itself show signs of development? And if we compare the two “surges” of the politicised minorities that have appeared since around 2003, there are indeed indications that such a development has taken place.

The first surge took place in the mid-2000s and coincided with the what we termed a new generation of the working class, manifesting itself in the anti-CPE movement and the Indignados. A small part of this milieu gravitated towards the communist left and even joined the ICC, giving rise to hopes that we were encountering a new generation of revolutionaries (cf the Orientation Text on the Culture of Debate[22]). What we were actually experiencing was a movement (the French term “mouvance” would be more accurate) largely within the swamp and one which proved to be highly permeable to the influence of anarchism, modernism, and parasitism. One of the distinguishing features of this mouvance was, alongside a distrust of political organisation, a profound resistance to the concept of decadence and thus to the groups of the communist left, seen as sectarian and apocalyptic, above all the ICC. Some of the elements in this surge had been involved in the ultra-activism of the anti-capitalist movement in the 90s, and although they had made a first step in seeing the central role of the working class in the overthrow of capitalism, they retained their activist leanings, pushing some of them (e.g. the majority of the collective that organises libcom) towards a revived anarcho-syndicalism, towards ideas of “organising” at the workplace, which thrived on the possibility of winning small victories and turned away from any notion that the objective and historic unfolding of the crisis would itself be a factor in the development of the class struggle.

The second surge of searching elements, which we have become aware of in the last few years, although perhaps smaller in scale than the previous surge, is certainly situated on a more profound level: it tends to regard decadence and even decomposition as self-evident; it often by-passes anarchism, which they see as lacking the theoretical tools for understanding the present period, and have less fear of directly contacting the groups of the communist left. Often very young and lacking any direct experience of the class struggle, their primary concern is to deepen, to make sense of the chaotic world that confronts them by assimilating the marxist method. Here, in our view, is a clear concretisation of communist consciousness resulting, in Luxemburg’s words, from “the sharpening objective contradictions of the capitalist economy on the one side, (and) the subjective understanding of the indispensability of overcoming it through a socialist transformation on the other”.

In relation to this emerging layer of politicised elements, the ICC has a dual responsibility as a “fraction-like” organisation. On the one hand, of course, the vital theoretical elaboration required to provide a clear analysis of an ever-shifting world situation and to enrich the communist perspective[23]. But it also involves a patient work of constructing the organisation: the work of “formation of cadres” as the GCF put it after World War Two, the development of new militants who will last the course; of defending the organisation against the incursions of bourgeois ideology, the slanders of parasitism and so on. This work of organisational construction does not appear at all in S’s reply, and yet it is certainly one of the principal elements in the real struggle against councilism.

Furthermore: if this process of subterranean maturation is a real one, if it is the tip of the iceberg of developments taking place within far wider layers of the class, the ICC is correct in envisaging the possibility of a future re-connection between the defensive struggles and the growing recognition that capitalism has no future to offer humanity. In other words, it announces the intact potential for the politicisation of the struggles and their convergence with the emergence of new revolutionary minorities and the increasing impact of the communist organisation.

On “political defeats”

The publication of a first round of debate on the balance of class forces has brought out various divergencies among our milieu of close sympathisers. On the ICC forum, particularly in the thread Internal debate in the ICC on the international situation| International Communist Current (internationalism.org) [79], in an exchange of contributions with MH, Debate on the balance of class forces | International Communist Current (internationalism.org) [80], in our contact meetings, and on his own blog[24], comrade MH in particular has become increasingly critical of our view that it was essentially the collapse of the eastern bloc in 89 which precipitated the long retreat of the class from which we have yet to emerge. For MH, it was largely a political/economic offensive of the ruling class after 1980, spearheaded by the British bourgeoisie in particular which brought the third wave of struggles to an end (rather: strangled it at birth). In this view, it was the defeat of the miners’ strike in 1985 in the UK which marked the defeat of the struggles in the 1980s. This conclusion is currently leading MH to reassess our view of the struggles after 1968 and even to question the notion of decomposition, although his differences sometimes seem to imply that “decomposition has won out”, and that we need to face the reality of a grave historical defeat for the working class. Comrade Baboon largely agrees with MH about the key importance of the defeat of the miners’ strike but has not followed him to the point of questioning decomposition or concluding that the retreat of the working class has perhaps taken a qualitative step into a kind of historical defeat[25].

Comrade S, however, now seems to be increasingly explicit about this being the case. As he put it in a recent letter to the international central organ:

“Is there or is there not a fundamental divergence on the balance of class forces?

The position of the organisation is that the working class is undefeated. The opposite position also exists within our ranks, that the working class, in the past five years, has suffered from a political defeat, the main symptom of which is the explosion of identitarianism of all kinds, which results first and foremost from the failure of the class to recover its own class identity. The position of the organisation is that the situation of the class is better than it was in the 1990s under the shock of the ‘death of communism’, whereas the other position says that the situation of the class today is worse than in the 1990s, that the world proletariat today is on the brink of suffering a political defeat on a scale such as which it may need a generation to recover from”.

As we pointed out at the beginning of this report, the ICC’s recognition that the concept of the historic course no longer applies in the phase of decomposition means that it becomes much harder to assess the overall dynamic of events, and in particular to reach the conclusion that the door to a revolutionary future has been definitively closed, since decomposition can overwhelm the proletariat in a gradual process, without the bourgeoisie having to defeat it directly, in a face to face combat, as it did in the period of the revolutionary wave. It is therefore difficult to know what comrade S means by a “political defeat on a scale such as which it may need a generation to recover from”. If the proletariat has yet to take on the class enemy in an openly political struggle, as it did in 1917-23, what criteria are we using to judge that the retreat of the class struggle over the past three decades has reached such a point; and furthermore, since such a defeat would presumably be followed by a major acceleration of barbarism, and - in comrade S’s view – by a world war, or at least a “limited” nuclear holocaust – what possibilities for “recovery” would be left for the next generation?

On a final point: comrade S claims that we see the situation of the class being “better” than in the wake of the collapse of the blocs. This is inaccurate. We have certainly said that the conditions for future class confrontations are thus inevitably maturing, and, as the report on the class struggle to the RI Congress pointed out, this is in a context very different from the situation at the beginning of the phase of decomposition:

• whereas 1989 could be presented as the defeat of communism and the victory of capitalism, the pandemic cannot be presented as a vindication of the superiority of the present system. On the contrary, despite all the mystifications surrounding the origins and nature of the pandemic, it provides further evidence that the capitalist system has become a danger to humanity, even if for the moment only a small minority have grasped this clearly;
• whereas the events of 1989 constituted a major blow to class combativity and consciousness, and although the development of decomposition has tended to aggravate the loss of class identity, the pandemic has broken out in the context of a certain revival of the class struggle, while the bourgeoisie’s willingness to sacrifice health and life in the interest of profit, as well as its chaotic handling of the pandemic, tends to provoke an awareness that we are not “all in it together” – that the working class and the poor are the prime victims of the pandemic and the criminal negligence of the ruling class.

But all these “plus points” come on top of 30 years of decomposition – a period in which time is no longer on the side of the proletariat, which continues to suffer the accumulating wounds inflicted by a society that is rotting on its feet. In some ways, we would agree that the situation is “worse” than it was in the 1980s. But we will fail in our task as a revolutionary minority if we ignore any of the signposts that point towards a revival of the class struggle – of a proletarian movement that contains the possibility of preventing society from taking a definitive plunge into the abyss.

In the preceding parts of this series we have highlighted the opportunist weaknesses which were at the base of the constitution of the Communist International (CI), both on the programmatic and on the organisational levels. This part will tackle the final period of the CI as an organisation of the working class.

In the years which followed the Founding Congress (1919) and its Second Congress (1920), despite episodes of great combativity, the reflux of the revolutionary wave continued. The working class in Russia was more and more isolated, the Soviets were slowly dying, the Bolshevik Party was merging with the state, becoming more bureaucratic and losing its proletarian content. Insurrectional uprisings in Western Europe (Bulgaria, Poland and Germany)[1] were supported by the CI although conditions were becoming more and more unfavourable, ending in the disorientation and demoralisation of the proletariat.

The CI suffered from the effects of the isolation of the revolution in the sole Russian bastion and followed the same trajectory as the Bolshevik Party where the logic of the apparatus gradually worked against an authentic class policy. Its political vitality was dying, as in the Russian party which in the end led it to become a useful tool serving the imperialist interests of the Russian state. In other words, after having epitomised the highest expression of global proletarian unity in its revolutionary struggle, the CI entered a process of degeneration.

This fourth part will therefore try to show the way in which this tragic political evolution happened.

1. The Bolshevik Party is no longer what it was

The three years of civil war between 1918 and 1920, during the course of which the White armies and foreign battalions gave the revolution a hard test, led to the Soviet Republic adopting the policy of “War Communism”. But what was only to be a number of urgent measures in order to face up to a desperate situation gave rise to a militarisation of society under the authority of the Bolshevik Party and the state. During this period that necessitated very heavy sacrifices for the workers and other social layers, we saw “a progressive weakening of the organs of the dictatorship of the proletariat (the workers’ councils) and consequently the development of tendencies towards bureaucratic institutions.” [2]

If during the whole of the civil war privations were on the whole put up with by the workers and poor peasants, it didn’t last in the new conditions. The civil war left the social situation in Russia totally drained. The people lacked everything, from food to fuel, needed to stave off the rigours of winter. From summer 1920, the first signs of discontent were emerging, notably in campaigns around the uprisings of peasants in Tambov. But agitation spread rapidly through towns where, aside from economic demands, the workers also demanded the end of War Communism. As such these strikes didn’t only express a reaction faced with the degradation of living conditions; they also marked a desire for the soviets to return to the heart of political decision-making. It is in this context that the sailors’ insurrection at Kronstadt broke out on February 28, 1921. In reaction to the brutal methods of the requisition of wheat undertaken by armed detachments, and the privations suffered by workers and peasants alike, the sailors of the warship Petropavlovsk mutinied and adopted a ten-point resolution with the principal claim being the rapid regeneration of soviet power. The revolt of the Kronstadt sailors happened “during the course of a movement of the class struggle against the growing bureaucracy of the regime, it identified with this struggle and saw itself as a moment in its generalisation”[3]  

The terrible repression that the Bolshevik Party unleashed on the revolt marked a real turning-point of the revolution. Through the execution of close to 3000 sailors, the Bolshevik Party crossed the red line by exercising violence within the working class. This dramatic policy undertaken by the only organisation, up to then, defending the revolutionary line and the communist programme marked, to a certain extent, a point of no return and a slow, irredeemable rupture between the interests of the Bolshevik Party which was assimilating itself more and more with the state, and those of the working class.

If the working class had in one sense emerged victorious from the war against the counter-revolutionary forces, the concentration of authority in the hands of the party-state duo was the other side of the coin. The dissentions within the proletarian camp on this issue, notably incarnated in the workers’ strikes in Moscow and Petrograd and the revolt of the Kronstadt sailors, were expressed even within the party from the beginning of the civil war. They were to reach their paroxysm during the Tenth Congress of the Russian Communist Party (RCP)[4] notably through controversy over the union question and the critiques of the Workers’ Opposition group notably animated by A. Kollontai and Shliapnikov. Since autumn 1920, this group within the RCP was established during the course of the debate on the role of the unions in the dictatorship of the proletariat. Although the framework for the debate remained profoundly inadequate, the position of the Workers’ Opposition was that the industrial unions would have to manage production while being independent from the soviet state[5] thus expressing “in a confused and hesitant manner, the antipathy of the proletariat for the bureaucratic and military methods which were more and more marking the regime and the hopes of the working class that things were going to change now that the rigours of the war had ended.”[6] This debate gave rise to lively polemics throughout the winter of 1920-1921 while, according to Lenin in his opening speech to the congress, the party had need for unity in its ranks more than ever: “Comrades, we have lived through an exceptional year, we have allowed ourselves the luxury of discussions and debates within our party. For a party surrounded by enemies, the most powerful and strongest enemies who group together the whole capitalist world, for a party which has borne the most incredible burden, these luxuries are really surprising (...) In any case, whatever the discussions which have taken place up to now, whatever debates are taking place amongst us, while we must face up to so many enemies, the dictatorship of the proletariat in a peasant country is an immense task, so difficult that it’s not enough that our work is formally more unified, more planned than before, that your presence here at this congress already proves; it is also necessary that there remains not the least trace of a factional spirit whatever the place and form in which it has shown itself up to the present; in any case it is necessary that these traces do not continue.”[7] Following that, the congress had to endorse the objective fixed by this opening speech through the adoption of the resolution on “party unity” ordering “the immediate dissolution of groups without exception formed on such-and-such a platform, and give instruction to all the organisations to strictly insist on the inadmissible character on all types of fractional activity. The non-execution of this decision of the congress will result in the immediate and unconditional exclusion from the party.” This decision, also defended by a majority of the CI, reflected the profound change in the way in which the party treated disagreements expressed on subjects as fundamental as the role of the trade unions for example. The forbidding of fractions within the party showed in reality a deformation of the discipline within the latter since henceforth it demanded the strict submission to the decisions of the party once they had been taken. Critiques from militants or groups were tolerated but it was formally prohibited to put up an opposition to the official party decision on the basis of an organised defence of their positions[8]. With this decision, the Communist Party of Russia abandoned a whole part of its history since it itself had led such work in fighting against the opportunism which gangrened the IInd International, leading that organisation to its own bankruptcy at the outbreak of the First World War.

A good number of dishonest and inconsequential academics and journalists saw in this affair the definite proof of the “natural authoritarianism” of Lenin and a so-called Bolshevik tyranny. In reality, this process was above everything a product of the isolation and state of siege imposed on the revolution in Russia, expressing not a “natural authoritarianism” but a real deviation of the Bolsheviks from their own history. Furthermore, as Lenin indicated, the existence of opposition groups organised in a “fraction” could be used by counter-revolutionary forces with the aim of discrediting the party. But what Lenin was no longer seeing was that while the open enemies of the revolution could point to these disagreements within the party in order to discredit it, it was all the more true that the “hidden enemy” of the revolution, the counter-revolution from the inside, was served by the forbidding of fractions as a means of entirely Stalinising the party.

It was thus the isolation of the revolution to the Russian bastion which led the RCP to turn in on itself and prioritise the interests of the party and of the state through an “iron discipline” rather than guarantee the expression of disagreements so as to participate in the clarification of fundamental political questions for the whole of the revolutionary milieu and the world working class[9]. Floating the threat of exclusion of groups defending divergent positions, the Russian party deprived itself of vitality and opened itself up to the bureaucratic spiral.

2.  “Lenin’s last struggle”

If, as we’ve indicated, Lenin defended the ban on fractions and, consequently, tried to dissuade some militants from publicly criticising the “necessary discipline”, he wasn’t slow however in taking stock of the proliferation of bureaucrats and of the danger thus weighing on the activities of the party. The tendencies to bureaucracy were a constant preoccupation of Lenin since the taking of power in October 1917. The consciousness of this scourge continued to be affirmed with the accumulation of dysfunctions and the proliferation of arrivistes and the grip of functionaries  

The different oppositions appearing during the years 1920-1921 never ceased, although in a confused manner, to warn the party against the growing weight of the “Workers’ State”[10] and of the absorption of the party into it. A mortal danger for the revolution and the party that Lenin himself exposed at the time of the XIth congress of the RCP, affirming that “erroneous relations between the party and the Soviet administrations” were being established.

The “Georgian Affair”, which broke out during 1922, allowed Lenin to take stock of the breadth of the bureaucratic gangrene. The use of violence, repression and manipulation by Grigol Ordzhonikidze (Secretary of the Transcaucasian Regional Bureau) under the orders of Stalin (Secretary-General of the RCP) against members of the Georgian party who refused to go along with the planned Constitution of the USSR[11] very much scandalised Lenin.

These brutal methods, totally foreign to proletarian and communist morals, were never before seen in the ranks of the party. They demonstrated the all-powerful nature of the party machine over its members and the disastrous evolution of the party and the state, engendering practices coming from “an apparatus which is fundamentally foreign and represent a hodgepodge of bourgeois and tsarist vestiges (...) covered only with a soviet veneer”[12].

During the last two years of his life, Lenin tried to arrest the bureaucratic drift incarnated by Stalin and his minions. After the Georgian episode, he undertook a frontal combat, openly accusing the Workers and Peasants Inspectorate led by Stalin to be “at the forefront” of the development of bureaucracy.

It is thus guided by the flame of internationalism that Lenin put his meagre forces to work in order to try and repel the Stalin’s first offensives and his doctrine of “socialism in one country”. But the totally erroneous responses that he advocated , consisting more or less of restructuring of the state, in the (illusory) expectation of a revolutionary jump-start from the European proletariat, only confirmed the irredeemable impasse in which the Russian revolution and the entire world revolution found itself.

For decades, the dominant ideology has used every means in order to establish a link between the revolutionary combat of Lenin and the totalitarian power of Stalin. But facts are stubborn! “Lenin’s Testament” contains enough to warn against the future tyrant, dismissing any legitimising of gangster methods and the chauvinistic aims of Stalin and his clique. Moreover, the “Testament” was kept under wraps for a long time and it was only after guaranteeing his total power within the party and the state that Stalin indulged in a kind of confession regarding what the document said about him.

3. The Bolshevisation of the International

Because of the victory of the revolution in Russia and the weakness of other communist parties, the RCP played a preponderant role in the formation of the Communist International, whose executive seat was based in Moscow. But this preponderance itself took a disproportionate character in the life and the functioning of the CI.

Consequently, bureaucracy and rampant authoritarianism within the RCP soon ate into the ranks of the International. Lenin was one of the few concerned about the “Russification” of the CI. He firstly expressed this at the time of the Second Congress by proposing the installation of the executive seat to Berlin, then at the Fourth Congress where he criticised the “too-Russian” character of the “Theses on the Structures, Methods and Action of the Communist Parties”, although he fully supported their content. Concerned about the too-strong “dependence” of the CI on the RCP, he exhorted the other sections of the CI to appropriate without delay all the experiences and lessons of the revolution in Russia so as to affirm its cohesion through a greater association of the different sections in the life of the party. This was also a question of guaranteeing the vitality of the International by placing reflection and the study of revolutionary experience at the centre of the activity of the sections.[13] But these working perspectives were extinguished with the death of Lenin in 1924. From that moment we see a turnaround in the CI which more progressively became a weapon in the hands of the (Zinoviev-Kamenev-Stalin) Troika first of all, then of the Stalinist bureaucracy. The “Bolshevisation of the Communist Parties” announced at the Fifth World Congress in July 1924 aimed to suppress all opposition, as much Trotsky and his partisans as the groups of the left: “The key word of Bolshevisation is born in the struggle against the right. Naturally it will be led against it, but also, of course, against the ultra-leftist deviations and against the pessimism which, here or there, weighs heavily on us”.[14]

This new watchword thus formed a clear expression of the tighter grip in which the Russian revolution found itself after the setback of the German proletariat in 1923 at the time of its desperate attempt at insurrection. This only accelerated the grip of the bureaucracy henceforth using its authoritarian discipline against all those who opposed or criticised the policy of the party led by the Troika first of all and subsequently by the Stalinist clique. It was thus a matter of “breaking the back” of all forms of resistance against the degeneration of the International. Alfred Rosmer, a member of the Executive Bureau of the CI between 1920 and 1921, having participated in its Second, Third and Fourth congresses, gives an informed account of the appalling policy manoeuvred by Zinoviev, then the president of the International: “Through the means of emissaries that he sent to the sections before the congress, he suppressed all opposition. Where resistance was expressed, a great variety of methods were used in order to minimise them; it was a war of attrition where the workers were beaten in advance by functionaries who, having everything to lose, imposed interminable debates; war-weary and overwhelmed by the weight of the International, all those who had made criticisms temporarily gave up or simply left”.[15]

The “Declaration of the Committee of Entente” [16], addressed to the Executive Committee of the CI in July 1925 after the Fifth Congress denounced the same aberrations: “The serious problems of fractions and tendencies within the Party, which is posed historically, both as a consequence of the policy followed and as a repudiation of this type of tactic, as a symptom of its insufficiencies that it’s necessary to study with the greatest attention, they pretend they’ve solved through orders and by threats, submitting comrades to crude disciplinary pressures, thus leaving one to think that on their personal conduct depends the entire favourable development of the Party”.

Consequently, all the militants or tendencies which subsequently expressed disagreements with the orientations defended by the party confronted the following alternative: submit or be excluded! If excluded, they were replaced in the executive organs of the CP by docile, young or inexperienced militants, very quickly becoming apparatchiks with limitless fidelity to Moscow as in the KPD or in the image of Maurice Thorez within the French Communist Party. Henceforth, the CP’s incarnated the implacable defence of the foreign policy of the Russian state instead of playing an active role in the elevation of revolutionary consciousness among the masses. The new mode of organisation of the CP’s through “factory cells” constituted a clear expression of this unfortunate evolution since it kept the workers focussed on local and corporatist problems to the detriment, evidently, of a general vision and perspective for the proletarian combat.

Stalinist propaganda largely contributed to presenting “Bolshevisation” as being in continuity with the policy undertaken by the Bolsheviks since October 1917. It was part of a long series of falsifications set up by this bourgeois clique throughout the period of counter-revolution. In reality, this watchword was a total rupture with the history and spirit of the Bolshevik Party. But much more than that, it marked a significant stage in the degeneration of the Communist International which stayed on this trajectory and became a counter-revolutionary tool in the hands of the Russian state for the preservation of its imperialist interests. Only the left fractions tried to lead a determined combat to counter this involution and keep alive the flame of internationalism and the communist programme. It is this aspect that we will tackle in the last part of this series.

(To be continued)

Najek,

April 16, 2021

The present article follows on from the ones we have already published which denounce an attempt to falsify the real origins of the communist left, emanating from a blog called Nuevo Curso[1] (recently rebaptised Communia). This attempt is orchestrated by an adventurer, Gaizka[2], whose aim is in no way to contribute to the defence and clarification of the positions of this current but to “make a name for himself” in the proletarian political milieu. This attack against the historic current of the communist left seeks to turn it into a vague movement from which the rigorous proletarian principles which presided over its formation have been amputated, creating an obstacle to the transmission, to future generations of revolutionaries, of the acquisitions of the struggle of the left fractions against the opportunism and degeneration of the parties of the Communist International. As for the adventurer Gaizka, we have supplied a sizeable amount of information, which to this day has not been refuted, about this gentleman’s relations with the personalities of the world of bourgeois politics (of the left but above all of the right). This is the kind of behaviour and personality trait which he shares with better known adventurers in history such as Ferdinand Lassalle and Jean Baptiste von Schweitzer who operated within the workers’ movement in Germany in the 19th century[3], even if he is very far from having the same status as these personalities.

Following our exposure, Gaizka remained totally silent: refuting the reality of the turpitudes we proved was a “mission impossible” for him. Furthermore, he received very little support; virtually the only one, and the most explicit, coming from the International Group of the Communist Left (IGCL), which before changing its name in 2014, called itself the Internal Fraction of the International Communist Current (IFICC). This is a group whose prime vocation, for the last 20 years, is to slander the ICC, and their statement of position in favour of Nuevo Curso is accompanied by a new hate-filled attack on our organisation[4].

Having denounced the fraud of this so-called left communist Nuevo Curso and the real nature of its animator Gaizka, we now have to look at the profile of his “friends”. The question is obviously not without importance. The Holy Alliance between Nuevo Curso and the IGCL says a lot about the real nature of each of these groups and their “contribution” to the efforts of young elements searching for class positions. But before examining the pedigree of the IGCL, it’s worth quickly focusing on the way this group positioned itself with regard to Nuevo Curso when it first appeared.

The IGCL’s support for Nuevo Curso and Gaizka

It was with much enthusiasm and flattery that the IGCL saluted the entry of the Nuevo Curso blog onto the political scene:

“Nuevo Curso is a blog of comrades who have begun publishing regularly on the situation and on wider questions, including theoretical issues. Unfortunately, their blog is only in Spanish. The ensemble of positions they defend are class positions which are part of the programmatic framework of the communist left… We are very impressed not only by their affirmation of class positions with no concessions, but also by the ‘marxist quality’ of the comrades’ texts... ”(our emphasis. From Revolution or War no.9, “New communist voices: Nuevo Curso (Spain) and Workers’ Offensive (USA)”)

In the same vein, “the constitution of Emancipacion as a fully-fledged political group (which animates the blog Nuevo Curso) is an important step whose political and historical significance goes well beyond the mere appearance of a new communist group… it expresses the fact that the international proletariat, although subjugated and very far from being able to push back the various attacks of capital, is tending to resist through struggle and to break out of the ideological grip of capital, and that its revolutionary future remains intact. It expresses the (relative) ‘vitality’ of the proletariat”. (Our emphasis, Revolution or War 12, IGCL letter to Emancipacion on its first congress).

The IGCL could not however avoid raising the problem posed by Nuevo Curso’s interpretation of the communist left which includes the “Trotskyist” current before its betrayal during the Second World War. The absence of any criticism by the IGCL on this question would have made it obvious that the group is not at all concerned with the real defence of the communist left, that its proclamation about being part of it and claim to defend it is nothing but a deception serving its sordid manoeuvres aimed at discrediting the ICC. That said,  the “timidity” and “gentleness” of the IGCL’s criticisms of Nuevo Curso hardly hides its benevolent attitude to this attack on the communist left: “We want above all to draw the comrades’ attention to the programmatic, theoretical and political dead-end into which the claim of continuity with the Fourth International is leading Emancipacion… Its passage to becoming a fully-fledged political group is extremely positive in itself, and at the same time raises new questions and responsibilities. These came to light at the congress. And one of them is that this reference to the Fourth International needs to be discussed – and in our view combated – in order to allow Emancipacion and its members to fulfil in the best way possible the historic task that the proletariat has conferred on them” (our emphasis – Revolution or War, IGCL letter to Emancipacion on its first congress). Instead of clearly denouncing an attack on the communist left, the IGCL evades this fundamental problem by trying to pull the wool over our eyes with phrases about the “programmatic, theoretical and political dead-end” into which Emancipacion is being led, and by evoking, no less, “the historic task that the proletariat has conferred on them”. Moral: the IGCL doesn’t give a fig about the defence of the communist left but is very concerned about the future of Emancipacion.

Furthermore, as soon as our organisation had provided sufficient information to characterise Gaizka (the main animator of Nuevo Curso) as an adventurer who, between 1992 and 94 had developed a relationship with the most important bourgeois party in Spain at the time, the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE), there was no room for doubt regarding the approach of Nuevo Curso – this was an attempt to distort the real history of the communist left. And there was even less room for doubt for the members of the IGCL since they were still militants of the ICC in 1992-94 and had full knowledge of the trajectory and activities of this individual.

However, this information, accessible to anyone (and, we repeat, denied by no one) did not prevent the IGCL from rushing to the assistance of the adventurer Gaizka faced with the denunciation we had made: “We must point out that to this day we have not seen any provocation, manoeuvre, denigration, slander or rumour launched by the members of Nuevo Curso, even on an individual basis, or any policy of destruction against other revolutionary groups or militants”[5]. Evidently, Gaizka doesn’t function in the same way as the IGCL, since the list of repulsive behaviours mentioned here is a very good summary of the IGCL’s own way of acting. And it’s no mean achievement of these gangsters and cheats to tell us that there’s no problem with Gaizka because he doesn’t conduct himself in the same way as they do.

With Gaizka, it’s his political persona which is the issue, the fact that, like other better-known adventurers before him, he is distinguished by the fact that “Contrary to sincere fighters who selflessly join a revolutionary organisation in order to help the working class to fulfil its historical role, adventurers join revolutionary organisations to fulfil their own ‘historical mission’. They want to place the movement at their service and constantly look for recognition with this purpose”[6].  For Gaizka, it’s the rewriting of the history of the communist left, its disfigurement, which is his selling point and which will puff him up if the operation succeeds[7].

Back to the list of misdeeds by the IFICC/IGCL

The IFCC was formed in 2001 on the basis of hatred of the ICC and the will to destroy it. Not succeeding in doing so, it tried to harm it as much as it could. Under the pretext of wanting to "straighten out the ICC", which according to them was threatened with "opportunist degeneration", the small group of ICC militants who founded the IFICC had, from the outset, been characterised by intrigue (holding secret meetings[8]), by thuggish actions such as theft and blackmail, and by the work of provocateurs, in particular through a smear campaign against a comrade publicly accused by them of being a state agent indirectly manipulating our organisation.

Since we cannot here give a detailed account of the misdeeds of the IFICC/IGCL, we refer the reader to the main articles of denunciation that we have written on this subject[9] and we will limit ourselves here to a number of concrete illustrations.

The members of the IFICC deliberately placed themselves outside our organisation as a consequence of the following behaviour:

    - Repeated violations of our statutes (in particular the refusal to pay their dues in full) and their refusal to commit themselves to respecting them in the future;

    - Refusal to come and present the defence of their behaviour within the organisation in the face of our criticism of it, before an extraordinary conference of the organisation which specifically put this issue on its agenda;

    - Theft of ICC’s money and material (address files and internal documents).

The IFICC as a police-like group

In the end, the members of the IFICC were excluded[10] from our organisation, not for these intolerable behaviours but for their activities as spies, with several acts of snitching to their credit. For example, they published on their website the date on which an ICC Conference was to be held in Mexico with the participation of ICC militants from other countries. This repugnant act of the IFICC, which could only facilitate the work of the repressive forces of the bourgeois state against revolutionary militants, is all the more despicable because the IFICC members knew full well that some of our comrades in Mexico had already been directly victims of repression in the past and that some had been forced to flee the countries they were born in.

But the snitching behaviour of IFICC members is not just about this episode. Before and after their exclusion from the ICC, they systematised their spying work on our organisation and regularly reported the results in their newsletters. Some of the "information" thus published, quite worthy of the gutter press (for example, "revelations" about militants who were a couple), is of interest only to the few imbeciles (if any exist outside the IFICC’s own members) who take pleasure in fantasising about a family oligarchy within the ICC. Far from being harmless, these are activities worthy of police agents. Here is a small sample:

    - IFICC Bulletin n° 14 is filled with prose worthy of the most zealous police reports: "This text written by CG[11], alias Peter, which is proved by the style and especially by the (rather fanciful) reference to a lamentable recovery operation carried out under his direction. This same Peter is the one who heads the ICC and who, after having excluded or pushed out most of the founding members of the ICC, claims to be the sole heir of MC[12]. But it is also important to know that if Peter is leading this hateful cabal against our comrade Jonas, it is for the simple reason that Louise (alias Avril), the militant about whom Jonas dared to express clear doubts, is none other than the partner of the leader".

    - In Bulletin n° 18, we are treated to a detailed report (typical of the informers’ reports found in police archives) on a public meeting of the International Communist Party (PCI-Le Prolétaire), where all the deeds and actions of "Peter alias CG" are reported.

    - Bulletin n° 19 returns to the charge about Peter "who was distributing publications on his own” in such and such a demonstration and raises a "highly political" question: "Finally, and you will understand that we also ask this question: where is Louise? Absent from the demonstrations, absent from public meetings, is she 'sick' again?".

The above sample of the sordid gathering of information by IFICC members is quite significant of the way these people conceived their "fractional work" (as gossip, police reports, etc). Indeed, the exhibition of such information is also aimed at the whole ICC, with a view to putting pressure on its militants by making them understand that they are "under surveillance", that nothing they do will escape the vigilance of the "Internal Fraction". This is evidenced by the innocent information published in Bulletin No. 13, which reports that the ICC has rented a "luxury room" for a public meeting, information whose sole function is to contribute to this atmosphere of being under permanent surveillance. It is with the same objective that the members of the ICC, as well as our contacts, regularly received in their mailboxes, even when some of them had changed address, the famous "Bulletin Communiste", despite protests and repeated requests to stop such mailings. It was a way of saying to the recipients: "We are watching you and we won't leave you alone".

It is not because it emanates from the sick brains of obsessive persecutors that such a job of policing our organisation, and especially some of its members, should be taken extremely seriously.

To conclude on the IFICC’s police-like behaviour, it is worth mentioning the publication by the IFICC of a 118-page text in A4 format and in small print (about 150,000 words!) entitled "The History of the International Secretariat of the ICC". This text, according to its subtitle, claims to tell "How opportunism imposed itself in the central organs before contaminating and beginning the destruction of the whole organisation...". It is a tale that can, in many ways, be described as a detective novel.

In the first place, it is a novel, that is to say a fiction and by no means a historical text, even if it refers to real facts and characters. It is a bit like considering Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers as the true story of d'Artagnan (who really existed) and his friends. Obviously, even if there is no possible comparison between Dumas' romantic imagination and the sick and paranoid imagination of the authors of this "story", we are entitled to a "thriller" with highly stereotypical characters, notably Louise and Peter. Louise is the main "villain" in the story, a true Lady Macbeth. She had pushed her husband to assassinate King Duncan so that he could take the throne. For her part, Louise, in conjunction with the state's specialised services, devilishly manipulates her partner Peter, inciting him to commit all kinds of crimes against the ICC and its militants[13]. Peter thus became the "leader", the one "who runs the ICC" (sic) after having eliminated "most of the CCI's founding members" and who "claims to be the sole heir of MC". It is no longer Peter-Macbeth we are dealing with but Peter-Stalin. And it is here, once again, that the police-like character of this text is manifested. Indeed, it explains the so-called "opportunist evolution" of the ICC by the intrigues of a number of evil characters, as if the degeneration and betrayal of the Bolshevik party had been the result of the action of the megalomaniac Stalin and not the consequence of the failure of the world revolution and the isolation of the revolution in Russia. This text comes from the purest police conception of history, which has always been fought by marxism, and its authors must be recognised as having been somewhat in advance of all the "conspiracy theorists" who today abound on the social networks and in the entourage of Donald Trump.

But the most odiously police-like character of this text is indeed the fact that it discloses many details about the internal workings of our organisation, which are blessed bread for the police services. The depths to which the IGCL can sink has no limits.

The IFICC’s efforts to build a "cordon sanitaire" against the ICC

Having failed to convince the militants of the ICC of the need to exclude the "leader" and the "partner of the leader", this parasitic group has set itself the objective of dragging other groups of the communist left behind its slanders, in order to establish a cordon sanitaire around the ICC and discredit it (see below the episodes of the "Circulo" and the "public meeting of the IBRP[14] in Paris). The IFICC thus asked the PCI (Le Prolétaire), in a letter sent on 27 January 2002, at the same time as to other groups of the communist left, to take a stand in its favour against the ICC: "Today we see only one solution: to address you so that you ask our organisation to open its eyes and regain its sense of responsibility. (...) Because we are in disagreement, today the ICC is doing everything it can to marginalise us and demolish us morally and politically "[15]. In spite of this letter, the IFICC had the nerve to write in its Bulletin n° 13: "we want to affirm that, for our part, we have never asked anyone to take sides between the ICC and the Fraction".

The desire to isolate the ICC meant trying to establish a perimeter wider than the organisations of the communist left. It involved building a fence, wherever possible and through different means, between the ICC and all those who, at one time or another, were likely to be interested in the content of our intervention. This is the meaning of its smear campaigns on its website, sometimes even through leaflets dedicated to this purpose, and in all the discussion forums that were accessible to it.

While we could not forbid IFICC members to go to street demonstrations to keep an eye on us, we could, on the other hand, prevent them from doing their dirty work of spying on our public meetings. This is why the ICC finally decided to ban the presence of members of the so-called "Internal Fraction" of the ICC from its public meetings and open contact meetings[16]. On several occasions we had to face threats (including the loud threat to slit the throat of one of our comrades[17]) and physical assaults from these thugs.

The opportunist degeneration of the ICC, proclaimed but never demonstrated by the IFICC!

The IFICC presented itself as "the true continuator of the CCI" which had allegedly gone through an "opportunist" and "Stalinist" degeneration. It declared that it was continuing the work, supposedly abandoned by the ICC, of defending the "true positions of this organisation", now threatened by the development of opportunism in the ICC and affecting in particular the question of its functioning. We have seen in practice the IFICC’s own conception of respect for the statutes and even the most elementary rules of behaviour of the workers' movement.

Moreover, nowhere is there any trace of a "political" argumentation by the IFICC, clearly highlighting its "fundamental divergences" with the ICC, which would have justified the constitution of an "internal fraction" situated in the continuity of all the left fractions of the workers’ movement, from the Spartacus League to the Italian Left Fraction[18]. Having always been incapable of developing the necessary political rigour by drawing inspiration from the experience of the workers' movement, it preferred to set up the scarecrow of popular vindictiveness by repeating endlessly that the ICC is a sect "without hope of recovery, and which has largely marginalised itself from the proletarian camp, or even put itself out of action, because of its opportunist positions". (Activities report of the 2nd General Meeting of the IGCL. Revolution or War n° 12).

Why and how the ICC has put itself "out of the action in the proletarian camp", a concept that we don't find anywhere in our predecessors of Bilan and Internationalisme[19] (descent from which the IFICC-IGCL has the indecency to claim, in particular its alleged continuity with our comrade MC[20]).

The IFICC-IGCL suggests that have betrayed, or are on the way to betraying, proletarian internationalism, which would indeed constitute a valid reason to denounce the opportunism leading in that direction. But, to date, the IFICC-IGCL has in no way demonstrated how our characterisation of the current phase of capitalist decadence, that of its decomposition[21] - which, according to these people, is a masterpiece of the opportunism of the ICC - is an illustration of this betrayal!

The IGCL-IFICC suggests that our sectarianism is expressed through our conception that there are parasitic groups acting in the milieu of the communist left[22]. This, as well as the idea that parasitism poses a danger to the proletarian political milieu, is what they claim marginalises us in relation to this milieu and even constitute a threat to it. In reality, this conception only constitutes a danger for the parasites and we defend its validity in the same way as we reclaim the fight of Marx and Engels against the Alliance of Bakunin within the First International: "It is high time, once and for all, to put an end to the daily internal struggles provoked in our Association by the presence of this parasitic body". (Engels, "The General Council to all members of the International", warning against the Bakunin Alliance).

The method of "suggesting" while avoiding the underlying political problem appeals to vulgar common sense[23], to the methods of witch-hunting practised in the Middle Ages, and which is experiencing a revival in today's decaying society - in particular, the all-out search for scapegoats for all the ills of society.

In reality, the IFICC-IGCL has never explained that, when its members were part of the ICC, they always supported the Theses on Parasitism and the Theses on Decomposition. Their attack on our organisation in 2000 made no reference to disagreements on these issues. It was only later that they "discovered", very conveniently, that they disagreed with these analyses. The challenge for them was to remove obstacles to the justification of their new political project:

    - By becoming in their turn cartoon caricatures of parasites, they obviously could not bear the image that the mirror of our analysis of parasitism reflected back on themselves and their behaviour. They had to break this mirror in order to make the ICC guilty of their own exactions, and to try to deprive the ICC of an adequate method for fighting them;

    - By rejecting the theory of the decomposition of capitalism elaborated by the ICC, which it is the only organisation of the communist left that defends this conception, the IFICC could gently flatter the other groups of the communist left, who are very critical of this analysis.

In addition, the ICC has been the target of many other accusations by the IFICC that we have not mentioned so far. Generally speaking, these are expressed by means of "shock formulas" based on lies and deformations, worthy of the motto of Goebbels, head of Nazi propaganda, according to which: "A huge lie carries with it a force that drives away doubt". Fortunately, medieval obscurantism does not prevent stupidity from being expressed and, with it, the possibility of arousing the incredulity of IGCL supporters. For their attention we reproduce a very small sample of the accusations brought against us by the IFICC: the ICC today is marked by "a progressive distancing from marxism and an increasingly assertive tendency to put forward (and defend) bourgeois and petty bourgeois values in vogue ("the cult of youth", feminism and above all "non-violence")[24] ; the ICC is also accused of playing the game of the forces of repression[25].

The police-like use by the IGCL of the ICC’s internal bulletins

No sooner had the old "IFICC" sign been put away and the news about the "IGCL" been posted than this parasitic group attempted a stunt, again of a police-like nature, against the ICC.

Although the IFICC’s anti-ICC campaigns initially had some impact on the proletarian political milieu, they did not succeed in marginalising our organisation, especially because we vigorously fought against them. The IFICC had had to resign itself to this situation until history seemed to smile on it again thanks to the providential arrival into its hands of some ICC internal bulletins[26].

Thinking that their hour of glory had finally arrived, these parasites, reinvigorated by this new "asset", unleashed some hysterical propaganda against the ICC, as evidenced by the (jubilant) advertising placard posted on their website: "A new (final?) internal crisis in the ICC!", accompanied of course by an "Appeal to the proletarian camp and ICC militants". For several days, they carried out a frenetic activity, addressing letter after letter to the whole "proletarian milieu" as well as to our militants and some of our sympathisers (whose addresses they continued to use after having stolen them from the ICC). This so-called "International Group of the Communist Left" rang the bell and shouted at the top of its voice that it was in possession of the internal bulletins of the ICC. By showing off their war trophy and making such a racket, the message that these experienced snitches were trying to get across was very clear: there was a "mole" in the ICC who was working hand in hand with the ex-IFICC! It was clearly police-type work with no other objective than to sow widespread suspicion, disorder and discord within our organisation. These were the same methods used by the GPU, Stalin's political police, to destroy from within the Trotskyist movement of the 1930s. These are the same methods that members of the former IFICC (including two of them, Juan and Jonas, founding members of the IGCL) had already used when they made "special" trips to several sections of the ICC in 2001 to organise secret meetings and circulate rumours that one of our comrades (the "wife of the head of the CCI", as they called her) was a "cop".

How did the ICGL benefit from such a godsend? An accomplice who had infiltrated our organisation? Could the police themselves have obtained it by hacking into our computers and then passing it on to the ICGL by some means? If, instead of being a gang of thugs, the IGCL had been a responsible organisation, it would have been eager to solve this enigma and to inform the political world of the outcome of its investigations.

Our article denouncing this new attack was enough to suddenly calm the IGCL's ardour, but it is interesting to note its response: "Our group takes note of the ICC’s silence and the absence of denial of the reality of a serious organisational crisis within the ICC and the new questioning within the ICC itself of the behaviour of the 'militant' Avril-Louise-Morgane. The ICGL will not respond to the cascade of grave insults that the ICC is currently pouring on our group (as it did yesterday on the IFICC). We have other things to do. (…)". This answer was revealing in several ways:

    - The ICGL refused to answer the "cascade of insults", so it avoided having to answer the only question of interest and which understandably embarrassed it: how had it obtained our internal bulletins?

    - It accused the ICC of hiding its organisational problems, whereas a reading of all our press reveals that this is a lie and a slander, since, like the Bolsheviks (see in particular Lenin's book One Step Forward, Two Steps Back) we are the only organisation to systematically report on them and learn from them.

    - Being in possession of our internal bulletins, the ICGL knew perfectly well that, once again, our problems would not be hidden. Consequently, publicising the organisational problems affecting the ICC could not be expected before a general meeting of the organisation (a congress or a conference) given the task of dealing with them was held; it could therefore only take place as part of a review of the work of such a meeting. The outcome of our extraordinary conference in May 2014 was published in an article in September 2014 in International Review No. 153, entitled "ICC Extraordinary International Conference: The news of our death is greatly exaggerated".

The IFICC are parasites, but not only on the ICC

We have shown how the IFICC tried to use the PCI to support it against the ICC (by sending them a letter) and we will illustrate how it used the same approach vis-à-vis the IBRP but on a bigger scale. This attempt to corrupt these two organisations, by leading them onto a terrain foreign to the rules that should preside over relations within the communist left, also constitutes a parasitic attack against them.

Thus, the IBRP was the target in particular of an audacious manoeuvre on the part of the IFICC, consisting in organising a public meeting for the IBRP in Paris on 2 October 2004. In fact, as we shall show, it was a public meeting that was aimed at boosting the reputation of the IFICC, to the detriment of that of the IBRP, and with a view to carrying out an attack against the ICC.

The announcement of this meeting by the IBRP indicated that its theme was the war in Iraq. On the other hand, the IFICC’s announcement stressed the importance of its own approach: "At our suggestion and with our political and material support, the IBRP will organise a public meeting in Paris (a public meeting which we hope will not be the last) in which we call on all our readers to participate" (emphasis added). What emerges from this appeal is that, without the IFICC, this organisation of the communist left, which exists internationally and has been known for decades, would not have been able to take the initiative and organise the public meeting!

In fact, this parasitic group used the IBRP as a "straw man" for its own publicity in order to obtain a certificate of respectability, of recognition of its membership of the communist left. And this shameless little thugocracy did not hesitate to use the address book of ICC contacts (which it had stolen before it left the organisation) to broadcast its call for this public meeting.

As we pointed out at the time, the IFICC had not deemed it useful to include in its announcement a single sentence of analysis denouncing the war in Iraq (contrary to the announcement made by the IBRP). Likewise, its announcement was exclusively dedicated to a question: "how to rebuild a pole of revolutionary regroupment in the French capital after the collapse of the ICC, following which its public meetings are now deserted and no longer constitute a place for debate".

In fact, it was quite the opposite that the IBRP's public meeting highlighted. According to the IFICC, this was to be the proof that the IBRP was now the "only serious pole" of discussion and reference for the communist left. However, it would have been a total fiasco if the ICC had not participated and invited its contacts to do the same. In fact, an important delegation of militants of the ICC and about ten sympathisers of our organisation were present.

In reality, the multiplication of compliments paid by the ICGL-IFICC to the IBRP was nothing but pure hypocrisy. From its constitution, the IFICC had sought support within the proletarian political milieu, essentially from the IBRP, in its parasitic crusade against the ICC, in particular by "electing" the IBPR as the only viable pole for the regroupment of revolutionary forces. Like the gadfly in the fable of Jean de La Fontaine, it gave advice, distributed good points to the political milieu, reproduced some of its articles ... At that time, relations between the IBRP and the IFICC were at their high point. The report by the IFICC of a meeting with the IBRP in June 2004 set out the following analysis of the existing dynamics within the proletarian camp: "These different elements reviewed allow us to conclude that there are indeed two dynamics within the present proletarian camp, going in two opposite directions: one towards creating a framework to gather revolutionary energies, to favour and orient debates and collective reflection, to allow the widest possible intervention within the working class. This dynamic, of which our Fraction is a part, is carried, today, essentially by the IBRP. The other, going in the opposite direction, that of maintaining, even increasing dispersion, political confusion, is carried by the ICC, and this what our Fraction is openly struggling against. " (Minutes of a meeting between the IBRP and the Fraction; September 2004 – IFICC Bulletin Communiste 27)

Fifteen years later, the Activities Report of the 2nd General Meeting of the ICGL (April 2019) gives us a much less idyllic picture of its relationship with the ICT (formerly the IBRP). In fact, it informs its readers that "... new communist forces have emerged of which Nuevo Curso is the expression and a factor, thus directly facing the historical groups of the communist left with their historical responsibility towards this new dynamic; but the Internationalist Communist Tendency, the main organisation of this camp, began by locking itself into an attitude, or reflexes, which were relatively sectarian towards us and immediatist as regards these new forces" (underlined by us - Activities Report of the 2nd General Meeting of the IGCL, Revolution or War n°12).

Moreover, "the ICT, although organically linked with the Italian CP and the Communist Left in Italy, suffers the weight of relative informalism, personalism and individualism, and therefore of the circle spirit" (ibid, our emphasis), which, according to the IGCL, hinders the application of a party method by the ICT, especially in the relationship with its contacts.

So what happened that made the IFICC-IGCL, those patented bootlickers of the ICT, rebel in this way? Today they discover that the ICT has been engaging in what looks like an opportunist approach to intervention towards contacts: "The article, written by a member of the CWO, the British ICT group, clearly rejects 'fractions or discussion circles'. Beyond the rejection of an organisational form per se, and more seriously, it underestimates, ignores, and in fact rejects, any process of political confrontation and clarification as a central means and indispensable moment of the struggle for the party" (ibid, underlined by us)

In fact, it is certainly not an approach that it characterises as opportunist (without using the term) that disturbs the ICGL, but rather the fact that the faithful "gadfly" has much less success than the ICT with the new elements approaching the communist left. Above all, the ICGL is having a hard time digesting the fact that its members in Canada have left it to join the ICT.

This criticism of the ICT by the IGCL is revealing, not of the recruitment methods of the ICT, but of the bottomless hypocrisy of the ICGL. In fact, in addition to the political/theoretical compromises that the IFICC had made to be more in tune with the proletarian political milieu (abandoning the theory of decomposition and the theses on parasitism), its members had stifled another divergence with the IBRP, one of great importance, that the IFICC had always had (and that they shared with the ICC when they were in our organisation) about the principles that should govern the formation of the party. Suddenly, IFICC members had "forgotten" the criticisms that they and the ICC had previously made of the Partito Comunista Internazionalista (PCInt) and the IFICC on this issue, including the opportunist approach that had presided over the formation of the Partito in 1945. Today, the ICGL is "discovering" that the recruitment methods of the ICT are a little opportunist but it is not, as the ICGL would have you believe, the ICT that has changed its methods but the ICGL that is abandoning its attitude of bootlicker owing to its bitterness at having been double-crossed by the ICT, which has taken some of its members from it.

There are indeed disagreements between the ICT and the ICC over the method of regroupment that can lead to the constitution of the world party, but this disagreement is within the proletarian camp and will give rise to political debate and confrontation between comrades fighting for the same cause. And it is unacceptable that it should be polluted by the Jeremiads of the IGCL.

The lessons of a fight against the IFICC’s alliance with an adventurer (citizen B) in 2004

To conclude on the IGCL-IFICC’s history of valorous deeds, and on their eminently harmful character, it is necessary to come back to an episode which presents similarities with the recent situation where the parasitism of IGCL came to support the shenanigans of an adventurer. An episode in which the alliance between these two elements had destructive effects, particularly in relation to elements approaching class positions.

In 2004, the ICC entered into a political relationship with a small searching group in Argentina, the NCI (Nucleo Comunista Internacional)[27]. Having undertaken a study of the positions of the currents of the communist left, its members were oriented towards the positions of the ICC. The discussions on the question of unacceptable organisational behaviour within the proletariat had convinced these comrades, on the basis of the study of the IFICCs position papers and our own articles on the subject, that the IFICC "had adopted a behaviour alien to the working class and the communist left". This had then given rise to a position paper in this sense written on 22 May 2004 by these comrades[28].

It turned out that a problem was beginning to arise within the NCI because one of its members - who we will call citizen B in the rest of the narrative - had a practice in total opposition to a collective and unified functioning, a fundamental condition of existence for a communist organisation. Having initially pushed for contact with the ICC (he was the only one who was in a position to use the internet), he conducted individual discussions with each of the members of the group, but he manoeuvred to avoid the development of any serious and systematic discussion of the group as a whole, which allowed him to "keep control" of it. This organisational practice, radically foreign to the proletariat, is typical of bourgeois groups, particularly of the left or extreme left of capital. In reality, Mr B intended to use his comrades as a springboard to become a "personality" within the proletarian political milieu. However, the systematic work of discussing political positions with the ICC over time, as well as our insistence on joint meetings of all comrades, increasingly thwarted his immediate plans as an adventurer.

Thus, at the end of July 2004, Mr B attempted a bold manoeuvre: he demanded the immediate integration of the group into the ICC. He imposed this demand in spite of the resistance of the other comrades of the NCI who, even if they had also set themselves the objective of joining the ICC, felt the need to carry out beforehand a whole in-depth work of clarification and assimilation, since communist militancy can only be based on solid convictions. The ICC rejected citizen B’s demand in line with our policy of opposing hasty and immature integrations which contain the risk of destroying militants and are harmful to the organisation.

In parallel to all this, an alliance had been forged between the IFICC and the adventurer B, certainly on B's initiative, with the aim of carrying out a manoeuvre against the ICC, using the NCI without its knowledge.

The manoeuvre consisted in circulating within the proletarian political milieu a denunciation of the ICC and its "nauseating methods", a statement which seemed to emanate indirectly from the NCI, since it was signed by a mysterious and fictitious "Circulo de Comunistas Internacionalistas" (or "CCI" for short!), led by citizen B and which, according to him, was supposed to constitute the "political supersession" of the NCI. These calumnies were conveyed by means of a leaflet by the "Circulo" and distributed by the IFICC on the occasion of the public meeting in Paris of the IBRP on 2 October 2004.

It was also put online in different languages on the IBRP website. In addition to directly targeting the ICC, the leaflet in question defended the IFICC, totally negating the NCI's position paper of 22 May 2004 which had denounced this group.

When they later discovered the manoeuvres Citizen B had been carrying out behind their backs, in particular the creation of the puppet "Círculo de Comunistas Internacionalistas", as well as his position in support of the IFICC and the denunciation of the ICC, the NCI members analysed the situation as follows: "It is highly probable that he (B.) had already made clandestine contact with the IFICC, while continuing to deceive us to the point of wanting to rush the integration of the NCI into the ICC" (Internationalists in Argentina - Presentation of the NCI Declaration)[29].

The way in which Citizen B elaborated his manoeuvre is typical of an adventurer, of his ambitions and his total lack of scruples and concern for the cause of the proletariat. The recourse to the services of an adventurer, by the IFICC, to satisfy its hatred of the ICC and to try to reinforce, by public denigration, the political isolation of our organisation, is worthy of the pathetic and despicable characters who populate the sordid world of the petty and big bourgeoisie.

At the time, the ICC had fought back, sometimes on a daily basis, against the false and usurping campaign of Citizen B until, unable to refute the public exposure of his manoeuvres, he decided to disappear politically. Unfortunately, the other members of the NCI, deeply demoralised by the way they had been used and manipulated by Citizen B, were unable to recover and continue their efforts to reflect, and eventually abandoned all political activity.

As for the IFICC, which was up to its neck in this affair and which had relied heavily on Citizen B to discredit the ICC, it seems not to have learned its lesson from this misadventure where it made a fool of itself since, recently, it has been relying on the actions of another adventurer.

Today, unlike the episode of Citizen B, it is not the ICC that is specifically targeted by the policy of the adventurer Gaizka but the whole communist left[30], whose reputation will suffer political damage if the latter is not unmasked and put in a position where it is impossible to do any political harm. As the tradition of the workers' movement teaches us, and as the recent experience of the ICC with the manoeuvring and slanders of citizen B shows, there is no other choice than to defend the honour of organisations which are the target of parasitic attacks and the action of adventurers[31] , even if this requires a great deal of energy which could usefully be put at the service of other organisational tasks[32].

At present, in several parts of the world, we are witnessing the emergence of a growing interest in the positions of the communist left on the part of young elements. And this is where the ICGL and Citizen Gaizka have a role to play. Not to contribute to the reflection and the evolution of these elements towards the communist left, but on the contrary to use their inexperience in order to lead them into dead ends, to sterilise and destroy their militant conviction[33]. If the IGCL and Gaizka claim to be part of the communist left, it is above all to trap these young elements for the sole benefit of their sordid interests. In the case of the IGCL, it is to establish a cordon sanitaire around the ICC in order to satisfy its hatred towards our organisation. In the case of Gaizka, it is a matter of realising his megalomaniacal ambitions as an adventurer. The motivations are not identical, but if, as in 2004, with the episode of Citizen B, there is a convergence between parasites and adventurers, it is obviously because they are, each in their own way, mortal enemies of the communist left, its traditions and principles. In the difficult path towards the full understanding of these traditions and principles, it will be necessary, on the basis of all the experience of the workers’ movement, to fight against the manipulations and traps of these out-and-out enemies of the workers’ movement.

ICC

In December last year the ICC wrote to the Internationalist Communist Tendency, asking them to publish a letter of correction of serious falsifications made about our organisation that appeared on the ICT website in an article entitled ‘On the forty-fifth anniversary of the Founding of the CWO’[1].

The ICC does not request such rectifications from the bourgeois camp. We expect lies coming from this direction and simply denounce any such defamations as the trademark of the enemy class.

If we asked the ICT for a correction of important defamations of the ICC it’s because we consider the ICT, whatever our political differences with this tendency, part of the internationalist proletarian camp, and we therefore assumed a common interest in rectifications of any important deviations from a truthful picture of the history of the Communist Left[2].

We expected that the ICT would either recognise these important inaccuracies and agree to rectify them or would provide evidence to refute our corrections.

Unfortunately though, the ICT replied angrily to our request, refusing to publish any correction, suggesting the request was a ‘provocation’ or a ‘political game’. They declared in their reply that this would be their last word on the subject and the correspondence was now closed.[3]

Nevertheless, despite this rebuff, the ICC wrote again hoping to effect a change of mind, explaining that our request for a rectification was not a provocation or a game or a dispute over the CWO’s interpretation of their history, or an attempt to try and impose our own interpretation of it, but a desire to reestablish important facts. And we noted in our second letter that despite the irate refusal of the ICT to publish our correction their reply did not refute the facts in question and were as we described them. But the ICT was consistent on one thing: they have so far stood by their unilateral ending of the correspondence and three months later have not replied to our second letter.

If we now publish this correspondence with the ICT it is because it was obviously impossible to arrive at a commonly agreed solution with them and because we nevertheless consider the falsifications serious enough to need a public correction. Given the ICT’s refusal to discuss a mutually acceptable public rectification further in private, which we would have preferred, we are obliged to make the facts public ourselves.

Our first letter

ICC to ICT, 8/12/2020

Dear comrades,

We ask you to publish the following corrective on your website:

"We noticed that an article on your website ‘On the 45th Anniversary of the founding of the CWO’ contains some falsehoods that defame our organisation. Three particularly stand out and they need to be corrected:

Firstly, the article claims that the ICC ‘slandered’ Battaglia Comunista concerning its origins in the Internationalist Communist Party founded in 1943:

‘We also discovered that the ICC slanders that they [the ICP] worked ‘inside the partisans’ were not true except in the fact that they had worked wherever the working class was present’.

In a letter from Battaglia Comunista to the ICC reprinted in an article “The ambiguities of the Internationalist Communist Party over the ‘partisans’ in Italy in 1943” in International Review No8 1977 it says:

“The comrades who came from the Communist Left and who constituted the [Internationalist Communist] party were the first both in Italy and outside it to denounce the counter-revolutionary policies of the democratic bloc (including the Stalinist and Trotskyist parties) and were the first and only ones to act inside the workers’ struggles and even in the ranks of the Partisans, calling on the workers to fight against capitalism no matter what kind of regime it was hiding behind.

The comrades who RI calls ‘Resistance fighters’ were revolutionary militants who engaged in the task of penetrating the ranks of the Partisans in order to disseminate the principles and tactics of the revolutionary movement, and who paid for this work with their lives.”

The Internationalist Communist Party, in which Battaglia Comunista originated, acted inside and penetrated the ranks of the Partisans – according to its very own testimony. So the ICC recognition and criticism of this fact is no slander.

Secondly, the “Timeline Summary” at the end of the CWO’s recent article says:

“1980: Third Conference of the International Communist Left (Paris) lead to the abandonment of the conferences by the ICC and other smaller groups”.

To affirm that the ICC abandoned the conferences is a pure falsification of reality, a falsification which is moreover contradicted by what is written earlier in your article:

“On the floor of the meeting [of the Third Conference] the CWO and the Belgian GCI separately announced that they would not attend the next conference. The CWO did not consult with the PCInt [ie, Battaglia Comunista] before doing this but the PCint, as the initiators of the conferences, tried to salvage something from them by proposing a new criterion for the next conference which would satisfy (or so they thought) some elements like the CWO and GCI and it would force the ICC to take a clearer stand. It did not work out like that as the ICC argued that the resolution was only intended to exclude them. They tried to get the PCInt to change the words of the criterion so that it would allow for the confusion on the party question to continue. PCInt stuck by the original formulation and the CWO delegation decided to support them.”

So it was not the ICC but the CWO which wanted to abandon the Conferences. The PCInt, in order to ‘salvage something’ introduced a new criterion (which they refused to alter, but which the CWO supported) for participation in the conference which the ICC could not accept. The debate on the nature of the party between the groups of the Conferences had been artificially closed. The ICC was in fact excluded by the two groups and did not abandon the Conferences.

Thirdly, the article says that:

‘When the ICC started breaking into people’s houses (ostensibly to recover ICC property) including that of JM who left alongside the splitters, Aberdeen threatened them with calling the police’.

The affirmation that the ICC ‘started breaking into people’s houses’ is a malicious lie put out by parasites like the long defunct Aberdeen ‘Communist’ Bulletin Group in order to justify the theft of ICC material resources and to excuse their threats to call the police against the ICC. The insinuation in the article – by the use of the adverb ‘ostensibly’ – that the recuperation of material by the ICC was a pretext for intimidation, was another lie put out by the parasites to excuse their own villainy.

One of the principles by which the communist left tradition has distinguished itself from Stalinism and Trotskyism has been to speak the truth and unmask the lies of the counter revolution, in particular the latter’s falsification of historical facts. This principle of factual accuracy is particularly important in a history of the communist left. The falsifications in the article need to be corrected in order to give a truthful picture of this history for new generations of communist militants.

The article has now been on your website for some time and could have been read by many people, so we ask that the corrective above appears within the next two weeks in a prominent place on your website.

Communist greetings, The ICC.”

Our second letter

Despite refusing to publish this letter the ICT effectively corroborated our corrections, as we pointed out in our second letter:

“…we note that in your letter you actually confirm the validity of the corrections that we asked for:

1. That it wasn’t an ICC slander to say that the PCInt entered into the Partisans at the end of the 2nd World War in Italy.

“PCInt members entered the partisans to win workers away from anti-fascism, Stalinism (and the CLN)”

2) That the ICC did not abandon the Conferences of the Communist Left:

“[The PCI] certainly did not want positive invitations to participate in the conferences to be reduced to only the ICC”

(In other words, there was no likelihood that the ICC would refuse to participate in the conferences.)

3) That the ICC did not commit any ‘break-ins’ during the recuperation of political material in 1981:

‘As to the question of “break-ins” you are right.”

The integrity of the ICC put in question

The facts in question, which we rectify in our first letter and confirm in our second letter, and which the ICT does not contest but refuses to correct publicly, are clearly not trifles but pertain directly to major aspects of the integrity of the positions of the ICC.  The CWO article suggests that the ICC's differences with the conduct of the PCint toward the Partisans in Italy in World War 2, – that helps to explain the different trajectory of the ICC’s antecedents, the Gauche Communiste de France, to that of the PCInt during the 1940s – was built on, a ‘slander’.

Then the article says that we abandoned the International Conferences of the Communist Left of the 1970s which we in fact defended tooth and nail. The negative impact of the failure of these conferences is still being felt today. And finally, the article pretends that the ICC, which has always defended revolutionary organisation and its honest behaviour, used the same kind of thuggery as those who were attempting to destroy it by theft, slanders and threats of the police. In a word, completely contrary to the facts, we come across in the article as slanderers, thugs, and deserters.

This is not a question of polemical exaggeration but of fabrications that defame us.

Obviously, the ICC is obliged to publicly defend itself against such denigrations.

The CWO intended their history for new members and contacts to know the ‘bedrock of our political awareness and perspectives today’. And as such their history was bound to have a polemical side since their past intersects at many points with that of the ICC. But this is all the more reason to keep to the facts in order for new militants to know the actual history of its divergences with other tendencies. The deep conviction of new militants in the politics of the ICT, or any other tendency of the Communist Left, can’t be formed on the basis of denigrations and falsehoods about opposing tendencies. On the contrary the formation of new militants of the Communist Left demands a knowledge of the facts.

Unfortunately, as the fate of the ICC’s request to the ICT shows, the collective determination to defend the truth within the Communist Left as a whole – part of its historical tradition – despite its mutual political disagreements, has been more and more forgotten and the attempt to rectify falsehoods is instead deemed by the ICT to be ‘playing a game’ - i.e, the demand by the ICC for factual honesty is itself considered to be dishonest. And then refused.

This wretched disregard for establishing the facts is however a fairly recent departure from the tradition of the marxist left and the Communist Left in particular.

‘The truth is revolutionary’ - Marx

The revolutionary nature of the truth has a general meaning for marxism in the sense that the sequence of historical changes from one mode of production to another throughout human history can only be understood scientifically, and therefore truthfully, as the result of class struggle. And it has a specific meaning for the struggle of the working class, which needs to unmask the lies the capitalist class uses to justify its rule of pitiless exploitation, economic crisis and destitution, endless war and catastrophe. Since the communist goal of the revolutionary proletariat is not to justify a new mode of exploitation but to abolish classes and create a society of the free association of the producers, the pursuit of the truth is the greatest political and theoretical weapon of the working class and its communist minorities, both against the bourgeoisie and in the reinforcement of its own ranks.

The theoretical, political and organisational development of the marxist tradition has occurred mainly through factually accurate polemics. There are the famous polemics by Marx and Engels against the Left Hegelians, (Holy Family, German Ideology) against Proudhon (Poverty of Philosophy), the Anti-Dühring, the Critique of the Gotha Programme, the polemic by Rosa Luxemburg against Eduard Bernstein (Reform or Revolution) Lenin’s polemic with the Russian populists in Who the friends of the people are and how they fight the social democrats, etc. They are all based on extensive quotations from the writings and the accurate, evidential accounts of the actions of those they are criticising, and were all the more powerful and vehement for that. Conversely the marxist tradition was determined to answer publicly all fabrications of its politics and most particularly expose the slanders and manoeuvres serving the enemy camp, such as Marx’s book- length exposure of the police spy Herr Vogt, or the report of the First International into the Bakunin conspiracy.

These principles of accuracy and honesty began to weaken in the marxist camp with the opportunist degeneration of the 2nd International. After the collapse of the latter in 1914 and the support of the main Social Democratic Parties for the imperialist war and active hatred for the revolutionary wave that emerged in 1917, the slanders against the marxist international left intensified and were the prelude to the attempt to exterminate its militants. The vilification of Rosa Luxemburg by the Social Democratic press, for example, created the climate for her assassination in 1919. Lenin and Trotsky narrowly escaped the same fate in the summer of 1917 after being slandered as German agents by the Mensheviks and others.

The long Stalinist counter-revolution that followed the end of the revolutionary wave from 1917-23 intensified this attack against the principles and honour of the revolutionary vanguard in the name of marxism and the working class –  a hypocrisy unprecedented in history. Stalinist attacks, dressed up as ‘marxist polemics’, aimed at the destruction of those that maintained the internationalist core of the marxist programme in the face of the degeneration of the October Revolution and the Communist International - that is, the opposition aroundTrotsky but above all the Communist Lefts of Germany and Italy. Falsifications of history, lies and denigrations prepared the ground for expulsions, imprisonment, torture, show trials and murder.

Trotsky attempted to uphold the true marxist tradition with the Dewey Commission in 1936 that exposed the frame-ups of the Moscow Trials with systematic and testimonial evidence.

But Trotskyism joined the bourgeois camp during the Second World War by abandoning internationalism, and in the process its methods became more akin to those of the Stalinist and Social Democratic counter-revolution. Lying and slandering became normal behaviour within the left and extreme left of the bourgeois counter-revolution. Only the Communist Left remained on the side of the proletariat and the defence of the truth during the imperialist butchery 1939 - 45. And today the Communist Left still has to contend with and sharply distinguish itself from the ignominious methods of the counter revolutionary left.

In the resurgence of the Communist Left tradition after 1968, despite the weight of sectarianism amongst the different groups and the difficulty of new militants breaking from the mores of leftism, the need for a common effort to establish the truth was mutually recognised by the different groups. As the ICC letter to the CWO above shows, the ICC published in 1977 in its International Review the request of Battaglia Comunista (that is the PCint/ICT) for a correction of its article on the partisans and the origins of the PCint. And at this time the request of the PCInt referred to this revolutionary principle of historical accuracy, an episode which we recall in our second letter to the ICT:

“In 1976, comrade Onorato Damen, in the name of the Executive of the Partito Comunista Internazionalista, addressed a letter to our section in France asking it to rectify certain statements contained in a polemic with the Bordigist PCI published in No. 29 of our newspaper Révolution Internationale. He protested, in particular, against what we had written about the Partito's policy on the partisan issue. And he concluded his letter with the following: "We want all revolutionaries to know how to carry out a serious critical examination of positions on the main political problems of the working class today, documented with the seriousness that is proper to revolutionaries, when it is a question of returning (and this is something that is always necessary) to the errors of the past”. We published his entire letter in the International Review No. 8, with, of course, our own reply.

Our question to you is: do you think that comrade Damen and the Executive of the PCInt had engaged in "provocation", in "political games" by asking us to publish a correction?

Of course, there can be a dispute over the reality of the facts. In International Review 87 for example, we published a letter from the CWO (written as "provocation" and for "political games" ?) that claimed there were falsehoods in an earlier polemic of the ICC. We argued that they were in fact true.

More recently in the last few decades, though this revolutionary tradition recalled by Onorato Damen has been forgotten, partly as a result of the failure of the Conferences of the Communist Left referred to earlier, and the resulting rise, despite the best efforts of the ICC, of a destructive ‘each against all' mentality, where the principle of honesty within the Communist Left was more and more forgotten. The principle of mutual discussion and common action established by Marx during the Ist International as the ethos of all the different tendencies within the proletarian movement was increasingly ignored. Connected to this failure, and exacerbating it, was the proliferation of groups - often no more than disaffected bloggers - who verbally claimed to be part of the Communist Left but whose function in reality proved to be to denigrate and slander this organised tradition of left communism. However the latter as a whole has so far failed to close ranks against this malignant phenomena which further weakens the principle of honesty within the Communist Left.[4]

The ‘Circulo’ Affair

The infection from the dishonest practice of leftism, symptoms of which appear in the falsifications in CWO’s latest article on its history, is reminiscent of an earlier episode of a similar kind, the infamous scandal of the ‘Circulo Affair’ when the ICT (then called the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party) re-published on its website, without any criticism, a litany of slanders against the ICC that originated from an imaginary group in Latin America called the ‘Circulo de Comunistas Internacionalistas’.

 In the early 2000s the ICC started discussions with a group in Argentina about the positions and organisational principles of the Communist Left and about the analysis of the piqueteros movement in that country in December 2001. As a consequence this group, the Nucleo Comunista Internazionalista, launched an international appeal to the groups of the Communist Left for organised discussion, to which, unfortunately, only the ICC responded positively. The NCI also made a statement condemning the actions of a parasitic group against the ICC.[5]

However, the difficulties faced by new groups coming to the Communist Left was revealed by a bizarre and destructive episode.

An ambitious individual, within the NCI, (who came to be known as Citizen B) was displaying a decidedly adventurist behaviour within the group with the air of a guru, and peremptorily demanded immediate membership of the ICC. When the conditions of this demand were rejected he took revenge by pretending that the NCI had transformed itself into an imaginary political group, the ‘Circulo de Comunistas Internacionalistas’ ! This outrageous usurpation took place entirely without the knowledge of the other members of the NCI.

On behalf of this phantom group, Citizen B then began to produce statements on the internet and on his own account personally reversing the previous position of the NCI against parasitism and instead taking up the very attacks of the latter against the ICC.

The first of these statements, which was physically distributed at an IBRP public meeting in Paris by the parasitic group the IGCL[6] declared:

“It is the one-sided voice of the ICC which, adopting the harmful lessons of Stalinism in 1938 to liquidate the Bolshevik old guard, is today trying to do the same: politically liquidate revolutionary comrades for the simple fact of disagreeing with its political line.”

Not only Stalin but Goebbels:

“It is necessary to put a stop to the slander and to Goebbels' policy of lying and lying again and again so that there is always something left of it”.

All this slanderous rubbish against the ICC from the statement of the bogus ‘Circulo’, unsupported by a single shred of evidence, was published without comment, and without any attempt to verify it, in several languages, on the ICT website. The non-existent ‘Circulo’ was even welcomed as a genuine addition to the ranks of revolutionaries.

The ICC, alarmed that such calumnies were published on a Communist Left website against another tendency of the Communist Left, immediately wrote to the ICT giving comprehensive evidence that the ‘Circulo’ was the grotesque invention of an adventurer and demanded that our statement of rectification of its slanderous statement be published by the ICT. It took three letters from the ICC and three weeks before this was finally done. But the matter didn’t end there.

The ICC contacted the other members of the NCI to corroborate the facts of the situation and found that the comrades were dumbfounded to learn of the usurpation and slanders of Citizen B and his ‘Circulo’ and decided to write a statement themselves denouncing the imposture and supporting the facts as presented by the ICC.[7]

Learning of this contact Citizen B then doubled down on his slanders from his first statement and produced a second tirade.

“…these telephone calls were not innocent. They had the devious intention of destroying our small nucleus, or its individual activists, by provoking mutual mistrust and sowing the seeds of division in the ranks of our small group.

…the current policy of the ICC provokes doubts and an internal atmosphere of mutual distrust. It uses the Stalinist tactic of ‘scorched earth,’ that is, not only the destruction of our small and modest group, but also the active opposition to any attempt at revolutionary regroupment which the ICC does not lead, through its sectarian and opportunistic policies. And for this, it does not hesitate to use a whole series of disgusting tricks with the central objective of demoralizing its opponents and, in this way, eliminating a ‘potential enemy’”.

Citizen B got so caught up in his manoeuvres and slanders that he found himself accusing the ICC of destroying a group that he himself had tried to replace with a completely fictitious group of his own imagination! But when this second slanderous declaration of the ‘Circulo’ appeared on the ICT website, the ICT refused to publish the statement of the NCI which completely exposed at first hand the fraud of the ‘Circulo’ and would have independently clarified and verified the whole episode. Nor did the ICT, once the facts had become obvious, and the ‘Circulo’ and Citizen B disappeared without trace, publish any retraction or explanation why the slanders against the ICC had appeared on their website or any recognition of the damage this had done to the reputation not only of the ICC but the whole Communist Left. The lying statement of the Circulo still remained for some weeks on the ICT website before it was quietly removed as though nothing had happened.

The ICC subsequently wrote an open letter to the militants of the ICT on the extreme gravity of facilitating the infiltration of the rotten methods of leftism into the behaviour of the Communist Left. We promised in this open letter that any further actions of the same type as the Circulo scandal would be exposed, particularly if the ICT again tried to extricate itself from the scandal by giving our letters the ‘silent treatment’ [8]. The present article is a fulfilment of that promise.

Instead of drawing the lessons of the experience and recognising the attacks of the ‘Circulo’ for what they were, and their own grave error of republishing them, the ICT responded at the time by adding insult to the injury on the ICC. Instead of denouncing the fraud of the ‘Circulo’ they denounced the ICC as a paranoid organisation in the process of disintegration, and posed instead as a victim of the ‘vulgar and violent’ attacks of the ICC.

The crime of the ‘Circulo’ fiasco, therefore, according to this scenario, was not that the ICT had facilitated a malicious attack on another group of the Communist Left but the fact that the ICC had reacted to this outrage and exposed it for the fraud it was.

The insolence didn’t end there. Having played a significant role in creating the ‘Circulo’ mess the ICT pretended that it was now much too busy to help clean it up and answer the critiques of the ICC. It implied that its important work toward the class struggle meant that it didn’t have time for the disputes of small groups, as though the attempt to drag a group of the Communist Left through the mud was of minor concern. 

……………….

If we recount the history of the ‘Circulo’ in this article it is to show the lessons haven’t been learnt and the same damaging mistakes are still being made. In a similar way to the episode of the ‘Circulo' the recent defamatory fabrications about the ICC contained in the article on the CWO’s history remain on their website. Not only has the ICT refused the request to publish the ICC rebuttal but it has refused to further discuss the question with the ICC, even though privately they do not contest the facts in question.

In its letter the ICT in effect responds to our request for the establishment of the facts with similar insults to those of the response of the ICT to us in 2004. According to them the problem is not the falsifications in the article but the ICC causing trouble by demanding that they be corrected publicly. The CWO pretends that the ICC is making a political game to discredit them. And they make believe they are much too busy anyway to pursue this question further; goodbye.

In reality the ‘political game’ is in this attempt to hide the falsifications in the article by further compounding them. The main discredit is here. The public rectification of the original falsifications in fact would have been to the credit of the CWO.

The Communist Left: revolutionary positions and revolutionary behaviour

The implication of the responses of the ICT to our critique is that the ICC is not concerning itself with the class struggle but only with the disputes between revolutionary groups. A glance at the work of the ICC on this site over the past 45 years will immediately reveal that this isn’t true.

It is no use pretending, in order to hide failures in this regard, that the question of the honest comportment of revolutionary organisations amongst themselves is secondary or irrelevant to the general political goals, analyses and intervention of the Communist Left. The organisational honesty of the latter in the working class is indispensable to its ultimate success. Conversely adopting, or excusing, behaviour that is more akin to leftism can only risk demoralising those who are breaking with the counter-revolutionary left to come to internationalist positions.

If the Citizen B and his ‘Circulo’ failed to make the NCI disappear immediately in 2004 as he wanted, the NCI nevertheless did not survive this whole fraudulent episode which, as we have explained, was more typical of the leftist milieu they had just escaped from than the milieu of the Communist Left which they believed they had joined. The experience had a long-term demoralising effect on them.

Today, without a revolutionary behaviour by groups of the communist left, there is a real danger of destroying the potential for new militants coming to their class positions.

Without a revolutionary behaviour, new revolutionary militants will find it difficult to distinguish not only the Communist Left from all strands of leftism but the real from the fake Communist Left. The numerous micro-groups, adventurers, individuals with a grudge, who today pretend to be part of the Communist Left tradition while devoting themselves to discrediting it, like the infamous ‘Circulo’, are proof that the internationalist platform is more than a document but a way of life, of organisational integrity.

However, upholding a common standard of behaviour amongst its different groups would strengthen the political presence of the Left Communist milieu within the working class as a whole.

The political programme of the Communist Left, that is the elaboration in the working class of the revolutionary truth of  the proletarian struggle, depends on an organisational behaviour that is consistent with these political ideals. The combat for the internationalist unity of the proletariat against the lies of imperialism and all its apologists for example, cannot be waged with the same morals as the latter and their contempt for the truth.

This is not an appeal to an eternal moral ideal but the recognition that the ends and means of the revolutionary organisation, the goal and the movement, are inseparable and constantly interrelate.

The ICC, in bringing to light the falsifications of the article on the CWO’s history is not playing a ‘game’. It is in earnest and will continue to make the question of revolutionary honesty and accuracy a central aspect of its communist intervention.

“Participating in the combat of the Communist Left does not only mean defending its political positions. It also means denouncing political behaviour such as rumours, lies, slander and blackmail, all of which are diametrically opposed to the proletariat’s struggle for its emancipation.” [9]

ICC (14/04/2021)

We republish here a letter we addressed to the IBRP in December 2004 following the appearance on its website of a declaration emanating from a mysterious “Circle of Internationalist Communists”, containing extremely grave accusations against the ICC. Despite the protests of our organisation, which it did not take into account, the IBRP did not make any attempt to verify the reality of this group or the content of the accusations in question.

Paris, 7th December 2004

Comrades,

Since 2nd December we have noted that some discreet changes have been made to the IBRP's web site. One at a time, the English version and then the Spanish version of the "Declaration of the Circle of Internationalist Communists (Argentina): against the nauseating method of the ICC" dated 12th October, that were present on the site for more than one and a half months, have disappeared (curiously enough, the French version of this declaration is still present at the time of sending this letter:[1] does the IBRP have a different policy according to the specific country and language?[2] In addition, the introduction to the "Position statement of the Circle of Internationalist Communists on the events at Caleta Olivia" present on the Italian pages of your site, has been reduced by a quarter because the following passage has been eliminated: "The International Communist Nucleus of Argentina has recently broken with the International Communist Current, which we have considered for a long time now to be a useless political residue, that is unquestionably unfit to contribute to the formation of the international party. The Argentinian organisation has also changed its name to 'Circle of Internationalist Communists." (“Recentemente il Nucleo Comunista Internazionalista di Argentina ha rotto con la Corrente Comunista Internazionale, che da tempo indichiamo come ormai inutile sopravvivenza di una vecchia politica sicuramente non adeguata a contribuire alla formazione del Partito internazionale. L'organizzazione argentina ha anche cambiato nome assumendo quello di Circolo di Comunisti Internazionalisti.”).

These changes show that the IBRP has (perhaps) begun to realise that it's stirred up a hornet's nest by taking as gospel what the so-called "Circle" has recounted in its various "declarations", in particular as regards the behaviour of the ICC, and by publishing them in an extremely imprudent way. In other words, the IBRP is no longer able to hide from itself, and above all, hide from the readers of its website, what the ICC has asserted for nearly two months: that the accusations levelled against our organisation are pure lies, invented by a shady element, an unscrupulous impostor who also a compulsive liar. However, the discreet and gradual removal of these "declarations" does not erase or correct in any way, the serious political error, let alone the indefensible behaviour, of your organisation. Quite the contrary.

That is why this letter is intended as a solemn appeal to the militants of the IBRP about the behaviour of their organisation, which has been absolutely scandalous and incompatible with the bases of proletarian conduct.

Let us briefly recall the facts:

Towards mid-October the IBRP published in several languages on its web site the famous "Declaration against the nauseating methods of the ICC" of the so-called “Circulo de Comunistas Internacionalistas”. The latter presented itself as the successor of the “Nucleo Comunista Internacional”, with which the ICC has been discussing for several months (including two meetings in Argentina between the NCI and ICC delegations).

What was the substance of this "Declaration"? It contained a series of very serious accusations against our organisation:

- the ICC uses "practices which don't belong to the legacy of the Communist Left, but rather to the very method of the bourgeois left and of Stalinism" with "the underhand intention to destroy our small nucleus [that is, the “Circulo”, the new name given to the NCI], or its militants in an individual way by provoking mutual distrust and by sowing the germs of division in the ranks of our small group";

- the ICC "engaged itself in a destructive dynamic not only against those who dare to defy the ‘unchanging law and theories’ of the gurus of this current but also against those who try to think by themselves and do say NO to the ICC blackmails";

- the ICC uses "the Stalinist tactic of the scorched earth policy, it means not only the destruction of our small and modest group, but also the active opposition to any attempt towards revolutionary regroupment which the ICC wouldn't be leading for its sectarian and opportunist orientations. And for that, it doesn't hesitate to utilize a whole series of repugnant ruses whose central aim is to demoralize its opponents and, thus, to be able to eliminate a 'potential enemy'";

- "lacking agreement with its positions which have nothing to do with the revolutionary tradition, the ICC tries to sabotage any attempt of revolutionary regroupment as it has been the case with the public meeting [of the IBRP] of October 2nd, 2004 in Paris (France) and (…) it aims today at destroying our small group of Argentina"

Any reader who has any experience at all relating to the Communist Left (or those who claim continuity with it) can recognise here the same kind of slander that the IFICC has been using against our organisation for several years. But the analogy doesn't end there. It is also to be found in the aplomb with which the grossest lies are spouted:

"At their unanimous request, the comrades that the ICC has called by phone in order to sow the germs of distrust and of destruction of our small group, propose to the whole members of the Circle of Internationalist Communists the total rejection of the political method of the ICC that they consider as typically Stalinist and whose central aim, aim of the present ICC leadership, is to avoid the revolutionary regroupment for which various currents and groups do struggle for ; they propose to denounce these intrigues to the whole currents who declare to be within the continuity of the Communist Left."

The reality is very different, as we have already said in other texts and as is stated in the NCI declaration of 27th October: we did in fact phone a comrade of the NCI but it wasn't at all with the intention of "destroying [the NCI] or its militants in an individual way".

The aim of our first phone call was to try and understand how the "Circle of Internationalist Communists" was formed. Also to ascertain why comrades who had shown a very fraternal attitude to our delegation a few weeks earlier and who hadn't expressed any disagreement with the ICC (especially in relation to the behaviour of the IFICC), should, on 2nd October, draft a "Declaration" that was particularly hostile to our organisation and turn their backs on everything they'd defended up until that moment. At the time we had doubts as to whether all of the comrades of the NCI were involved in this "Declaration" (in spite of what it says about the "unanimity" of the members of the NCI in favour of this trajectory). The telephone discussions with the comrades of the NCI made it possible for us to inform them of what was going on: that a "Circulo" had appeared that presented itself as the continuation of the NCI and which was attacking the ICC. We were also able to ascertain that these comrades had no idea of the new policy being carried out by citizen B (the only one with access to Internet) in their name. When we asked the comrades, whom we contacted first, if they wanted us to call again, they replied in the affirmative. They insisted that the calls be as frequent as possible and they suggested that we phone when they were with the other comrades, so that we could talk to them as well. So in fact there is "a unanimous request on the part of the comrades that the ICC call them": they by no means "propose to the whole members of the Circle of Internationalist Communists the total rejection of the political method of the ICC", instead they warmly approved it. And the method that "they consider typically Stalinist" is that of Señor B.

At the beginning of his 12th October declaration, this intriguing character warns us that what he states about the "methods of the ICC" may "seem like a lie". In fact, the "declarations" of Señor B may indeed "seem like a lie". There's a good reason for that: they really are lies, utter lies. Needless to say, the IFICC immediately believed this lie which looked like a lie. Anything that can enable them to fling mud at our organisation is all grist to their mill and they couldn't care less if the accusation "can seem like a lie". After all, lying is second nature to them, it's their trade mark (in addition to blackmail, theft and grassing). But what is incredible, by contrast, is that an organisation of the Communist Left, the IBRP, has followed in the footsteps of the IFICC by publishing on its web site the infamous flights of fancy of Señor B without any critical comment, which means giving them total support.

The IBRP is very fond of giving lessons to others, for example by giving its own interpretation of the ICC's crisis, taking the lies of the IFICC for gospel truth without even making the effort to examine seriously the analyses made by the ICC itself (see, for example, "Elements of reflection on the crises of the ICC" on the IBRP web site[3]). On the other hand it doesn't like to receive suggestions on its own behaviour: "we reject the ridiculous warnings (of the ICC)", "We don't have to account to the ICC or anyone else for our political actions and the ICC's pretensions to represent the so-called traditions of the Communist Left is simply pathetic" (see “Reply to the stupid accusations of an organisation in the process of disintegration”, on the web site of the IBRP[4]). Nevertheless, allow us to say how we would have behaved if we had received a declaration such as that of the "Circulo" raising serious doubts about the IBRP.

The first thing that we would have done, would have been to contact the IBRP and ask it what was its response to such accusations. We would also have checked the credibility and the honesty of the author of such accusations. If it had been demonstrated that the accusations were untrue, we would immediately have denounced this behaviour and have offered our solidarity to the IBRP. If the accusation were true, and we thought it necessary to make this known in our press, we would have asked the IBRP for a position statement in order to publish it alongside the document accusing them.

Maybe you think that these are empty words and that in fact we would have done no such thing. But our readers at any rate know that this is how the ICC reacts and that we already did so when LA Workers' Voice mounted a campaign denigrating the IBRP (see Internationalism n°122).

How did the IBRP react when it received the "Declaration of the 'Circulo'"? Not only was it content to support it by publishing it in several languages on its site without making the least attempt to verify its authenticity, but it also refused for more than a dozen days to publish the denial that we asked it several times to publish alongside the declaration of the "Circulo" (see our letters of 22nd, 26th and 30th October).

Publishing our denial was the least that the IBRP could have done (and something that any bourgeois newspaper is generally willing to do) but it took three letters before it was published; three letters and a number of incidents which began to make it clear that the "declaration" was lies. The inclusion of our denial was the minimum, but that doesn't mean that it would have been sufficient because, by failing to take a position itself on the declaration of the "Circulo", the IBRP continued to support its lies. That's why, in our letters of 17th and 21st November, we asked you "to publish immediately (that is, on receipt of this letter) on your web site the Declaration of the NCI of 27th October, which is published on our own site in all relevant languages". This declaration isn't an emanation of the ICC, which you may suppose capable of saying anything, but comes from the principal witnesses to the falsifications and slanderous lies of Señor B. To this day, you still haven't published this declaration of the NCI (which was sent to you by post from Buenos Aires), which you know quite well is true as you've gradually and discreetly withdrawn the declaration of the "Circulo" from your site.

For several weeks you've "played dead" when the ICC asked that the truth be established. Now that it is gradually coming out (not thanks to you), you choose the most hypocritical way possible in order to avoid getting sullied: you withdraw a document that has been slinging a load of mud at our organisation for nearly two months with the same silence with which you circulated it in the first place.

Comrades, are you aware of the seriousness of your behaviour? Are you aware that this attitude is unworthy of a group that lays claim to the tradition of the Communist Left but belongs rather to the methods of degenerated Trotskyism, if not to Stalinism? Are you aware that you are doing the same thing as Señor B. (whose recent negotiations with the site "Argentina Roja" demonstrate that he has returned to his old Stalinist loves), who spends his time making documents appear and disappear on his web site in order to try and hide his underhand manoeuvres?

In any case, as you've placed your means of communication at the service of slander against the ICC, it isn't enough to retract this slander discreetly as if nothing has happened. You have committed a very serious political error and now you must rectify it. The only way worthy of a proletarian organisation is to announce on your web site that the document that was to be found there for almost two months is a pack of lies and to denounce Señor B's intrigues.

We understand that discovering the truth must have been a bitter disappointment for you: the NCI hasn't broken with the ICC and the "Circulo", in which you had the greatest hopes (see your article in the October issue of Battaglia Comunista" In Argentina too something is on the move"), is no more than an invention of Señor B’s imagination. Nevertheless, this is no reason to avoid taking a position on the methods of this impostor. It is also a matter of basic solidarity with the militants of the NCI, who were the main victims of the infamous manipulations of this element who usurped their name.

Likewise, we understand that it would be painful for you to recognise publicly that once again (after your communiqué of 9th September 2003 on the "Radical Communists of the Ukraine") you have been the victims of a fraudulent invention. When this mishap befell you, the ICC made no comment. Rather than twist the knife in the wound, we thought that it was up to you, as a "responsible leading force" (in your own words), to draw the lessons of this experience. However, it did not surprise us given the set-backs that you have experienced in the past (in particular with the SUCM and LAWV), and this despite our warnings that you "reject as ridiculous". But today the problem is much more serious than suffering the ridicule of being taken for a ride. Behind the touching ingenuousness with which you believed the word of a swindler and a compulsive liar, there was also duplicity in the fact that you gave space on your site for this individual's infamy. This behaviour is absolutely unworthy of an organisation that lays claim to the heritage of the Communist Left.

The IBRP claims that the ICC has "forfeited any capacity/possibility to contribute positively to the indispensable process towards the formation of the international communist party" ("avendo cioè perso ogni capacità/possibilità di contribuire positivamente al processo di formazione dell'indispensabile partito comunista internazionale", “In Argentina too something is on the move”, Battaglia Comunista of October 2004). Unlike the IBRP (and the various denominations of the Bordigist current), the ICC has never thought it was the only organisation able to contribute positively to the formation of the future world revolutionary party, even if it judges that its own contribution will be the most decisive, of course. This is why, since its appearance in 1964 (even before the actual founding of the ICC), our current took up the same orientation as that of the Gauche Communiste de France and has always defended the need for fraternal debate and co-operation (obviously on the basis of clarity) between the forces of the Communist Left. Even before 1977, when Battaglia Comunista made the proposal to organise international conferences of the groups of the Communist Left, we had already proposed that it do so several times, but in vain. This is why we were enthusiastic about Battaglia's initiative and committed ourselves seriously and determinedly to it. That is also why we deplored and condemned the decision of Battaglia and the CWO to put an end to this attempt at the end of the 3rd Conference in 1980.

In fact, our opinion is that certain of the IBRP's positions are confused, erroneous or incoherent and that they can create or maintain confusions within the class. This is why we publish polemics criticising these positions regularly in our press. However, we think that the IBRP is a proletarian organisation because of its fundamental principles and that it makes a positive contribution within the working class against bourgeois mystifications (in particular when it defends internationalism against imperialist war). This is why up to now we have always thought that it was in the interests of the working class to preserve an organisation like the IBRP. You do not have the same analysis as regards our own organisation as, having stated in your meeting with the IFICC in March 2002 that "if we come to the conclusion that the ICC has become 'invalid' as an organisation, our aim would be to do all that is possible to push for its disappearance" (IFICC Bulletin n°9), you have now in fact done all that is possible to attain this end.

The fact that in your opinion the ICC constitutes an obstacle to the development of consciousness in the working class, and that it would be better for the struggle if the ICC disappeared, doesn't pose problems for us. After all, it's the position that the various denominations of the Bordigist current have always defended. In the same way, it isn't a problem in our view that you try to achieve this aim. The question is: what means do you use? The bourgeoisie too has an interest in seeing the ICC disappear, as it has an interest in the disappearance of the other groups of the Communist Left. This is why it has unleashed disgusting campaigns against the Communist Left by identifying it with the "revisionist" current, which is linked to the far right.[5] For the ruling class ANY means are acceptable, including, and especially making use of lies and slander. But this isn't true for an organisation that claims to fight for the proletarian revolution. Just like the other revolutionary organisations of the workers' movement which have gone before it, the Communist Left isn't marked out only by its programmatic positions, such as internationalism. In its fight against the degeneration of the Communist International and against the opportunist deviation of Trotskyism, which led the latter into the bourgeois camp, the Communist Left has always defended a method based on clarity, and therefore on the truth, in particular against all the falsifications that Stalinism disseminated. Marx said "the truth is revolutionary". In other words lies, and slander in particular, aren't weapons of the proletariat but of the enemy class. So an organisation which uses them in its combat, whatever the validity of the positions inscribed in its programme, takes the path towards betrayal or at the least becomes a decisive obstacle to the development of consciousness in the class. In this case it is in fact preferable, from the point of view of the interests of the proletariat, that such an organisation disappear, much more than it would be because of errors in its programme.

Comrades,

We tell you frankly: if the IBRP persists in its policy of using lies, slander and, worse still, of "allowing" these to be used and abetting them by remaining silent when faced with the intrigues of grouplets, such as the "Circulo" and the IFICC, of which they are the trade mark and raison d'être, then it will have demonstrated that it too has become an obstacle to the development of consciousness in the proletariat. It will have become an obstacle, not so much because of the damage that it can do to our organisation (recent events have shown that we are able to defend ourselves, even if you think that "the ICC is in the process of disintegration"), but because of the damage and the dishonour that this kind of behaviour can inflict on the memory of the Italian Communist Left and thus on its invaluable contribution. In fact, in this case it would be preferable if the IBRP disappeared and "our aim would be to do all that is possible to push for its disappearance" as you so excellently put it. It is of course clear that to attain this end, we would use only weapons belonging to the working class and it goes without saying that we would never permit the use of lies or slander.

One last point:

The "Circulo's" declaration of 12th October, as well as the IFICC article in its Bulletin n°28, refers to our so-called "attempts to sabotage" your public meeting in Paris on the 2nd October. You are not yourselves strangers to this kind of accusation, as in the first version of your position statement on this public meeting which was published only in Italian (and not in French - yet another mystery of the IBRP!) you say: "the revolutionary vanguard, even where it is reduced in number, hampered in its emergence by the stink produced by an organisation in the process of disintegration, such as the ICC in Paris. This is why the IBRP will continue its work in Paris as well, taking all necessary measures to prevent and avoid sabotage, no matter where it may come from" (“le avanguardie rivoluzionarie anche laddove scarseggiano, ostacolate nel loro emergere dai miasmi prodotti da una organizzazione in via di disfacimento, come la CCI a Parigi. E' per questo che il BIPR continuerà il suo lavoro anche su Parigi, prendendo tutte le misure necessarie a prevenire ed evitare sabotaggi, da qualunque parte essi vengano”). In the end, you withdrew the final part of this passage (which shows that you weren't very sure of yourselves) and in particular the reference to our "sabotage". Nevertheless, a number of visitors to your site and the contacts to whom you send your communications by e-mail, have been informed of these accusations. Likewise, the IFICC and the "Circulo" continue to publish them on their own site and you make no attempt to deny them.

Comrades, if you think that we tried to sabotage your public meeting in Paris, say so frankly and explain why. This would make it possible to discuss the point in an argued way instead of being confronted with an underhand rumour.

To conclude. This letter is focused on one question alone, the publication on your web site of an infamous "Declaration" slandering the ICC. However, the use of lies and slander (in an active or passive way) as a way of combating the ICC doesn't end there. We remind you that we've written you two letters, in which, among other things, we asked you to take a position on a question of the greatest importance (if ever there was one) "Do you believe that, as the IFICC goes on repeating, the ICC is under the control of agents of the capitalist state (belonging to the police or a sect of free-masonry)?"

We also remind you that up to now, although you justify the IFICC's theft of our list of subscribers, you haven't explained how come these subscribers received an invitation to your public meeting by post although they hadn't given you their addresses. The only "explanation" that we've received was the one given at your public meeting in Paris on 2nd October by a member of the presidium, who said: "we didn't know that these invitations had been sent and we don't agree with it".

· If the IBRP didn't send these invitations, who did send them?

· Why don't you approve of this initiative if you approve of the theft of our list of subscribers?

Even if you don't want to explain to the ICC, we ask you at least to have the decency to give an explanation to our subscribers, who aren't necessarily ICC sympathisers.

We have raised here a number of questions that are still open in our view and we will place them on the table whenever necessary if you decide to use your usual policy of silence in response to our letters.

Communist greetings,

The ICC

[1] Note to the English version: as we publish this translation on our web site (31/12/2004), we notice that – although the link to the French version of the "Declaration" remains active – the document itself has disappeared : incompetence, or another example of the IBRP’s "discretion"?

[2] This question concerns not only the date of the withdrawal of the 12th October "Declaration" but also its insertion onto the IBRP's site. In fact, this declaration has never appeared in Italian although two other texts of the Circulo have appeared in this language; "Presa di posizione del Circolo di Comunisti Internazionalisti sui fatti di Caleta Olivia" ("Position statement of the Circle of International Communists on the events of Caleta Olivis" and "Prospettive della classe operaia in Argentina e nei paesi periferici" ("Perspective of the proletariat in Argentina and the peripheral countries"). Paradoxically, these haven't been published in other languages by the IBRP. A little difficult to understand. We hope at least that the militants of the IBRP know the reasons for these surprising decisions.

[3] Note to the English translation: this text appeared in Internationalist Communist n°21, which has never been published on the IBRP web site.

[4] Note to the English translation: this text has appeared in French on the web site, but not apparently in English.

[5] Note to the English translation: Various fraudulent campaigns in the bourgeois press, especially in France and Italy, have tried to identify the internationalist denunciation of the “great anti-fascist war” by the Communist Left, with the theses of those “revisionist” historians who deny or minimise the existence of the Nazi concentration camps.