The text we’re publishing here is the report pre­sented to the Fourth Congress of Revolution Internationale. The aim of the report isn’t to bring us up to date with the present state of the economic crisis in the eastern bloc, but to help deepen the following question: how can we say that the crisis in the eastern bloc is the same capitalist crisis which is hitting all the countries in the world? In what way and for what reasons are the manifestations of this crisis different from the forms taken in the developed countries of the western bloc?

The second part of the report Looks at the hist­orical aspect of this question, particularly with regard to the USSR: by examining the way that Russian capital arrived late on the world arena, and the methods it used to develop its imperialist strength in the context of decadent capita­lism, it tries to show how the manifestations of the crisis in the USSR are an extreme expression of the contradictions of capitalism.

This is why, in the first part of the report, we touch on the question of the scarcity of capital, which is a manifestation of world capital’s gene­ral crisis of overproduction in the weaker and more militarized countries, particularly the countries in the Russian bloc.

In publishing this report, we’re presenting to our readers the present level of the debate inside our organization about the general characteristics of capitalist decadence in the east, and how they are manifested in today’s open crisis.

Overproduction and scarcity of capital

“The mere relationship of wage-laborer and capitalist implies:

1. That the majority of producers (the workers) are non-consumers (non-buyers) of a very large part of their product, namely, of the means of production, and the raw material;

2. That the majority of producers, the workers, can consume an equivalent for their product only so long as they produce more than this equivalent, that is, so long as they produce surplus-value or surplus-product. They must always be overproducers, producers over and above their needs, in order to be able to be consumers or buyers within the limits of their needs.” (Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, Vol. II, p.520)

Faced with this contradiction, which is inherent in the very operation of capitalist exploitation, capitalism could only find a way out by selling to extra-capitalist sectors, in order to realize the surplus value contained in its commodities and perpetuate its accumulation, thus pursuing its development on an enlarged scale.

At the beginning of industrial capitalism, crises were localized crises of overproduction which took place on the scale of existing markets, and which were only resolved by the penetration of new pre-capitalist markets (exports, colonizations).

But the development of the market,ie the disposal of the capitalist surplus-product, has an absolute limit: the limitation of the world market. At the end of the nineteenth century, when the imperialist powers were completing the dividing up of the globe, the remaining pre-capitalist markets were controlled and protected by one or other imperia­lism. It was no longer possible to discover new markets which would have allowed capital to dispose of its surplus-product and thus palliate the crisis.

Capitalism entered into a permanent crisis of overproduction. Through the interplay of compet­ition, this overproduction tended to generalize to all commodities, but also to wherever capita­list relations of production predominated -- ie all over the world, once the world market was completed. Capitalism was now in its decadent phase.

Scarcity of capital: a consequence of generalized overproduction

The first factions of the bourgeoisie to make their national revolution, to create the national framework needed for the development of accumula­tion (England, France, USA etc), also grabbed hold of the essential areas of the world market. Thanks to these markets, which were in permanent extension during the ascendant period, they were able to carry through an accumulation of capital which allowed them to develop their industriali­zation, to raise the organic composition of their capital, to reach ever-higher levels of produc­tivity.

Once the world market was completed, it was also saturated: there was a world overproduction of capital and competition between the different capitals became more and more intense. Those who arrived too late, who were unable to safeguard their national independence, who didn’t have an external market at their disposal, who hadn’t accumulated enough capital in the ascendant period, were in the decadent period condemned not only to being forever incapable of making up for lost time, but also to seeing this gap between themselves and their more powerful rivals grow and grow. When competition got fiercer, when the race for higher productivity got more frenetic, they just didn’t have enough capital to be able to compete against the big capitalist powers that were much more favorably placed than they were. They were faced with a situation of scarcity of capital, condemned to ‘underdevelopment’. They could only survive by putting themselves under the protec­tion of a more powerful capitalism, which would use them simply as a reservoir of industrial or agricultural raw materials, or as a source of labor-power. They weren’t allowed to go through a real development of the productive forces, since this would only have made them added competitors on an already cluttered world market.

The situation of scarcity of capital in these countries is therefore something that is relative to the most developed capitals. It is one of the manifestations of the growing gap between the ‘rich’ and the ‘poor’ countries.

From the economic point of view, in the decadent period when competition becomes more and more intense, it is the most powerful pole of accumula­tion which tends to reduce the others to ‘under­development’, to a scarcity of capital. The most powerful national capital tends to attract capi­tal towards itself, because it tends to be the most productive, the most capable of innovating. (For example, today, the oil producing countries prefer to invest in the big imperialist metropoles rather than develop their own national production.)

This situation of saturation in the world market jeopardizes those who haven’t made sufficient investments to remain at the level of competivity necessitated by the market. While in the nine­teenth century Britain represented the future of capitalist development, today it is exactly the reverse: it’s the situation of the under­developed countries which indicates the future of capital.

Thus, in the framework of the Western bloc, the European countries and Japan have lost their national autonomy and find themselves more and more dependent on the USA; faced with the immen­se destruction of the world war, they had to appeal to American capital to reconstruct their economies.

From the economic point of view, the develop­ment of capital tends toward a growing inequality between the most powerful pole of accu­mulation and the rest of the planet, which is plunged into increasing misery, the majority of the population suffering from absolute impoverishment. During the crisis, at the end of the spectrum there’s nowhere to invest because markets are clogged up and there’s no way of making investment bear fruit; at the other end, there’s no capital to invest any­way.

Accumulation and destruction of capital

We’ve seen that, by definition, “the workers can consume an equivalent of their product only so long as they produce more than this equivalent...They must always be overproducers.” But the capitalist must realize this surplus-product on the market if he is to continue the cycle of accumulation. With the decadence of capitalism, the extra-capitalist markets have been reduced to their simplest expression, ie, virtually to nothing, either through proleta­rianization or pauperization. Surplus-value can only be realized in exchange with other ca­pitalist spheres, ie, at the expense of other capitalists. The most privileged capitalists are the most developed ones because, being more productive, they can sell at lower cost. Competition becomes intense.

This situation becomes a fetter on the process of accumulation: the necessity for each capi­tal to maintain the process of accumulation pushes global capital into bigger and bigger contradictions, culminating in crises and a destruction of capital, a disaccumulation which takes place:

-- through competition, which, in a crisis, culminates in a massive devaluation of the commodities thrown onto the market. The ca­pitalist whose product is too expensive is forced to sell at a loss to realize even a part of his initial investment.

The inability to invest in an already satu­rated market pushes capital towards massive speculations in which it sterilizes itself, while at the same time the attempt to create artificial markets leads to galloping inflation, which expresses a constant devaluation of capital.

-- through military production. The only way to protect one’s markets and open up others is to resort to the army, to military force. In decadence, the economy is subjected to military necessities. The war economy is a necessity because war has become capital’s mode of survival. Competition moves from the economic to the military terrain. But at the level of global capital, arms production is a destruction of capital because, contrary to the means of production or the means of con­sumption, it doesn’t allow for the reproduction of capital.

-- through resorting to an all-pervasive, un­productive statist system. Capitalism, torn by increasingly violent contradictions, can only maintain the unity of its productive apparatus through administrative palliatives which are totally unproductive and consume capital without reproducing it.

At the same time, more and more explosive social contradictions make it necessary to develop a huge repressive sector which is also totally parasitical (police, judiciary, unions, etc).

Thus, in the period of capitalist decadence, while a few national capitals manage, with increasing difficulty, to continue their accumu­lation, this only takes place at the expense of global capital which more and more goes through a process of destruction of capital, culminating in crisis and imperialist war.

This situation is expressed in increasingly totalitarian functioning of capital, the other side of which is the growing impoverishment of humanity and waste of the productive forces.

Only by destroying the relationship between capital and labor, which lies at the heart of all this poverty and inequality, will the proletariat be able to put an end to the reign of barbarism and liberate the productive forces which hold the promise of communist abundance, the end of capitalist scarcity.

Decadent capitalism in the USSR

At the end of the 19th century, the Russian Empire was the bastion of feudal forces, an objective barrier to the progressive development of capital. While the Russian bourgeoisie was able to create a modern productive apparatus, it still wasn’t strong enough to clearly impose its political power and sweep away the feudal barriers which paralyzed its development.

In these conditions, Russian capital developed too late and too weakly to be able to compete with its European rivals, who were in the process of dividing up the world. It was all too late: the places had already been taken, and Russia’s principal asset was the gigantic internal market it had inherited from the feudal Tsarist Empire. However, at the beginning of the 20th century, when the pre-capit­alist markets were getting narrower and narrower, and competition was becoming more acute, the Euro­pean and Japanese capitalists were casting hungry eyes at this feudal Empire lying fallow for capit­alism, and began to nibble away at it (as in the Russo-Japanese war of 1905).

With the completion of the world market, a new epoch opened up, marked by the outbreak of the 1914-18 war and the proletarian revolution of 1917. The Russian bourgeoisie was shaken by the war and swept away by the revolution.

1928 saw the completion of the Stalinist counter­revolution, marked by the adoption of the theory of socialism in one country and by the putting into action of the first five year plan. But, for the Russian bourgeoisie, it was in any case too late: scarred by the problems of its youth, it had missed the boat in the ascendant period of capitalism and had not accumulated enough capital to compete with its rival imperialisms on the economic level. It was faced with the problem of scarcity of capital, which would forever be a fetter on its capitalist development. It was con­demned to underdevelopment in relation to the dominant capitalists (USA, Britain, Japan, etc).

However, if Russia today has been able to beco­me the dominant capital of an imperialist bloc in a world divided into two by the rivalry between the USA and the USSR, it’s because the USSR had certain assets which allowed it to survive in the period of decadence.

The USSR’s assets in the period of decadence

The Stalinist bourgeoisie inherited a number of acquisitions which it didn’t help to create:

1. An important internal market inherited from the Tsarist Empire. Even though, after the First World War the USSR no longer possessed Poland, the Baltic countries, Finland, Korea and Bessarabia, what remained was by no means negligible and represented a gigantic extra-capitalist market composed of mi­llions of peasants and artisans. The USSR remained the biggest country in the world geographically speaking, and was rich in mineral resources,

2. A national independence maintained by the Tsar’s Empire, then the frontiers defended by the prole­tariat as its bastion. Thus the Stalinist counter­revolution inherited an independent national fra­mework that had been protected from the rapaciousness of the big imperialist powers.

3. Before 1914, Russia had been, in spite of everything, the fifth world power. However, its importance was based on its immense size and population: in 1913, its national income was only one fifth that of the USA’s, and it produced less coal, iron and steel than France. It was the strongest of the underdeveloped countries.

However, these assets were only taken advantage of because the USSR under Stalin made rapid use of the ‘recipes’ that were most adapted to the survival of its capital in the period of deca­dence. It did this for two essential reasons:

a. the specificities of its history and

b. the weakness of its economy.

These “recipes” had already been widely tested by the warring powers of World War 1. These powers had a tendency to forget these “recipes” with the illusions of the reconstruction period which followed. These “recipes” are made up of two inseparable elements: state capitalism and the war economy.

State capitalism

Already weak before 1917, the private bourgeoisie in Russia no longer had any important economic role following the revolution of 1917. Since the counter-revolution developed through the state, it was natural that the state should ensure the responsibility for the management of Russian capital.

Already heavily tied to the Tsarist state (an ex­pression of the weakness of the Russian private bourgeoisie), Russian industrial capital was, with the counter-revolution, totally in the hands of the Stalinist state. Russian state capitalism is the direct product of the counter-revolution. The state was the only structure capable of de­fending the USSR’s economic and military interests against the other imperialisms.

The war economy

The Stalinist bourgeoisie had only just defini­tively consolidated itself (1928) when the crisis of 1929 came along to rock world capitalism and destroy any illusions in the possibility of econo­mic exchange between the USSR and the rest of the world. Russian capitalism was too weak to defend its interests on the world arena at the economic level.

In the face of growing imperialist tensions between the great imperialist powers hunting for new out­lets, in the face of the military threat posed by Germany and Japan, the USSR could only preserve its independence through a massive recourse to the war economy, which became its only guarantee for survival (as an independent imperialism).

Given the weakness of its economy, there was only one way it could carve out a place on the world market: through imperialist war. Towards the end of the 1930’s the USSR began to actively prepare for this, subordinating the whole economic acti­vity to its needs of war.

But while these measures allowed the USSR to keep its place on the world arena, they were in no way a solution to the crisis of capitalism, which derived from the saturation of the world market. All they could do was to push the contra­dictions of the system to a higher and even more explosive level. They are stigmata of decadent capitalism all over the world. However, in the specific case of Russia, their precocity, their brutal and far-reaching character allowed the USSR to emerge as the second imperialist power in the world, at the expense of those who weren’t able to adapt so well, or so quickly, to the new conditions opened up by the First World War.

The development of Russian capital in the period of decadence

During the 1930’s, Russian capitalism did not escape from the convulsions of the world crisis. It merely insured its survival through total protectionism and a semi-autarkic development. How was this development possible, In fact, even according to the most pessimistic estimations, the USSR tripled its production between 1929 and 1940.

First of all, we can point out that, if you start from very little, it’s a lot easier to double or triple production. But, more important, the USSR was able to take advantage of its internal extra-capitalist market and the quantity of manpower at its disposal.

However, given the weakness of Russian capital, accumulation didn’t take place through classic economic exchange, but through the most brutal pillage of the extra-capitalist sectors and the ferocious exploitation of labor power, all of this guaranteed by the terror carried out by the state. Millions of peasants were deported to labor camps, where their brutal exploitation pro­vided both the capital needed for industrial in­vestment and almost free work-force. The pro­letariat was exploited in an absolute manner, through Stakhanovism imposed by terror. In its isolation, Russia was turned into a vast concentration camp.

The whole of production was oriented towards the means of production (86% of investment in the first five-year plan); then, from 1937, towards war production. The Russian ‘model’ of development was in fact a model of underdevelopment (this is why it’s mainly the underdeveloped countries which have followed in the same path). It corresponded to the impossibility of realizing through exchange the surplus value required for accumulation. Since it was so weak, Russian capital was forced to short-circuit this process: its development wasn’t guaranteed by its economic force, but by its police force.

Despite this development in the 1930’s, concretised in the war economy, Russia remained an economically weak country: it was the game of alliances and its wealth in cannon-fodder which allowed the USSR to pull the chestnuts out of the fire of World War II.

In 1945, the USSR came out of the war with a ravaged economy (20 million dead, 31,850 factories destro­yed, etc), but also with considerable gains such as its hold over Eastern Europe and, later on(1949), over China.

But, while Russian imperialism was the most power­ful figure in the new bloc, it wasn’t the most developed capital in the bloc. East Germany, Czechoslovakia, or even Poland were more competi­tive than Russia. There again, it wasn’t through classical exchange that the USSR was able to draw from these countries the capital it needed for its reconstruction: it was, once again, through pillage (dismantling of factories, deportation of the work­force, pure and simple annexations). Even if this policy was softened after the death of Stalin, owing to the necessity to reinforce the bloc as a whole and under the pressure of social events (East Germany 1953, Poland and Hungary 1956), the exchange set up within COMECON was a forced ex­change: the USSR imposed its low-quality products on its partners, paid them for their products in roubles (a non-convertible currency on the world market) and made them pay for Russia’s products at western rates. It also raised credit from its vassals which were not reimbursed and which were used to develop its economy (9.3 billion roubles from 1971 to 1980).

As we can see, the USSR doesn’t control its bloc through its economic power, but through its milita­ry power. It thus profits fully from the reality of decadent capitalism which, all over the world, has tended to displace economic competition onto the military level. The USSR’s only guarantee for survival is its coercive military and police po­wer. This determines the whole orientation of its economy towards a war economy. But this sort of meddling with the law of value, even though it’s the precondition for the survival of Russian capital, pushes the USSR into a number of insur­mountable contradictions which can no longer be hidden by the heavy, totalitarian state apparatus needed to keep the process of accumulation in mo­tion. The very development of the Russian state is the expression of these insolvable contradic­tions.

The crisis in Russia today

Having arrived too late on the world arena, the USSR is, from the economic point of view, a weak country suffering from a chronic shortage of capi­tal. It’s a military colossus on an economy of clay. Its economic strength is more quantitative than qualitative: in 1977 the USSR was 26th in the world league table (not counting the OPEC countries), just ahead of Greece. If the gross national product of France was £3,500 per capita, in Russia it was £1,400.Within its own bloc, Russia is behind East Germany (£2,170), Czechoslovakia (£1,550) and Poland (£1,510). In one hour, a Russian worker produces an added value of 3 dollars, a French worker 8 dollars, and an American worker 10 dollars.

Foreign trade

In these conditions, we can see why Russia’s balance of payments with the west is always in deficit, taking the form of a 16.3 billion dollar debt to the west at the end of 1977. But, even in relation to the COMECON countries, the USSR is seeing a continual deterioration of its position. The reconstruction of these countries’ economies after World War II led to a deficit for the USSR, which became percep­tible at the end of the 1950’s. Between 1971 and 1974, the USSR’s balance in relation to these countries was definitely negative; the situation was altered artificially by the rise of raw mate­rial prices (mainly oil), but today Russia’s situ­ation is deteriorating again.

But the USSR’s economic weakness doesn’t only appear in its balance of trade: it can also be seen in the structure of its foreign commerce, which is typical of an underdeveloped country.

The USSR is essentially an importer of manufactured products and an exporter of raw materials: with COMECON, raw materials make up 38.7% of its exports, while manufactured products make up 74% of its impports. With the west, the situation is even clearer: raw materials make up 76% of its exports, manufac­tured products 70% of its imports. It’s only with the underdeveloped countries that the USSR trades more like a developed country, but here 50% of its exports are made up of military materials.

The war economy

All these elements highlight the weakness of Russian capital, its under-developed character. In such a situation, which takes the form of a chronic cri­sis, the only way Russia can hold down a place on the world market is through the war economy, through the development of its military potential. What maintains the unity of the eastern bloc is the power of the Red Army. Economic potential is mo­bilized first and foremost towards military needs, through the war economy.

The rivalry between the two blocs is concretized at the military level, not the economic level.

On the economic level, Russia is beaten in advan­ce. On the military level, it can only compete with the west by mobilizing the essential parts of its economy for the army. While the USA devo­tes 6% of its budget to the army, the USSR, in order to retain credibility in the arms race, of­ficially devotes 12% of its budget (in fact, at this level, the official figures are a permanent lie: for the USRR, 20% would still be a very cau­tious estimate). It is impossible to dissociate the civil industrial sectors from the military industrial sectors (for example, tractor factories also produce tanks). Absolute priority is given to military production: in supplies, mobilization of factories and the work-force, transport, maintenance, etc... The Russian economy is an en­tirely militarized economy.

A military effort like this can only take place at the expense of the economy itself. Military production has the particular characteristic that it doesn’t allow for an ulterior development of the productive forces. It’s based on the destruc­tion of capital (when you consider that the Third World’s meat-imports in 1977 represented no more than 82% of the price of one nuclear submarine and that the USRR has dozens of them, you can get some idea of the scale of waste involved). How­ever, this immense waste is the USRR’s only gua­rantee of survival. It allows it to impose, through terror, draconian sacrifices on the working class and, again through force, through the tribute it extorts from its European vassals, to bring in the capital it needs to keep up the process of accumulation.

However, with the intensification of the crisis in the 1960’s, the economic and military pressure from the west also grew more intense. This pressure took the form of a change of bloc by China, Egypt, Iraq, etc, and of impulses towards independence, such as were rapidly silenced by the Red Army in Czechoslovakia. Given the low level of Russia’s trade with the West (3% of its national income), it can’t be said that Russia imported the crisis. For Russia, competition is first and foremost on the military level: faced with this pressure from a west tormented by the crisis, it had to strengthen its military potential even more, and thus destroy its own capital even more. This pushed the USSR into its own capitalist contradictions, into even more profound dis­tortions of the law of value. This situation tends to translate itself into a disaccumul­ation of capital which can no longer be compensated by the revenues of imperialism. This is why the world crisis, which appeared in the west in the mid-sixties, in Russia took the form of the dramatic aggravation of an already permanent crisis.

Faced with a scarcity of capital, the USSR has throughout its history, had to make a series of draconian choices, and has always decided in favor of its military potential. But this has only further weakened its economy, showing that the scarcity of capital is a vicious circle from which the USSR cannot escape. Thus, its strategic choices in favor of the aerospace and nuclear industries, vital to the development of its nuclear strike force, could only be made at the expense of other crucial sectors of the economy. We can see this today in Russia’s growing tendency to fall behind on key areas such as computers, biology, metals and new alloys, etc. In international competition, the Russian economy has become weaker, as can be seen by the fact that Japan has recently overtaken it as the second biggest economic power (ie. in quantitative terms). This situation serves to counter-weight Russia’s military strength and forces it to make even greater sacrifices to maintain its military credibility.

The priority given to the war economy can only take place at the expense of investments aimed at modernizing sectors that aren’t linked to the production of arms. In all these sectors, there is a very low level of mechanization; this scarcity of constant capital means that a large work-force has to be used. Thus, in agriculture, where 20% of the active population works (as opposed to 10% in France and 2.6% in the USA) , the lack of modern equipment -- tractors, silos, fertilizers, etc -- leads regularly to agricultural shortages. This forces the USSR to make more purchases on the world market, which in turn aggravates the diff­iculties of the Russian economy.

Scarcity of labor power

In the USSR, bare hands replace non-exist­ent machines, as in all the underdevel­oped countries in the world. However, and this is the difference, Russia’s hegemony over its bloc has allowed it -- and the necessities of imperialist rivalries have obliged it -- to develop heavy industry and other sectors crucial to its military strength. This creates a profound disequilibrium between the various economic sectors, between those linked to the army and others. But a capitalist economy is a whole: in order to make steel, you have to not only extract iron minerals, but also coal: you have to then transport the steel, work on it, etc: you have to feed the workers, and for that you need to supply agricult­ural products... Unfortunately for the Russian bourgeoisie, it can’t invest in every­thing at the same time. There is only one way it can make up for the deficiency of capital in these sectors: by using and abusing labor power, on pain of seeing a total paralysis in the economy. In the mines, in the fields, in the shipyards, men must replace machines. Thus, 36% of the active population in Russia are employed in agriculture and building, as opposed to 19% in France and 10% in the USA. This expresses itself in the low productivity of Russian industry, and, given the enormous demands made by the form of its economic development, by a scarcity of labor power.

This phenomenon is further strengthened by the fact that the internal imbalances of the Russian economy are expressed in a brutal tendency towards state capitalism (the only way of maintaining cohesion in the face of these explosive contradictions). This in turn is characterized by a terrible bureau­cratic inertia, by a chaotic situation in the supply of raw materials and spare parts to factories.

These two aspects lead the heads of enterprises to employ a swollen number of workers, out of fear of failing to meet the plan and to make up for the fact that production lines are often slowed down by lack of supplies, or by lack of spare parts to repair them. By maintaining a reservoir of labor power you can catch up on pro­duction targets when supplies do arrive. You can make maximum use of the assembly lines and you can use your plethora of maintenance workers to repair parts when there’s no replacement for them. All this means that, in 1975, the ‘ancilliary’ sectors of enterprises accounted for 49% of those working in industry.

This situation compels the Russian bour­geoisie to use labor power in an extensive manner, by institutionalizing the ‘double’ working day (supplementary hours, moon­lighting), by resorting to unpaid working days, by using the labor power of women (93% work) and the retired (in 1975 4,400,000 supplemented their pension with a wage).

The scarcity of labor power has its corollary in full employment. However, this full employment cannot mask the real underemployment of labor power, which expresses itself in the low productivity of the Russian economy. Full employment, in Russia, expresses the same thing as unemployment in the western countries: the underemployment of labor power, ie. decadent capitalism’s inability to use the resources of living labor.

Scarcity on the internal market

The necessity to lower the costs of prod­uction forces the Russian bourgeoisie to mount a constant attack on the most malleable and most important productive force: labor power. Their one aim is to lower real wages.

Faced with a shortage of labor power, which implies a constant pressure on the overall wage bill, the bourgeoisie is unable to use a sharp dose of unemployment and has to resort to the following draconian measures to reduce costs:

-- rationing, which is typical of a afar economy.

-- stability or reduction of prices, art­ificially imposed by the state in its auth­oritarian manner; this means that goods are sold on the internal market at prices below production costs.

This system allows the bourgeoisie to get cheap labor power, but it also means:

-- very low living standards

-- shortages of supplies in the shops. Since solvent demand (distributed in the form of wages and subsidies) is higher than the official value of consumer goods put on the market, this leads to long queues in front of the shops and profound discontent in the population, to a forced saving of money which has no real use, and to strong inflationary pressures.

-- the creation of an important black market, and a tendency towards bartering.

The shortages in the shops are further accent­uated by the general bad functioning of the Russian economy:

-- 15% of production is unsaleable or defective.

-- distribution is anarchic and products are poorly adapted to the needs of the market; in a context of general scarcity this leads to stocks of unsold, unusable material.

-- an agriculture in chronic deficit

All this means that people simply have to save their money (although this shouldn’t be overestimated -- it largely corresponds to the absence of consumer credit). This is some­thing that has greatly increased since 1965, showing that there is growing austerity via rationing.

This situation is the product of the priority given to the development of producer goods in industry, at the expense of consumer goods (87% of industrial investment as against 13%). However, owing to the backwardness and dis­equilibrium of Russian capitalism, this scarcity of commodities also affects the production of pro­ducer goods, since there are deficient supplies of raw materials and spare parts.

However, the pressures of the world market and the internal market are tending to break out of the barriers constituted by the distortions in the law of value which are the basis of the Russian model. Thus, the saturation of the world market has meant the appearance of major unsold stocks in Russian industry, and the pressure of demand on the home market has accelerated the growth of the black market. The black market has flourish­ed over the last few years, and here the law of value operates openly, leading to a fall in savings since 1975 and to growing inflationary pressures.

Inflation in the USSR

The official indices of prices in the USSR are remarkably stable (100 in 1965, 99.30 in 1976). Doesn’t inflation exist in these countries? Here again, the very functioning of the domestic market tends to mask inflation as it’s understood in the west (especially in its classic manifest­ation: price increases) As a matter of fact, this inflation takes different forms on the official market:

-- increased subsidies to consumer products, in order to maintain artificial prices.

-- accentuated rationing, leading to longer and longer queues outside the shops.

-- excess money, sterilized in savings accounts (130 billion roubles).

The inflationary factors in Russia are:

-- an excess of soluable demand over supply, which leads to the creation of a black market where inflation is genuinely reflected (there the rouble is worth of its official value).

-- unprofitable investments (eg. huge amounts invested in unfinished shipyards).

-- the enormous weight of the unproductive sectors, especially armaments (officially 12% of GNP).

-- the pressures of the world market via foreign trade.

This inflationary pressure is so strong that the Russian bourgeoisie can now no longer hide it: huge increases succeed each other at a faster and faster pace: tax is 100%, silk 40%, crockery 80%, clothes 15%, jewels 110%, automobiles 50% for the most sought after models. These are just some of the increases decided by the state on 1 January 1977, without taking into account the disguised increases, such as the withdrawal of a cheap product and the circulation of a more expensive equivalent, or the brutal price rises on the kolkhoz market (the agricultural collectives) and the black market.

Contrary to what the Stalinists and Trotsky­ists might say, when they declare that inflation in the USSR is due solely to the crisis of the western countries penetrating Russia via its foreign trade, it’s essentially the USSR’s internal contra­dictions which are behind this inflationary process, since commerce with the west only represents 3% of its national income.

In the particular situation of Russia, inflation, expresses the excess of demand over supply, whereas it’s the other way round on the world market. Is this contra­dictory? No, because the particular situation of Russia is precisely due to the fact that, given its lack of competivity, the world market has always seemed saturated as far as it’s concerned. The situation in Russia is still the product of the world economic crisis which is expressing itself on the world market.

In these conditions, could Russia’s unsaturated domestic market serve as a real outlet for its economy? Not really, because in Russia prices are lower than costs (a deficit which can only be made up by extor­ting capital from Eastern Europe). For the domestic market to serve as a real outlet prices would first of all have to be adjusted to world market prices: in fact, this is what lies behind the recent price rises. But this means moving towards an inflation­ary spiral, through growing pressure on the wage bill, and brings with it the threat of major social explosions. In fact, the important priority given to producer goods in the Xth national plan is even more an expre­ssion of the crisis of department I (producer goods) in relation to the saturation of the world market.

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The USSR cannot escape from the world crisis of capitalism. On the contrary, it fully expresses the reality of decadent capitalism:

-- impossibility of a real development of the productive forces.

-- brutal tendency towards state capitalism.

-- war economy.

In fact, all these traits express the perm­anent crisis of capitalism. The specific characteristics of the crisis in the USSR, far from signifying the absence of crisis in such countries, express the depth and perm­anence of the crisis there. They are the proof of the explosive contradictions which shake the Russian economy.

In order to maintain its independent exist­ence, Russian capital can only try to cheat the law of value and the law of exchange more and more. But this kind of cheating cannot for long mask the reality of capital and its contradictions: the law of value is more and more tending to shatter the formal framework which is presently distorting it.

With the threat hanging over it, the USSR is more and more compelled to find new markets to pillage in order to keep going. It’s more and more pushed towards war as a solution to the crisis.

But these contradictions, while they appear to be more brutal, aren’t different from the ones shaking capitalism all over the world; every­where, the law of value is doing its work; everywhere, capital is coming up to the limit of its outlets.

In many ways, the USSR shows the direction which capital everywhere is following: increasingly totalitarian control by the state, the insane waste of the war economy, etc.

In the East as in the West, the economic crisis in undermining the foundations of capitalist production and creating the condition for the social crisis which, by bringing the contradiction between capital and labor to boiling point, created the conditions for the communist revolution.

June 1980

 

“...the mass strike is not artificially ‘made’, not ‘decided’ at random, not ‘propaga­ted’ ... it is a historical phenomenon which, at a given moment, results from social condi­tions with historical inevitability.” (Rosa Luxemburg, The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions)

A breach has been opened in history which will never be entirely closed again: before the eyes of the whole world the working class in Poland has broken through the iron curtain to join the class struggle of all workers. Like 1905 in Russia, this movement emerged from the depths of the proletariat; its class nature is unambiguous. Its resolutely working class voice, its broad base and historical dimension make the mass strike in Poland the most important event in class struggle since the beginning of the reawakening of the proletariat in 1967-68.

The significance of this event goes beyond the still hesitant steps of May 1968 in France. At the time of this great lightning flash marking the end of the period of counter-revolution and the beginning of a new epoch of social turmoil, the potential of the workers’ movement was still undefined. Others spoke in place of the workers, like the students, for example, in revolt against the bankrupt values of a society shaken by the first effects of the crisis, but incapable of providing a solution. In the east, Czechoslovakia in 1968 reflected the nature of this early period: a movement in which the working class did not hold a major place, a nationalist movement domi­nated by a faction of the Party in power, a ‘Prague Spring’ of ‘democratic demands’ with no tomorrow. Although the movement in Poland in 1970 showed a much greater maturity of the prole­tariat, it remained little known and isolated from the general situation.

Today however the economic crisis of the system is a daily reality felt by the workers in their very being. It gives a more far—reaching and deeper significance to the events in Poland 1980: a whole country overwhelmed by a mass strike, by the generalized self—organization of the workers against austerity. The working class held centre-stage, going beyond the framework of economic defence to place itself, despite many weaknesses, on the social terrain, uniting the political and economic thrust as in all mass strikes. In reac­ting to the effects of the economic crisis, the workers in Poland have powerfully demonstrated that the world is a unity - all the governments of the world no matter what their ideological cover are floundering in the crisis and demand sacrifices from the exploited. The struggle in Poland is the best proof that the world is not divided into two different systems but that capitalism in one form or another reigns every­where over the exploitation of workers. The strikes in Poland have dealt an enormous blow (and one that the future will reveal to be irrev­ersible) to the credibility of the Stalinist and pro-Stalinist mystification of ‘workers’ states’ and the ‘socialism’ of the eastern bloc among the workers. Every time that workers in struggle anywhere in the world come up against the ideolo­gical or physical chains of Stalinism, the wor­kers’ voice of Gdansk will be remembered. And the breach will only widen. The events in Poland can only be understood in the framework of the crisis of capitalism (see the article on ‘Crisis in the Eastern Countries’ in this issue) and as an integral part of the international reawakening of workers’ struggles.

In the west, class struggle has emerged with greater vigour in recent years confirming the persistence of the combativity of the working class: the steel strike in Great Britain; the dockers’ strike in Rotterdam; Longwy-Denain in France; the struggles in Brazil, are only the most obvious examples.

In the east, recent events are also part of a working class agitation which has been developing for several months, particularly the general strike that paralysed the city of Lublin in Poland in July and the strikes in the USSR (the bus dri­vers’ strike in Togliattigrad in the Spring which was supported by the solidarity of the car workers, for example). These events help to destroy the myth that the working class has been forever crus­hed in the east and that all class struggle there is impossible.

Today we are seeing the unmistakable signs of an increasingly general reaction to the manifesta­tions of the world economic crisis. The strikes in Poland mark an immense step forward in inter­national class struggle, by showing the funda­mental unity of the proletarian condition and the proletarian solution. THEY ARE INDEED A HARBINGER OF THE BIRTH OF OUR POWER.

THE PROLETARIAT AND INTER-IMPERIALIST ANTAGONISMS

The fact that the rise in class struggle inter­nationally has found a culminating point in an eastern bloc country has a great significance for the proletariat. The working class has just gone through a whole period of intense propaganda cam­paigns by the western bourgeoisie about the dan­ger of war coming from the eastern bloc, the ‘war— mongers’ who are threatening the ‘pacifist’ west. On this level the lessons are very important and completely expose the lies about a homogeneous warrior bloc in the east against which all clas­ses of western society must unite and mobilize to avoid future Afghanistans. By its struggle, the Polish proletariat has undermined the monstr­ous perspective which the bourgeoisie tries to present as the only alternative: choosing one imperialist camp against the other. The workers in Poland have put forward the only real choice over and above national frontiers: WORKERS AGAINST THE BOSSES, THE PROLETARIAT AGAINST CAPITAL.

The bourgeoisie of all countries felt the threat of the working class: faced with class struggle which tends to break down the very basis of capi­talist society by revealing the fundamental con­tradiction between the proletariat and the bour­geoisie, the capitalist class showed a sort of international solidarity in the heat of events which undoubtedly surprised the neophytes. Un­like Hungary in 1956 or even Czechoslovakia in 1968 when the western bourgeoisie took advantage of the situation to try to win new levers of power, this time we were treated to the edifying spectacle of all the world’s governments, east and west, offering their bucket of water to put out the proletarian fires. The west offered credits to Poland through pressure on German banks and the International Monetary Fund, western unions sent money, Russia granted credits - all of them hovering around the sick patient trying to see that Poland’s colossal debts would not prevent it from granting some crumbs to calm the movement. All of them had one aim, to preserve the status quo against the proletarian danger and its tendency to spread. It is impossible to know all the details of the bourgeoisie’s secret diplomacy but the ‘personal’ letters of Giscard and Schmidt to Gierek, from ‘President to Presi­dent’, the Carter—Brezhnev telephone consulta­tions, show the common preoccupation that the Polish workers awakened in the class enemy. In fact the events in Poland merely confirm a basic historical law of class society. When the bourgeoisie of both camps was frightened by the mutinies in Germany in 1918, after the example of the Russian Revolution, it stopped the first world war to avoid the break-up of its entire system. In the same way the determined and org­anized struggle of the workers in Poland against austerity, even if it was not an insurrectional one, temporarily pushed the question of inter—imperialist conflicts to the background by putting the social question on the immediate agenda. Inter—imperialist factors do not disappear and can only be temporarily pushed aside because the pressure of working class struggle is still spor­adic and not mature enough for a decisive confron­tation. But these events constitute the clearest proof that the potential of working class resis­tance is the only effective break on war today. Contrary to the claims of the left and others that we must supposedly first defeat the opposing imperialist camp (‘Enemy Number One’) and only then commit ourselves to the social struggle (remember the campaigns around the Vietnam War in the sixties), the events in Poland show that ~ proletarian solidarity in the struggle can make the threat of war recede.

THE BOURGEOISIE BACKS OFF

One lesson of this movement which will not be erased quickly is the fact that the workers’ struggle can make the bourgeoisie retreat natio­nally and internationally and can establish a balance of forces favourable to the workers. The working class is not helpless against the repres­sive forces of the exploiters; it can paralyse the hand of repression by a rapid generalization of the movement.

There is absolutely no doubt that the workers of Poland have drawn the lessons of their previous experiences of 1956, 1970 and 1976. Their praxis has revealed the collective reflection of the revolutionary class. Unlike previous struggles, particularly Gdansk, Gdynia and Szczecin in 1970 when street fighting was the most marked although not the only characteristic of the movement, in the 1980 struggle the workers consciously avoided premature confrontations and left no dead. They realized that their force resided above all in the generalization of the struggle, in organiza­tion and solidarity.

It is not a question of opposing ‘the street’ to ‘the factory’ because both are part of the struggle of the working class. But the street (whether it be demonstrations or fighting) and the occupa­tion of factories (as a stronghold and not as a prison) are effective in the struggle only if the workers take the struggle into their own hands by generalizing it over and beyond sectional divisions and by organizing in a determined and autonomous way. Our force resides in this and not in any morbid exaltation of violence in and of itself. Contrary to the Situationist legends about burning and pillaging supermarkets or the Bordigists ‘Red Terror’ of Nosferatu, the struggle has reached a new level today by going beyond the stage of angry explosions; this is not because the workers in Poland became ‘pacifists’ under pressure from the KOR. At Gdansk, Szczecin and elsewhere the workers immediately organized defence groups against any possible repression, and were able to judge the weapons adequate for their struggle at a given moment. There are obviously no universal recipes valid in all cir­cumstances but the proof is clear that it was the rapid extension of the struggle which para­lysed the state.

There was a great deal of talk about the danger of Russian tanks. In fact the Russian army has never directly intervened in Poland neither at Poznan in 1956 nor during the 1970 and 1976 move­ments. This does not mean that the Russian state would not send their equivalent of the US Marines if the regime risked collapse and the movement was isolated. But today we are not in the Cold War Period (like in East Germany in 1953) when the bourgeoisie had its hands free to deal with an isolated uprising. Poland was neither a pre­mature insurrection drowned in blood as in Hungary 1956, nor a nationalist movement in a border state tending to open up to a rival bloc. The struggle of the workers in Poland in 1980 takes place today in an epoch of working class potential in all countries, east and west. And in spite of the strategic military position of Poland the Russian state had to be careful. It was not possible to face the workers’ struggle with an outright mass­acre. All the more so since in 1970 in Poland the early brutal repression only served to gener­alize the struggle. Faced with a workers’ move­ment of the size and strength of 1980 the bour­geoisie backed off; the workers felt their power, gaining confidence in themselves.

POLAND 1980 SHOWS US THE WAY FORWARD

Starting from the same causes which provoke all workers’ strikes, a revolt against impossible living conditions, the workers in Poland mobilized against scarcity and a rise in food prices (esp­ecially meat). They spread the movement by soli­darity strikes, refusing government pressures to negotiate factory by factory, sector by sector, and thereby avoided the trap that so many workers’ struggles in so many countries have fallen into these past few years. Above and beyond the spec­ificities of capitalism’s attacks against the working class (here, massive lay—offs and inflation; there scarcity of consumer goods and also inflation), the same basic problems face the entire proletariat whatever the specific methods of austerity, whatever the national bourgeoisie it confronts. The struggles of the Polish work­ers will only serve their class brothers if all these lessons are gradually assimilated.

In 1979 in France the workers of the steel indu­stry spontaneously and violently mobilized against the capitalist state which had just decreed a wave of lay—offs. It took two months for the unions to eliminate any possibility of an exten­sion of the movement - particularly by ending the strikes in the Paris region - and to make the workers re—enter the legalistic and capitalist framework of negotiating lay-offs. The organiza­tion of the struggle was left in the hands of the union rank and file organisms, the extension of the struggle was limited merely to the steel industry, working class violence was derailed into nationalistic commando operations, such were the obstacles encountered by the working class which allowed the bourgeoisie to demobilize the combativity of the workers and to carry out its plans (see the article ‘France: “Denain, Longwy, Show Us the Way”, in International Review, no.17).

In 1980 in Great Britain, under pressure from the steel workers, the shop stewards took the initia­tive of forming strike committees. Despite the threat of massive lay—offs (more than 50,000 in British Steel), the demands were limited to wage increases; despite the existence of other sectors of the working class ready to struggle, the ‘generalization’ was limited to the less comba­tive private steel industry. It took three months however to demobilize the workers ... the three months foreseen in the stockpiles of the bourgeoisie.

In these strikes the working class gained the experience of its strength but also witnessed the impasse of corporatism and of the specializa­tion of demands by sector, or by factory; it saw the sterility of union ‘organization’. The movement in Poland by its massive character, its rapidity, its extension beyond categories and regions, confirms not only the necessity but the possibility of the generalization and the self-­organization of the struggle. The movement in Poland went beyond the previous experiences and answered their weaknesses.

Unionists of all colours proclaim: “without unions, struggle is impossible; without unions the working class is atomized”. But the Polish workers have proved this a lie. The workers were never as strong as they were in the midst of this struggle because they had their own organizations born in the struggle, with elected delegates, revocable at any moment. Only when the workers ‘turned towards the illusion of ‘free trade unions’ were they led back into the capita­list order by recognizing the leading role of the state, of the Communist Party and the Warsaw Pact (the Gdansk Agreements). The events in Poland show the potential contained in all of today’s struggles and which would be more fully expressed if there were no social shock absorbers, the unions and the ‘democratic’ parties, to con­tain and demobilize it.

THE EVENTS

“The mass strike is an eternal moving changing sea of phenomena ... now it flows over the whole land, now it divides into a huge net of thin streams, now it rushes forth from under that ground like a fresh spring, now it is lost in the earth.” (R. Luxemburg, Mass Strike)

The economic weakness of capitalism in the east obliges it to adopt brutal austerity policies against the working class. Because it does not have the capacity to spread out the effects of the world crisis by attacking the proletariat gradually, day after day, piece by piece, industry by industry, as the western bourgeoisie has so far been able to do; because it cannot distort the workings of the law of value forever, the eastern bourgeoisie provoked the accumulated dis­content of the workers. The rigidity and economic fragility of eastern state capitalism obliges it to fix food prices; by raising these prices abruptly and thereby lowering workers’ living standards in one blow, the Polish state sparked a homogeneous response from the workers (despite the fact of wage differentials imposed by the regime). the unity of the bourgeoisie behind the state in the east is also the economic and poli­tical reality in the west but it is hidden by a myriad of private bosses in apparently separate sectors. In fact, what the rigidity of the Stalinist system makes clear and easy to under­stand in the east will also be understood in the west after painful experience. The events in Poland are part of this experience. The true face of the decadence of the capitalist system will everywhere be shorn of its ‘democratic’ and ‘liberal’ mask.

On 1 July 1980, after a major increase in meat prices, strikes broke out at Ursus (suburb of Warsaw) in the tractor plant which was at the heart of the confrontation with the authorities in 1976 and in Tczew in the Gdansk region. In Ursus the workers organized general assemblies, drew up a list of demands, elected a strike com­mittee. They resisted the threat of firings and repression and carried on work stoppages through­out the following period to support the movement

Between 3-10 July agitation spread within Warsaw (electrical supplies factories, printers), to the aircraft factory at Swidnick, the car plant in Zeran; to Lodz, to Gdansk. Workers formed strike committees, their demands dealt with wage increa­ses and the cancellation of the price rises. The government granted wage increases: 10% on average, sometimes as high as 20%; often granted preferen­tially to strikers in order to calm the movement.

In mid-July the strike hit Lublin. Railroad wor­kers, transport workers and finally all industries in the city stopped work. Their demands: free elections to the unions, a guarantee of safety for the strikers, keep the police out of the fac­tories, wage increases.

Work started again in some regions but strikes broke out in others. Krasnik, the Skolawa Wola steel mills, the city of Chelm (near the Russian border), Wroclow, were reported to be affected by strikes in the month of July. Department K1 of the shipyards at Gdansk had a work stoppage; also the steel complex at Huta—Warsaw. Everywhere the authorities gave in and granted wage increases. According to the Financial Times the government established a fund of 4 billion zlotys in July to pay these increases. Official agencies were instructed to make ‘good meat’ immediately available in factories where work stoppages threatened. Towards the end of July the movement seemed to recede; the government thought it had stopped the movement by negotiating factory by factory. It was mistaken.

The explosion was merely incubating as the one­ week strike of Warsaw’s dustmen at the beginning of August showed. On 14 August, the firing of a militant of the free trade union movement, a worker known for her combativity and sincerity, provoked the outbreak of a strike at the Lenin shipyards in Gdansk. The general assembly drew up a list of eleven demands; proposals were lis­tened to, discussed and voted upon. The assembly decided to elect a strike committee mandated on the basis of the demands which included: the reinstatement of fired workers, increases in family allowances, wage increases of 2000 zlotys (average wage: 3000—4500 zlotys a month), the dis­solution of the official unions, suppression of the privileges of the police and bureaucracy, the building of a monument to the memory of the wor­kers killed by the militia in 1970, the immediate publication of truthful information about the strike. The management gave in on the reinstate­ment of Anna Walentynowisz and Lech Walesa and on the construction of a monument. The strike committee gave an account of its mandate to the workers in the afternoon and informed them of the management’s position. The assembly decided to form a workers’ militia; all alcohol was confis­cated. A second round of negotiations with the management began. The workers took over the loud speaker system so that negotiations would be open for all to hear. Soon they developed a system whereby workers outside could be heard by the negotiators inside. Workers seized the microphone and made their voices heard. Throughout the greater part of the strike and up until the last days before the signing of the compromise thou­sands of workers intervened from outside to exhort, to approve, or to reject the strike committee’s decisions. All the workers who had been fired since 1970 could return to the shipyards. The management granted wage increases and guaranteed the safety of the strikers.

On 15 August a general strike paralysed the Gdansk region. The Paris Commune shipyard at Gdynia went out. The workers occupied the ship­yards and were granted an immediate increase of 2100 zlotys. They refused to go back to work, however, saying that “Gdansk must also win”. The movement at Gdansk fluctuated in a moment of hes­itation: the shop floor delegates hesitated to go any further and seemed to want to accept the management’s proposals. Workers from other places in Gdansk and from Gdynia convinced the assembly of workers occupying the shipyard to maintain solidarity with them. There was a call for a new election of delegates who would be better able to express the general will. The workers from dif­ferent plants in the region formed an inter-factory committee during the night of 15 August and elaborated twenty—one demands.

The strike committee then had 400 members, two representatives per factory; at the height of the movement there were between 800 and 1000 members. Delegations went back and forth from their facto­ries to the central strike committee, sometimes using cassettes to record the discussions. Strike committees in each factory took care of any specific demands, the whole was co-ordinated by the central strike committee. The strike committee of the Lenin shipyards had twelve members, one per shop, elected by a show of hands after discus­sion. Two were sent to the central inter—factory strike committee and reported back twice a day.

On 16 August all telephone communications with Gdansk was cut off by the government. The central strike committee elected a presidium where the partisans of ‘free trade unions’ and dissidents predominated. The twenty—one demands settled upon on 16 August began with a call for free and inde­pendent unions and the right to strike. What had been point two in the eleven demands went to seventh place: the 2000 zloty increase for every­one.

By 18 August seventy-five enterprises were para­lysed in the Gdansk-Gdynia—Sopot region. There were about 100,000 strikers. There were movements in Szczecin, and at Tarnow, eighty kilometres south of Cracow. The strike committee organized the food supply; power stations and food factories operated by request of the strike committee. The negotiations having become bogged down, the govern­ment refused to talk with the inter—factory committee. In the following days new strikes at Elblag, at Tczew, in Kolobrzeg and other cities broke out. On 20 August it was estimated that 300,000 workers were on strike. The newspaper of the Lenin shipyards, Solidarity, came out daily; printing workers helped to put out leaflets and publications.

On 26 August workers reacted with caution to the government’s promises and remained indifferent to Gierek’s speeches. They refused to negotiate until telephone communications were re—established.

On 27 August safe conduct passes for travel to Gdansk issued by sources in the Warsaw government were granted to dissidents so that they could go to the strikers as ‘experts’ and calm this upside-down world. The government agreed to negotiate with the presidium of the central strike committee and recognized the right to strike. The telephone lines were re—established. Parallel negotiations began at Szczecin near the border with East Germany. Cardinal Wyszynski called for an end to the strike; parts of his speech were shown on TV. The strikers sent out delegations to the rest of the country for solidarity.

On 28 August the strikes spread further. They affected the copper and coal mines of Silesia where workers have the highest standard of living in Poland. The miners, even before discussing the strike and agreeing on precise demands de­clared that they would stop work immediately “if the authorities touch Gdansk”. They went on strike for “the demands of Gdansk”. Thirty factories were on strike at Wroclow, in Poznan (the factories where the movement began in 1956), in the steel mills of Nova-Huta and at Rzeszois. Inter-factory committees formed in various regions. Ursus sent delegates to Gdansk. At the height of the generalization Walesa declared: “We do not want the strikes to spread because they will push the country to the point of collapse. We need calm to conduct the negotiations.” The negotiations between the presidium and the govern­ment became private; the loudspeaker system increasingly began to break down at the shipyards. On 29 August the discussions between the govern­ment and the presidium came to a compromise: the workers will be given ‘free trade unions’ if they accept: 1. the leading role of the Party; 2. the need to support the Polish state and the Warsaw Pact; 3. that the unions play no political role.

The agreement was signed on 31 August at Szczecin and at Gdansk. The government recognized the ‘self—managed’ unions; as its spokesman said: “the nation and the state need a well—organized and conscious working class”. Two days later, fifteen members of the presidium resigned from their workplaces and became officials of the new unions. Afterwards they were soon obliged to nuance their position because it was announced that they would receive salaries of 8000 zlotys. This information was later denied because of workers’ discontent.

It took several days to get these agreements signed. Statements from workers at Gdansk show them to have been morose, suspicious and disappoin­ted. Some workers on hearing that the agreements gave them only half of the increase they had already obtained by 16 August shouted “Walesa, you sold us out”. Many workers did not agree with the point recognizing the role of the Party and the state.

The strike in the coal mines of Upper Silesia and in the copper mines whose aim was to ensure that the Gdansk agreements would apply to the entire country lasted until 3 September. Throughout September strikes continued: in Kielce, at Bialystok among the cotton workers, in textiles, in the salt mines of Silesia, in the transport services of Katowice. A movement of this magnitude does not stop all at once. The workers tried to generalize what they saw as gains, tried to resist the downward swing. We know that Kania visited the shipyards at Gdynia even before Gdansk because the workers there were reportedly the most radical. But of their discussions as of hundreds of others at other places, we know little or nothing at present because the press focused on Gdansk. It will be some time before the true richness of the movement can be measured so that we can go beyond the rather succinct points mentioned here.

The mass strike in Poland is part of the difficult and painful march of the emancipation of the working class — thought and consciousness becom­ing concrete, solidarity, the creativity of millions of workers. For all of us, these workers, at least for a moment, breathed the air of emanci­pation, lived solidarity, and felt the breath of history. The working class so scorned and humi­liated in this world showed the way forward to all who aspire, however confusedly, to break the prison of bourgeois society by rallying them to the only thing that lives in this dying world: the force of the class conscious proletariat.

For those who think they are correcting the error of Lenin in What Is To Be Done? (where it is said that class consciousness comes to the workers from outside the working class) by main­taining like the PCI (International Communist Party, Bordigist) that the class does not exist without the party, the workers of Poland have shown this to be a lie.

In Poland as elsewhere and probably more than anywhere else the working class must be alive with discussions. Within the class, political circles must be crystallizing which will eventu­ally give rise to political groupings of revolu­tionaries. As the struggle develops it poses with greater and greater sharpness the essential questions of the working class’ historic combat. It is to help answer these questions that the class creates its political organizations. The strike of the Polish workers shows once again that these organizations are not a pre—condition for struggle but that they develop as the expres­sion of a class that exists and acts if necessary before these organizations arise.

How to organize? How to struggle? What demands to put forward? What negotiations to undertake? For all these questions which are posed in every workers’ struggle today the experience and the courage of the workers in Poland are an enormous contribution to the whole movement of their class.

THE WEAKNESSES

“The tradition of the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolution­izing themselves and things, in creating some­thing that has never yet existed ... they con­jure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle-cries, and costumes...” (Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte)

In the first mass strikes in 1905 the workers found it difficult to find their own ground. The workers went into the streets behind Father Gapon and the icons of the Orthodox Church, “consoler of the oppressed”, and not at the call of the Social Democrats. But in six months the icons became red flags. No-one can foretell the pace of the maturation of the conditions of struggle today but we do know that the process has begun. When the workers in the mines of Silesia stand before St Barbara, when the workers of Gdansk demand the right to hear mass, they are suffering from the weight of past traditions on the one hand and on the other they are expressing a grain of resistance to the desolation of modern life, a mistaken nostalgia because: “they recoil ever and anon from the infinite prodigiousness of their own aims” (Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire) But this mistaken envelope of their aspirations, the church, is not a neutral one. It is a formidable support for nationalism as can be seen in Brazil as well as in Poland. The Church unmasked itself to some extent before the most combative workers when it used its first chance to speak in thirty years to appeal for ‘order’ and a ‘return to work’. Nevertheless this trap remains to be destroyed.

Some myopic observers will see in Poland only workers on their knees singing the national anthem. But history can’t be judged like a photograph. The sceptics do not see the dynamic of the move­ment which will go beyond this. The workers will get rid of the national rag and the icons. We must not put ourselves in the position of the PCI Communist Programme or Battaglia Comunista or others who saw in May 1968 only some student games. If revolutionaries are only able to see reality when it is written in big letters all over the page then they will never be worthy of the method of Marx who was able to see in the proletariat of 1844 the future giant of history.

It is perfectly true that in Poland the actions of the dissidents have, especially since 1976, had an influence on the workers’ movement particularly in the Baltic region. It is difficult to exactly evaluate their influence but it seems that 20,000 copies of the bulletin Robotnik are distributed, creating a whole workers’ milieu around it. Often combative workers are attracted to the free trade union movement to protest against repression in the workplaces. The regime tolerates the Catholic opposition as well as patriotic reformers and intellectuals ever since it realized the need to defuse the workers’ combativity of recent years. The KOR (Social Self—Defence Committee) is quite explicit in its aims: “The nation’s economy is in ruins. Only a tre­mendous effort by everyone along with profound reforms can save it. Making the economy heal­thy demands sacrifices. Rising up against price rises will deal a terrible blow to the functio­ning of the economy ... Our task as the oppo­sition is to transform the economic demands into political demands.” (Kuron)

Naturally the political dimension is absolutely vital to workers’ struggles. The mass strikes expressed in action this unity of economic and political aspects. But the KOR only plays on the workers’ desire to politicize their struggle. When Mr. Kuron and Co. and all the ‘experts’ who came to help the negotiations in Gdansk talk about ‘politics’ it is only to empty the struggle of its class content, to bury the economic fight against exploitation in favour of bourgeois poli­tics and to put themselves forward as the loyal opposition of the Polish homeland. To ‘save the economy of Poland’ the workers at Gdansk lost more than half their economic demands. The oppo­sition representing the interests of a wing of the Polish bourgeoisie which wants to create structures more able to “win the workers’ agree­ment to make sacrifices; to develop valid bargain­ing agents”. But the main body of the Polish and Russian bourgeoisies do not share this orientation and the evolution of the situation remains open especially if the new unions are not rapidly inte­grated into the state apparatus.

Fifty years of counter-revolution have so disorien­ted the working class that it has difficulty in remaining on a class terrain. In Poland the wor­kers have opened an amazing breach in the Stalinist structure but they have put on the ‘costumes’ of the past with this demand for free trade unions, ‘real, true unions’ like those of the nineteenth century. In the minds of the workers, these unions probably represent the right to organize, to defend themselves. But this battle—cry is a rotten trap and it will turn against the workers. To get the right to organize in free unions, the Gdansk agreements had to recognize the Polish state, the domination of the Party and the Warsaw Pact. And this is not gratuitous. In our age of the decline of capitalism, unions have become part and parcel of the state apparatus, whether they are recent stillbirths like in Poland or whether they’ rely on the weight of long ‘tradition’ Already all the forces of the bourgeoisie have rallied around the free trade unions: some mem­bers of the strike committee have become officials; rules of order and all kinds of procedures have been established to tighten up the new structures; the Gdansk agreements speak of the commitment to increase productivity. With the offer of AFL-CIO (the main central union of the USA) aid, the international bourgeoisie in however small a way offers its contribution to binding and gagging the proletarian giant.

At the end of September the situation in Poland has not yet gone back to normal and the remaining combativity of workers is still slowing down the wheels of the state machine. But the illusions will be dearly paid for by the workers.

The ‘free trade unions’ are not a springboard from which to go further; they are an obstacle which workers’ combativity will have to go beyond. They are an ambush for combativity. The most combative workers have already perhaps felt this when they booed the Gdansk agreements. But they are still a minority and they are not the ones which the movement is putting forward at this state. The least clear, the most confused, the most Catholic elements hold centre stage. Walesa is a symbol and an expression of this stage in the movement; he will bend further into the state apparatus or be eliminated.

In the twentieth century only the vigilance and mobilization of the workers can advance their interests. It is a bitter truth and a difficult thing to realize that any permanent organ outside of the struggle period itself will inevitably be sucked into the gears of the state apparatus, in the east and the west. For example, we saw this with the workers’ committees in Italy in 1969 which were officially integrated into the union struc­ture and ceased to be a workers’ instrument; and we see this with the various recuperation attempts by ‘rank and file unionism’.

In the twentieth century there is either capital­ist stability or proletarian power. It is only in a period of pre—revolutionary ferment that permanent organs of proletarian power, workers’ councils, can be established because they defend the immediate interests of the working class while globally raising the question of political power. They thereby have the possibility of escaping the stranglehold of capitalist bounds. Outside of this period when struggle reaches such a pitch that it is permanent and thereby finds expression in the fully-fledged formation of councils and the movement towards insurrection, there can be no permanent organization of struggle serving the workers’ interests.

Today the decay of the capitalist system is so advanced that the working class can of course benefit from all the past sixty years of experience of struggle and from the maturing of the condi­tions of revolt. But unlike the situation in 1905 the working class is not up against the senile, rotting regime of the tsars; it is confron­ting state capitalism everywhere in the world, a more subtle and bloody enemy.

The bourgeoisie will try in its own way to draw the lessons of the Polish events for the workers of the world; it certainly cannot allow the events to speak for themselves. Bourgeois ideo­logy has to try to recuperate the class movement by giving its ‘official version’ when things are too big to impose a news black-out. It has to offer a deformed version of reality to divert the attention of other workers. It has used and will use the Polish events right up to the hilt: in the east to show that workers must be ‘reasonable’ and bend to the austerity needs of COMECON; in the west to prove that the workers’ movement only wants the ‘democratic freedoms’ which bring such happiness and fulfilment to the workers in the west!

The events in Poland are not the revolution nor are they a ‘failed revolution’; although its dynamic went far enough to establish a balance of class forces favourable to the proletariat it did not reach an insurrectional stage which in any case would have been premature in the context of the world proletariat today. A whole period of maturation in the internationalization of struggles is necessary before the revolution can be directly on the agenda.

But this is all the more reason for revolutionaries to denounce the nightmares of the past, the traps which risk immobilizing the struggle. Today when we see all the agents of capital, the CPs, the Trotskyists, the left and leftists, the ‘rights of man’ et al applauding the obstacles to consciousness, revolutionaries must denounce them with all their energy and point the way forward.

The struggles in Poland in 1980 are a rehearsal for the future - they are full of the promise of tomorrow. The force of the events in Poland will perhaps wake up all the sceptics for whom May 1968 was nothing, all the professional denigrators of the working class, even in the prole­tarian milieu. History is moving towards a con­frontation of classes, the counter-revolution is over and only with the courage and the hope of the workers in Poland can we fight effectively.

Only by understanding all the lessons of this historic struggle: the nature of state capitalism and the world economic crisis in the east and in the west; the ignoble masquerade of ‘democracy’ and electoralism; the integration of the unions into the state in the east and in the west; the creativity and self-organization of the working class in the generalization of its struggle, can tomorrow’s combatants of the working class say, when they go even farther forward: we are all workers from Gdansk.

JA

25 September 1980

This report, which was presented to the 4th Congress of Revolution Internationale, the ICC’s section in France, tries to examine the initial steps of the international resurgence of workers’ struggles. The report is made up of three parts:

-- The first deals with the development of the general, social, economic, and political conditions in which today’s class struggle is taking place.

-- The second briefly draws out the main features of the present class struggle.

-- The third part looks at the problems the class struggle now confronts.

The reason for dealing with the question in this manner is that it allows us to approach it in a global, dynamic way.

The development of the workers’ struggles in Poland seems to confirm this method of analysis as well as the content of the report. Thus,

-- the development of the whole international si­tuation confers on these struggles a far greater importance than the struggles of ‘70-71 and ‘76;

- -these struggles show once again how the class struggle today proceeds by sudden leaps, and acts in a gradual manner. It has a different dynamic from the one it had last century;

-- finally, these struggles show the unity of the problems and questions that confront the working class in its struggle, no matter what country we are talking about. But what characterizes the struggles in Poland in relation to preceding struggles is the fact that they represent a leap forward for the whole international workers’ movement. It’s the fact that the workers in Poland have begun to answer, in practice, the problems posed by previous struggles -- the extension and unification of the struggle, self-organization, and class autonomy and solidarity.

Before letting the readers judge for themselves, we should point out that the main aim of this report is to look at the dynamic and positive aspects of the resurgence, without spending too much time analyzing how the bourgeoisie is try­ing to oppose the movement (in particular through the left’s oppositional stance).

**********

The evolution of the form and content of the class struggle is always a reflection of the evolution of the conditions in which it takes place. De­pending on the situation, every event which sets labor against capital is either a stimulant to the subterranean development of the class struggle, or a reflection of the final strivings of a decli­ning movement. Thus one cannot analyze the class struggle without considering the conditions in which it takes place.

For this reason, we shall first examine the ge­neral social conditions which determine the deve­lopment of the class struggle. Then, in the se­cond part of this text we shall deal with the most important aspects of this development, the overall dynamic of the class struggle over the past two years, and, in the light of this, the perspectives for the future development of the class struggle.

Evolution of the conditions of today’s class struggle

We have to consider the social determinants of the present situation in its various aspects: economic, political, and in relation to socie­ty as a whole.

At the economic level

The accentuation and generalization of the econo­mic crisis creates the conditions for class strug­gle today. The tendency towards the equalization of economic stagnation and decline among capita­list nations in the period of decadence is exacer­bated in periods of open crisis. Over the last ten years all countries have been hit by the cri­sis and all those countries regarded as ‘models of development’ -- Germany, Japan and America a­mong the developed countries, and Korea, Iran and Brazil among the underdeveloped countries -- have been shown to be no more immune from its effects than the rest.

Equally, within each national economy, there are less and less ‘locomotive’ industrial sectors. The bourgeoisie hoped to be able to develop these sectors at the expense of other, anachronistic or less profitable sectors. But these hopes ha­ve now been dashed. All sectors or industry is beginning to feel the effects of the crisis.

And all sections of the working class. The spec­tre of redundancies and unemployment, or falling living standards, the prospect of increasingly intolerable living conditions -- these are no lon­ger confined to particular sectors of the class. Individual problems are becoming general problems. This tendency -- the product of the crisis -- towar­ds the equalization of the conditions of existen­ce of the working class tends also to create the conditions for the generalization of the class struggle.

The aggravation of the generalization of the economic crisis is a fundamental factor in the development of the conditions for the generali­zation of struggle in the present period.

Another factor, no less fundamental for the de­velopment of these conditions, derives from the fact that, for all classes, it is becoming appa­rent that there is no solution to the crises, except another war.

The bourgeoisie used to talk of ‘restructuring the economy’, of ‘participation’ and ‘self-management’; now this has given way to the langua­ge of austerity. They no longer talk about ‘the light at the end of the tunnel’. For the bour­geoisie, the end of the tunnel is war, and they admit it.

Today one has to ‘tell the truth’. But the bour­geoisie’s truth is not always very pleasant to tell, especially for the exploited class.

When the bourgeoisie openly admits that its system is collapsing, when it has nothing else to offer except another inter-imperialist butchery -- then it helps to create the conditions which will enable the working class to put forward its own historic alternative to the capitalist system.

At the political level

All the illusory solutions to the crisis put for­ward over the past ten years, which even the bour­geoisie believed in at the time, are fading away.

Thus the catastrophic economic situation, the perception of the crisis by different social classes, and the reaction of the working class to the crisis, are reflected at a political le­vel, not only in the struggle between different factions of the bourgeoisie, but above all in the absence of a political alternative in the face of the class struggle.

The declining value to the bourgeoisie of “the left in power”, which was the predominant trend for several years, is one determinant factor in the absence of this alternative. This is why we have seen the return of the left parties to op­position in the principal European countries, in response to the development of the class strug­gle.

For the moment however, on a political level, the left is not able to put forward its own perspec­tive. Its function is essentially to minimize the gravity of what’s at stake. In response to the governments’ talk of the ‘harsh reality of the situation’, the left hesitates. It says that this ‘harsh reality’ -- the threat of war -- is a lie. But it hasn’t yet thought up many lies of its own to disguise this reality. Thus it is not so much on a political level that the left is playing its anti-working class role; but ra­ther directly on the level of the class struggle itself.

This absence of a political alternative is at the heart of the political crisis of the bourgeoisie. From this point of view the return of the left to opposition betrays the weakness of its own position and that of the bourgeoisie as a whole.

At the social level

On a social level, the development of the condi­tions in which the class struggle takes place is expressed above all in the relationship of the state to society. All the more so since, in the period of capitalist decadence, the state tends to rule over the whole of social life, and establish its control all aspects of social ex­istence.

The effects of the crisis and the various econo­mic plans to counteract these effects have had serious consequences for the state -- particular­ly on a financial level, where state deficits have grown to increasingly unmanageable propor­tions and have become one of the principle sources of inflation.

Increased state spending is now more or less restricted to the police and the army; for the rest, what the bourgeoisie calls the ‘social wa­ges’ -- that part of wages whose expenditure is determined by the state -- has fallen sharply while taxation has increased.

At the same time as the state finds necessary to increase repression and the militarization of social life, its own economic crisis tends to weaken its ideological hold over society.

The illusion of the ‘neutral’ or ‘social’ natu­re of the state is undermined, and the state is increasingly clearly revealed as the guardian of capitalist order.

The position the state finds itself in today means that it is powerless to prevent the development of all the contradictions which gnaws at capitalist society, contradictions which set class against class, and one expressed through growing resistance to the state, social revolts and proletarian struggles.

In response to this development, the state resor­ts to the strengthening of its repressive apparatus to prevent these contradictions from breaking out into the open. In the underdeveloped countries, the state is increasingly forced to resort to the massacre of workers, peasants or entire populations -- such as the massacre of workers in India and Iran, and the growing in­cidence of murder by the state in countries such as Turkey, Tunisia, and Ecuador... In the developed countries where, until now, the state has been able to preserve a “democratic” facade, it now finds it has no other response than to use the police and bourgeois ‘justice’ against all expressions of social discontent.

The laws that European governments are now con­cocting for us (‘anti-terrorist’ in Italy, ‘anti-autonomist’ or ‘anti-vandal’ in France), the heavy judicial repression against those “caught in the act”, the deaths in the confrontations in Corsica, Jussieu and Miami, the injuries at Bristol and Plogoff, the armoured cars in the streets of Amsterdam against the squatters -- this is the response of the ‘democratic’ states to the contradictions in their society.

In this situation, any remaining illusions about the possibility of change within the ‘legal’ framework of existing institutions must tend to disappear.

The formal reinforcement of state repression is not an expression of the real strengthening of power. In the absence of any political or economic solution to the crisis, without a con­vincing ideology which can mobilize the popula­tion in support of the state, the growth of re­pression is, in reality, an expression of the weakness of the state.

Moreover, the failure of the system does not on­ly lead to the deterioration of the living conditions of the working class, but also increa­singly deprives entire sections of the population of any possibility of work, and excludes them from all aspects of economic life. It throws thousands of peasants onto the streets, and lea­ds to the impoverishment of all the intermedia­te classes and social strata. In these conditi­ons, there is a growing revolt by all non-exploi­ting classes against the existing social order. In the last two years we have seen revolts by entire populations (Iran, Nicaragua, El Salvador), by peasants, by the oppressed strata in the de­veloped countries (Bristol, Miami, Plogoff), and by students (Jussieu in France, Korea, and South Africa).

The growth of social discontent and social revolt is one of the conditions for the development of the class struggle and the proletarian revoluti­on. Movements against the existing social order contribute to a process which leads to the grow­ing isolation of the state, create the social conditions in which the proletariat can develop its own forms of struggle, and emerge as the only force in society able to provide an alternative to capitalism.

The proletariat does not only make its revolu­tion against the bourgeoisie; it has to answer the problems of the whole of society. In show­ing a way forward for other oppressed strata, it also develops its own consciousness.

Thus with the development of these factors:

1. the deepening economic crisis which offers no perspective except war;

2. the lack of any immediate political perspec­tive for the bourgeoisie; its inability to deve­lop an ideology which, if it does not give groun­ds for ‘hope’, can at least defuse revolt;

3. the weakening of the state’s hold over socie­ty, as it becomes more isolated in the face of revolts by non-exploiting strata and classes all over the world;

We can see the emergence of the conditions that will allow the proletariat to discover the path towards the international revolution.

But despite the fact that the overall situation favors the proletariat, the more of the left into opposition responds to the need of the bour­geoisie to prevent this from happening. Even before the resurgence of class struggle was clear­ly apparent, the bourgeoisie, thanks to advance warning from the unions and its ‘labor experts’, had begun to understand the situation. In this sense, in contrast to the preceding period of class struggle (1968-74) where the re-emergence of the proletariat onto the historical stage took the whole world by surprise, the bourgeoisie to­day understands the danger of the class struggle and is preparing for it.

From the point of view of the bourgeoisie, the passage of the left into opposition is not a Machiavellian plan foreseen in advance. The cre­dibility of the left parties and above all of the unions was already becoming dangerously weak throughout the period in which they were in po­wer or held positions of ‘responsibility’ within the established power structure (de-unionization, declining union membership, the isolation of the union bureaucrats were the clearest signs of this growing weakness). Thus, the left and the unions were forced to adopt a new attitude in order to preserve the source of their strength and the whole basis of their existence: the ability to control the working class.

In opposition, however much they try to restore their credibility by assuming the ‘leadership’ of struggles, they are unable to do this effec­tively because extra-parliamentary struggle is not their ‘natural’ field of activity. This is why we said above that the left in opposition is in a position of weakness. It is the pressu­re of the class struggle, which is responsible for its current situation in opposition and the need for ‘verbal radicalization’.

In our work within the class struggle, face to face with the problem of the left in opposition, we must remember the two-edged situation of the left in opposition. On the one hand the left is a block to the development of class struggle; on the other hand it is in a position of weakness, itself due to the weakness of bourgeois ideology. Whatever happens, the left is forced to continue its work of sabotaging the class struggle, des­pite this contradiction, which will become more acute as the class struggle develops, and will undermine its effectiveness even more radically than the years in power.

Having examined the objective conditions for the development of class struggle today, we will now attempt to evaluate the actual development of the struggles which have taken place. But first it is necessary to briefly outline what the re­cent experience of the class has shown us about the general characteristics, the overall dynamic of the class struggle in decadent capitalism.

The process of the class struggle

1. Unlike in the 19th century, the proletariat cannot become a force within capitalist society unless it challenges capitalism itself. In the 19th century, the working class could struggle for limited aims and force capitalism to concede to its demands without this leading to a wider, social conflict. The obsolescent and decadent character of capitalism in the 20th century, and the exacerbation of the contradictions of capi­talism in periods of acute crisis, means that capitalism can no longer tolerate the growth of an antagonistic force within itself. Proletari­an struggles can only have the effect of deepe­ning the crisis and calling into question capi­talist society itself.

The aims of the movement, from challenging the conditions of working class existence, now begin to challenge that existence itself. The forms of struggle, from expressing the partial and lo­calized resistance of sections of the working class, now embrace the working class as a whole. The development of the class struggle can only take place through the participation of increa­singly massive numbers of workers.

2. Although the class struggle has always deve­loped in an uneven way, the workers’ movement of the 19th century could grow progressively within capitalist society. Each limited strug­gle contributed to the development of class consciousness and the growing unity of workers in their mass organizations. But today class struggle can only take the form of explosive, unexpected and unprepared struggles.

But despite their uneven, explosive character, the development of such mass movements is still a process, and it follows a definite logic: there are real links between the different moments of the struggle, even if they don’t appear at the surface.

“It is absurd to think of the mass strike as one act, one isolated action. The mass strike is rather the indication, the ral­lying idea, of a whole period of the class struggle lasting for years, perhaps for decades.” (Luxemburg, The Mass Strike)

This is the framework of the general laws and characteristics of the revolutionary movement today. It’s within this framework that we can and must situate the experience of the working class in its most recent struggles.

Today, we are at the start of a process leading towards the development of mass strikes, towards the constitution of the working class as a force that will regenerate society and liberate the world from the chains of capitalism.

This is why we must analyze today’s struggles very closely, in order to draw out the dynamic elements within them, the elements which offer the immediate possibility for us to participate, to the utmost of our resources, in the historic march of the proletariat towards the future.

Certain aspects of today’s class struggle

During recent struggles, although they are still at an embryonic stage, the activity of the working class has already raised many problems, ma­ny of them have not been resolved, and will not be resolved in the immediate future. But the fact that they have been posed, in practice, is already a step forward. We can outline some of these problems, which are repeatedly encountered by workers in their struggles in the present period. Although they are all interconnected as integral parts of the process which leads towards revolution, they often appear as isola­ted problems, and can be considered as such without necessarily detracting from the clarity of analysis:

-- confrontations with the state, which has occurred in all the recent principal struggles which have taken place in Europe (Longwy, De­nain, Paris, Great Britain, miners of Limburg and dockers of Rotterdam...)

-- self-organisation (co-ordination commit­tees in Sonacotra, the strike committee in Rotterdam);

-- active solidarity (Great Britain, France);

-- factory occupations (Longwy, Denain);

-- the distribution of informations through the press, radio and TV (Spain, France);

-- repression and the struggle against repres­sion (workers imprisoned following events at Denain, Longwy, and the March on Paris on March 23rd);

In confronting these problems, workers have at the same time confronted the unions’ sabotage of their struggles, in all its various forms. They have confronted the whole union apparatus from top to bottom. Despite the trade unionist ideology which still weighs so heavily on their consciousness, the workers have been forced to overflow, confront, or rush ahead of the unions, and very often fell into the traps laid by the unions.

All these questions arise in the course of the struggle, and their solutions will only be found in the struggle itself. We can’t be satisfied with the repetition of general truths, while waiting for these problems to solve themselves. Unlike the PIC (Pour une Intervention Communiste) who at Longwy.and Denain called on the working class to inscribe the slogan “the abolition of wage labor” on its banners; unlike the GCI (Grou­pe Communiste Internationaliste) for whom the most burning question is always whether or not the workers are ‘militarily’ prepared; unlike the FOR (Ferment Ouvrier Revolutionnaire) who call for “insurrection”, and the CWO (Communist Workers’ Organization) which is ‘waiting’ for the working class to break from the unions (and join the party?) before the class struggle is worthy of its attention... we must concretely analyze the needs and potential of the struggle today, the dangers and problems which confront workers today, if we want to participate actively in the development of the class struggle. On the eve of an insurrection the most crucial immediate problems will not be the same as today. But to­day, right at the start of a long and difficult process, we must carefully analyze different aspects of the struggle, however insignificant they may appear, in order to be able to under­stand questions like: What is happening at each point in the development of the struggle? What are the most important factors determining the immediate development of the struggle? What is the potential of the struggle? How can we make our own contribution to it?

Here we will limit ourselves to an analysis of some of the questions mentioned above, which we feel are the most important at the present time.

The means and extension of struggle

One of the first questions raised by the class struggle is that of its immediate effect on the bourgeoisie and the bourgeois state. If we take the example of three different situations confronted by production workers in recent struggles, we can see that they all confronted this problem.

-- In Great Britain, the three month long stri­ke by public sector steelworkers, which also involved private sector workers to a lesser extent, had almost no effect on the economy of the coun­try. In Holland, despite a month long strike by dockers at Rotterdam, 80% of activity at the port was unaffected.

-- Elsewhere, a large number of struggles have been waged against redundancies. In these cases even more than the others, it is virtually impos­sible for workers’ actions to have any economic impact on the bourgeoisie.

Elsewhere again, workers in sectors which are vi­tal for the functioning of the economy and the state (especially energy, arms, transport etc...) are subjected to intense pressure and increasin­gly totalitarian deterrent measures to prevent them from going on strike, In France, for exam­ple, for many months the bourgeoisie has waged a campaign against strikes in the public sectors, and more recently has attempted to introduce an­ti-strike measures in the electricity industry.

In the last few months, workers’ experience has confirmed that it is becoming increasingly dif­ficult to exert enough economic pressure to make struggles effective. The high level of manufac­tures’ stocks, the high technology of modern capital, and its corollary, the limited size of the workforce, the international organization of capital, the centralization and control of the economy by the state -- in a word, the power of capital over labor on an economic level, means that strikes confined to one factory or one branch of industry have less and less effect.

None of this is new. It is an expression of state capitalism and the militarization of economic life that is characteristic of decadent capitalism and reinforced by the present situation of acute crisis. But what is ‘new’ in struggles in recent months, is that the growing consciousness of this situation has been the principal factor forcing workers to search for new methods of struggle, and to extend their struggles.

In Great Britain, the steel workers quickly realized that the blockade of steel at ports and stockholders etc, was practically impossible to achieve, and they had to find other ways to assert themselves. This is why steelworkers were led to make it the focus of their activity to seek active solidarity from other workers.

In France the steelworkers’ struggle was around the issue of redundancies. In this case, even more than in the others, there was no way that the steel workers could exert any economic pressure on the bourgeoisie, and the workers knew this from the start. At no time did they come out on strike: the struggle took place in the streets. Workers rejected the suggestion of the CGT in Denain to occupy the factory.

At Rotterdam, the problem of the extension of the struggle was raised at the start of the strike. The workers made various attempts to extend the strike (to dockers in other ports) and when, after three weeks, they went to try to call out other workers at the port, this was the point at which the state called in the police -- showing very clearly that the bourgeoisie realized that this was the principal source of danger.

In these struggles, the working class began to recognize the objective limitations of sectoral and purely economic struggles. They began to see that this is a terrain where the balance of forces always favors the bourgeoisie. While at present the response of workers to this question remains at an embryonic level, the deepening economic crisis and the consequent rise in unemployment, together with the rationalization and militarization of key sectors of the economy, will increasingly force workers to develop new forms of struggle; forms which, by attacking the forces of capitalism from all sides, will force the bourgeoisie onto the defensive.

The question of unemployment and redundancies

In the resolution we adopted on the question of unemployment and the class struggle, we stated that “if the unemployed have lost the factory as a base for their struggles, they have gained the street.” The struggles during the past year have confirmed this statement.

The struggles against redundancies have shown us that the use of “the street” as a base for class struggle is extremely favorable for the development, extension, and unification of the struggle, since this is a terrain which enables workers to break out of the limited framework of factory or trade, where trade unionism reigns supreme.

This experience gives us an idea of the importance that the struggles of unemployed workers will have in the future. In fact, in a general situation of rising class struggle, the struggle of unemployed workers -- because it is forced to break free from the snares of corporatism and sectoralism, and can only take place ‘in the streets’ -- will undoubtedly play an important role in the extension and unification of workers struggles. It will be struggle that the unions will find hard to contain or control.

Until, now, although we have discussed the relation of unemployment to the class struggle, the slow development of the crisis has denied us the opportunity to witness the development of unemployed workers’ struggles in practice, except in Iran. Despite the limited inform­ation available, it nevertheless seems certain that the question of unemployment was central to the workers’ struggles in Iran, and that it acted as a motivating and unifying force.

For all these reasons, in the present situation of extremely grave development of the crisis and consequently of unemployment, we must continue to devote our attention to this question. In fact we must pay particular attention to the development of unemployment, the reactions it provokes within the working class, and the strategy adopted by the left and the unions, now and in the future, in their effort to defuse the social dynamite which it represents.

Solidarity and the extension of the struggle

From the moment a struggle erupts, in whatever sector, solidarity is essential for the success of the struggle.

In France, from the moment when workers first started their attacks on town halls, tax offices, banks, chambers of commerce, and above all when they started to attack the police stations in response to acts of repression by the police, this at once provoked spontaneous acts of solidarity by other workers, unemployed workers and all sectors of the local population.

In Great Britain, despite the limitations strictly enforced by the unions on the forms of organization adopted by the steelworkers from the start of the strike (pickets to stop the movement of steel), the workers expressed their combativity and their own orientation when they attempted to spread the strike to other workers by asking for their active solidarity. Although the unions succeeded in retaining control of the movement to extend the strike by containing it within a corporatist framework, it was the pressure from the workers attempting to find their own way forward that forced the unions to do this in spite of initial opposition from the union hierarchy. This was the real strength and force of the class movement in Britain, despite all the traps that were so carefully prepared by the bourgeoisie.

In the two struggles where workers developed their own truly independent forms of organization, outside the unions, the question of solidarity constantly came to the fore. From the start, as we have indicated above, the strike committee at Rotterdam was preoccupied with the question of the extension of the struggle and the solidarity of other workers. At Amsterdam we saw an embryonic expression of this. Throughout the struggle at Sonacotra, the question of the solidarity of French workers was the central preoccupation of the co-ordination committee. The main slogan at all the demonstrations of the immigrant workers were “French and immigrant workers: same bosses, same struggle!” and “Solidarity of French and Immigrant workers!”

This search for solidarity by the working class is an extremely positive characteristic of recent struggles. It’s a sign that workers have a growing consciousness of their fundamental unity as a class.

But several factors contribute to the weakness of this as yet fragile effort. The first is the general level of class struggle. Although solidarity is always a conscious action, it nonetheless depends on the general level of development of the class struggle. It was hard luck for the immigrant workers to be struggling at a time when there was a general reflux in the level of struggle. A second factor in the weakness of workers solidarity is the confused conceptions of solidarity which still predominate within the proletariat: conceptions which see workers solidarity in terms of how it operated in the 19th century.

In the 19th century workers solidarity could be expressed through material and financial support for strikes, through collections organized by the unions which allowed workers to hold out until the bosses gave in. Today, as we have seen, workers can no longer exert the same economic pressure on a single factory or branch of industry. Countless workers today know what it means to experience a long strike which, despite the material and “moral” support organized by the unions, has not only failed to win the workers’ demands, but has ended in isolation and demoralization.

Essentially, the necessity for solidarity is experienced by workers as the need to break through the isolation of their struggles. But the bourgeoisie can also make use of the fact that workers feel this necessity, if it feels sufficiently threatened by the potential development of the struggle. In Brazil for example, workers paid the price for accepting the ‘support’ of the bourgeoisie and the clergy.

This support really meant isolating the workers inside the churches and diverting their struggle onto a bourgeois terrain, that of nationalism and ‘democracy’ (free trade unions).

In France few strikes have received such wide­spread and massive support -- from everyone from Chirac to the bourgeois press -- than the cleaners on the Paris underground. Everyone did their share in the name of solidarity – and the workers were completely isolated.

The bourgeois conception of solidarity is solidarity between classes, the unity of all citizens behind the same flag, behind a ‘cause’ for which one is temporarily prepared to sacrifice one’s own particular interests. Working class solidarity is ... class solidarity: each act of solidarity expresses the common class interests of the workers. For the bourgeoisie, solidarity is a moral conception.

For the working class it is a practical necessity.

Because of the conditions of class struggle in decadent capitalism the only way that working class solidarity can be expressed today is through active solidarity, which means essentially the participation of other workers in the struggle: the extension of the struggle. Solidarity is both the effect and the cause of the unification of the class struggle.

The union question

The union question is the touchstone for the development of the class struggle today. More than direct and violent repression, the mystification and diversion of trade unionism is the spearhead of the bourgeoisie’s offensive against the working class, an offensive which is preparing the ground for repression in the future. The left and the unions attack the working class on all fronts: isolation and derailment of the class struggle, provocation, etc.

For the moment, we are still a long way from the stage when workers clearly express their independent class interests against the unions. This is particularly the case in countries like Great Britain, where there is a long historical tradition of trade unionism. It is true that in France the struggles at Longwy and Denain started outside the trade unions. In Italy, the GCIL is particularly discredited on account of a whole series of openly anti-working class actions. Some struggles in Italy, like the hospital workers’ strike, have directly confronted the unions. But the clarification of the union question within the consciousness of the working class can only take place on the basis of a higher level of class struggle.

It is absolutely correct to say that the union question is a crucial question for the working class. The unions are the ‘Fifth column’ of the bourgeoisie within the proletariat, and as long as the unions organize struggles or keep them under their wing, this is the most powerful barrier to the development of the class struggle.

It is essential to recognize this basic truth if we are to be able to really contribute to the development of the class struggle and class consciousness. The reluctance of a number of revolutionary groups to accept this truth prevents them from playing a positive role within the working class.

But the recognition of this basic truth is not enough in itself. Workers will not understand the union question through a process of theoretical reasoning, but by confronting it in practice. We must analyze how the question is posed in practice, if we are to make a real contribution to its resolution by the working class. Simply to repeat, like the CWO, the FOR and the PIC that the unions are anti-working class and that the working class must get rid of them, doesn’t tell us anything about the way the working class will actually achieve this. It’s easy to live in the future and exorcise the unions in one’s imagination, but this doesn’t help us to explain the present, and the road which leads from the present to the future.

The presence of the unions in a struggle doesn’t mean that the struggle is defeated in advance. Whatever the FOR, the PIC and the CWO might like to think, behind the march on Paris called by the CGT, and in the strike movement in Britain, for all that they were controlled by the unions, the working class was able to assert itself as a class. The struggles showed great potential although they had not yet broken out of a union framework. The real force of the working class was expressed elsewhere, and it is this we must recognize.

The break from trade unionism is always a precondition for the real development of the struggle, but it is not an end in itself. The goal is the strengthening of the class struggle, which is dependent upon certain specific developments:

1. that the working class takes control of its own struggles (ie through general assemblies and discussions, through self-organization)

2. the extension of the struggle.

And it is precisely when the working class attempts to respond to these necessities, which arise directly from the struggle itself, that the question of breaking from the trade unions is posed in practice.

The two most crucial factors for the develop­ment of the class struggle -- the extension of the struggle to all sectors of the proletariat and the question of autonomy and self-organiz­ation -- are intimately linked.

When an exploited class, dominated economically and ideologically, subjected daily to contempt and humiliation, takes the struggle into its own hands, through the collective organization and direction of the struggle, then this is truly the first step towards revolution. But this is impossible without a class unity that transcends the divisions imposed by capitalism.

In her description of the first upsurges which marked the beginning of the revolutionary period in 1905, Rosa Luxemburg drew attention to the mass character of these struggles and drew the conclusion that “it is not the mass strike which produces the revolution, but the revolution which produces the mass strike.” Lenin drew attention to the other complementary aspect of this movement when he said that the workers councils which emerged in 1905 were “the finally discovered form of the dictatorship of the proletariat”.

On the basis of the experience of the past we must put forward the unity of these two factors in today’s struggles: self-organization and the extension of the struggle. To the extent that the unions are and will be less and less able to oppose the class struggle at every level; to the extent that they will be less and less able to retain the initiative and leadership of struggles which are going to arise suddenly and unexpectedly, one tactic that they will use more and more frequently to sabotage workers’ struggles will be to concentrate their attack on the working class at the weakest point of the movement. Thus in some cases they will do everything to prevent the extension and uni­fication of the struggles; in other cases they will do everything to hamper self-organization and the sovereign power of the general assemblies. This is because only the unity of these two aspects of the struggle will allow the working class to become firmly rooted in the soil of revolutionary practice.

‘Rank and file unionism’ will be the spearhead of the unions’ sabotage of the struggles to come. Rank and file unionism is all the more pernicious because it appears to adapt itself, at each moment, to the needs of the movement, to respond to workers’ initiatives, and, in the final analysis, to express the movement itself. This suppleness, this capacity for adaptation, will allow rank and file unionism to appear in new unexpected forms, some of which may not even be called “unions”!

It is not merely the form of trade unionism which is dangerous, but equally the spirit of trade unionism. This spirit weighs heavily on the consciousness of the working class, a combination of the burden of past tradition and present-day mystifications. Thus, it is necessary to be particularly vigilant with regard to this danger, to show how it is expressed even within apparently working class forms of organization. The international dockers’ conference (see WR 29) and the calls of the Rotterdam strike committee for financial solidarity, show us how this trade unionist spirit can weigh heavily on living expressions of the class struggle today.

The Left and the unions in opposition

The ‘social void’ created by the end of the perspective that an electoral victory would bring the left to power, and the deep discontent of the working class, exacerbated by the imposition of austerity plans, largely explain the fact that of all the struggles over the past two years, those at Longwy and Denain went furthest and most clearly posed the main questions confronting the class struggle today.

The radical nature of these struggles was the product of the absence of an electoral perspective; at the same time, the depth of the struggle accelerated the passage of the left and the unions into opposition.

Since then, in many different countries, we have seen just how the left and the unions act as a barrier to the development of the struggle (and also to our intervention).

But the situation today, which seems to be firmly controlled by the left and the unions, should not lead us to the conclusion that the present period is comparable to the period of reflux in the years before 1978, despite all the difficulties encountered by workers in their struggles. We are now in a phase where the working class, having rediscovered the path of class struggle, is digesting and assimilating the experience of the left in opposition.

 

Conclusion

The class struggle has revived on a worldwide scale: from Iran to America, from Brazil to Korea, from Sweden to India, from Spain to Turkey, the struggles of the proletariat have multiplied over the last two years.

In the under-developed countries, with the terrible deepening of the crisis, the illusions about ‘national liberation’ are tending to fall away. Hardly had Zimbabwe become ‘independent’ and achieved ‘black self-determination’ when strikes broke out demanding wage increases. Throughout Latin America, the myth of the ‘new man’ in Cuba has been struck a mortal blow by the recent mass exodus. The mystification of national liberation, which gave so much mileage to the leftists and which helped mobilize the youth revolt of the 60’s in the advanced countries to the cry of ‘Castro, Ho Chi Minh and Che Guevara’ -- all that is becoming a thing of the past.

In the under-developed countries, we’ve seen the development of movements that imply a break with the nationalist ideology of war. In Iran, the enormous movement which led to the fall of the Shah, a movement within which the proletariat played a crucial role, has not been completely mobilized behind the nationalist banners of Khomeini and Bani Sadr. The demonstrations which raised the slogan ‘Guardians of the Revolution = Savak’ are a clear expression of this. In Korea, that buffer between the two imperialist blocs, the movements of the students and above all the workers turned their backs on the ‘national interest’ ideology which was being foisted on them.

It’s particularly significant that the proletariat hasn’t been dragooned behind the nation and the war-effort in zones of the world where wars have been going on continuously for thirty years.

In the present world situation, where the bourgeoisie in the advanced countries lacks a faction capable of mobilizing the population and obtaining a national consensus, the noise the governments are making about the threat of world war could have the opposite effect to what they’re hoping for.

In the past, the bourgeoisie has never mobilized the proletariat for war simply by announcing that the war is coming. On the contrary, before the First World War social democracy disarmed the class with its pacifism. Before the Second World War, the national consensus was built around the theme of anti-fascism, and the working class wasn’t conscious that the wars in Ethiopia and Spain were preparations for world war.

Today, the bourgeoisie has nothing else to offer; it’s trying to present war as something inevitable, written into the history of humanity. It hopes the population will just get used to this idea and accept it. Everyone knows that Afghanistan is another step towards World War III.

The level and development of the class struggle is expressed in the struggles themselves, as well as in the workers’ groups emerging from the struggle and expressing the attempts of the class to become conscious of its situation.

Today, the resurgence is still slow and difficult. In contrast to the first wave of struggles ten years ago, which revived the idea that revolution was possible, the perspective of revolution is today only a subterranean aspect of the movement. It’s not expressed so openly as it was ten years ago, when we saw the emergence of a whole number of groups which defended a revolutionary orientation. But at that time the revolutionary movement was still strongly marked by the petty-bourgeois concerns of the student revolt. This expressed itself in numerous forms -- activism, workerism, modernism -- but they all had in common the idea that revolution was a simple matter.

Such influences and illusions have less and less place in the proletarian movement that’s taking shape today. The reflection that’s beginning to take place within the working class is partly expressed by the groups and circles we’ve already seen emerge in Italy and which will continue to arise out of the depths of the working class.

The development of a revolutionary milieu will be slower and harder than it was ten years ago, but it will also be a more profound development and more firmly rooted in the practice of the working class. This is why one of our main concerns must be to remain open and attentive to the initial manifestations of this process, no matter how confused they might be.

June 1980

The Third International Conference of Groups of the Communist Left ran aground on a sandbank. The formal cause was the question of the party.

Nobody was in any doubt that this was only a pretext. The truth is, that since the Second Conference Battaglia Communista and the CWO have been feeling uneasy, and more concerned about the immediate interests of their group -- and so characteristic of the sectarian spirit -- than about the importance that International Conferences of Communist Groups may have in this period of rising class struggle. They have done all they could to bring about the failure of the Conferences.

This will be a great pleasure to the Bordigists of the International Communist Party, who have always claimed that no good could come of conferences between communist groups, all the more so since the One and Only International Party has already been in existence since 1943. That is to say, their little group. According to their own logic, the Bordigists consider themselves the only communist group in the world. The Bordigists are certainly consistent within their basic postulate -- that the program of the communist revol­ution was defined by Marx in 1848, and that since then it cannot vary one iota: amongst other things they claim that the party is unique (like God) and monolithic (like the Stalinist party)1. The Bordigists therefore refuse all discussion with anybody, demanding that all those who want to fight for commun­ism, join their Party purely as individuals.

Battaglia Communista seems more open to dis­cussion, But this openness is more apparent than real. For BC, discussion is not a con­frontation of positions, but a demand to be recognized as the Real Party: the only one worthy to speak in the name of the Italian Left. They do not understand, any more than Programma (the ICP), the process of regroup­ment amongst communist groups, scattered by the weight of 50 years of counter-revolution. This process, which opens with the rising proletarian struggle, and advances on the basis of a critical re-examination of the positions set out during the last revolut­ionary wave, and of the experience which has followed it, allows previous errors and immaturities to be overcome, and permits a greater theoretical-political coherence. This in turn makes a greater unity and cohesion possible in a future international communist party.

This article does not aim to go back over the misunderstandings of the numerous heirs of the Left Communist tradition, as regards the inevitable process of regroupment of the communist forces, and the place of the Inter­national Conferences in this process. We have dealt with this subject in numerous texts published in our press, particularly in the last issue of the IR. Here, we will limit ourselves to a single, but highly important question: the question of the party, its function, and its place in the develop­ment of the proletarian struggle against the bourgeoisie and the capitalist system.

Councilism and the Party: Real and Fictitious Divergences

To progress in the discussion of the party, we must above all be able and willing to establish the correct framework for the debate. The most unproductive way of conducting it consists in dishonestly blur­ring the boundaries between what can be called councilism and the convinced partisans of the necessity of the party.

Indiscriminately brandishing the councilist scarecrows against all those who do not share the Bolshevik conception of the Party, and esp­ecially its extravagant Bordigist caricature, only serves to maintain and develop the conf­usion over what councilism is and what the party is for.

The councilist movement appeared in the turb­ulent years of the revolutionary wave which followed World War 1. It shared with the Communist Left, apart from the Italian left, the fundamental idea that not only had the union movement as it then existed ceased to be an organ for the defence of the working class, but that the very structure of the trade union organization no longer corresp­onded to the needs of the proletarian struggle in the new historical period opened up by the war, a period that was now posing the necessity of the communist revolution. The tasks imposed on the working class in this new period demand a new type of organization. This type of organization could not be based on particular trade and corporatist interests, strictly limited to economic defense; it had to be really unitary, open to the dynamic act­ivity of the whole class, making no separation between the defense of the proletariat’s imm­ediate economic interests and its historic goal: the emancipation of the working class and the destruction of capitalism. Such an organization cannot be anything else than centralized and co-ordinated workers’ councils, based on the factories.

What separated the councilists from the Communist Left was not only that they denied the usefulness of a political party, but that they considered even the existence of a party as damaging to the class struggle. The councilists advocated the dissolution of the party in the unitary organizations -- the councils. This is the point that separated them from the Communist Left and led to their break with the KAPD.

As such, councilism represents a renewal of pre-war anarcho-syndicalism. And like anarcho-syndicalism, which was a gut-reaction against the electoralism and opportunism of the social-democracy. Councilism was a reaction against the ‘super-partyist’ tendencies in the communist organisation, which began by identifying the dictatorship of the proletariat with the dictatorship of the party and finished purely and simply by substituting the one for the other.

The ‘super-partyists’ or neo-Bolsheviks like to evade the criticism of their ultra-Leninist conceptions by insisting heavily on the fact that the Councilist movement originated in a split with the Communist Left, particularly in Germany. They use this observation, which is supposed to stain forever the Communist Left outside Italy with the original sin of councilism, as their ultimate argument.

This argument has as much value as reproaching the revolutionary left for having fought in the ranks of the Second International before the war. It is no less stupid than condemn­ing the Bolsheviks for having ‘engendered’ Stalinism.

Whatever the ‘super-partyists’ may think and say, the Communist Left is not the mother’s milk of councilism. Councilism feeds on the caricature that some revolutionaries make of the party and of its relation with the class. The aberrations of the former feed and strengthen those of the latter, and vice versa.

When the Bordigists and neo-Borrdigists, to help their own cause, call us councilist, this is a dishonest polemic, not a reply to our criticisms of their aberrations. Cer­tainly, it is easier to use the method of ‘he who wants to kill his dog first says it has rabies’ than to take the trouble of replying to arguments. This method, which consists of inventing no matter what and attributing it to the opponent, may pay in the short term, but turns out in the long term to be completely useless and negative. It serves only to confuse the debate instead of clarifying and highlighting each other's positions.

When, for example, Battaglia criticises councilism at a Conference of communist groups they are simply breaking down open doors. But when they try to stick this on the ICC, to justify their sabotage of the Conference, it makes you wonder what to think of a group like Battaglia, which has taken no less than 10 years to discover that it’s been discussing with a councilist group: And, better still, has been organizing International Conferences with this group for 4 years without noticing it was Councilist! As political flair and perspicacity goes, this leaves much to be desired. Instead of convincing anyone of this fairytale of the ICC’s councilism, Battaglia only discredits itself as a serious and res­ponsible political group. We don’t intend here to clear ourselves of the accusation of councilism. This is for our accusers to demonstrate. Even a slight acquaintance with the press of the ICC’s sections, and especially of our Platform, is enough to show that we have always rejected and fought against the aberrations that make up councilism.

But it’s even funnier to hear the same reproach coming from the CWO, who we had to argue with for months to make them go back on their analysis of the October Revolution and of the Bolshevik Party, which they saw as bourgeois. We had to drag the CWO by the ears to help them out of the modernist swamp of Solidarity. After ‘super-anti-partyism’, the CWO has now thrown itself into ‘super­partyism’ and the struggle against the ICC’s conceptions of the party.

So, let us leave to one side all these stupid fabrications about the ICC’s councilism2, and look at the real differences that separate us on the question of the party.

The nature of the Party

Many groups have difficulty in disengaging themselves clearly from Kautsky’s thesis, taken up and defended by Lenin in What is to be Done? This thesis holds that the proletarian class struggle and socialist consciousness spring from two absolutely different premises. According to this con­ception, the working class can only develop a “Trade-Unionist” consciousness, ie. one limited to the struggle for its immediate economic demands within capitalism. Social­ist consciousness, the understanding of the historic emancipation of the class is simply the work of intellectuals studying social questions. It follows logically from this that the party is the organization of these radical intellectuals, who give themselves the task of “importing this consciousness into the working class”. Thus not only do we have a being separated from its consciousness, a body separated from its spirit; better still, we have a disembodied spirit existing in itself. This is an idealist vision of the world taken from the neo-Hegelians, whom Marx and Engels thrashed so implacably in The Holy Family and The German Ideology.

With the Trotsky of the ‘Report of the Siberian Delegation’, with Rosa Luxemburg, and so many other revolutionaries, the ICC categorically rejects such a theory, which has nothing to do with Marxism -- which indeed turns its back on Marxism, Lenin himself, 10 years later, publicly admitted that he had gone much too far on this point, carried away in his pole­mic with economism. All the PCI (Programma)’s contortions and all the PCI (Battaglia)’s ‘dialectical’ somersaults to justify this theory of Kautsky’s (to mark their ‘fidelity’ to Lenin) only lead them into more and more contradictory affirmations. No anathema against ‘spontaneism’, no exorcism of ‘councilism’ will spare them from the obligation to declare themselves clearly, once and for all, on this fundamental point. This is not a question of a difference between Leninism3 and Councilism, but between Marxism and Kautskyism.

The political implications of this theory are still more serious than the philosophical and methodological aspects. It reduces the proletariat to a more economic category, where Marx recognized it as a historic class, bearer of the solution to all the contradict­ions that have entangled humanity through a succession of class-divided societies. The very class which bears the emancipation of all humanity in its own emancipation is down­graded to the point of denying it the capacity to become aware of itself and its role in history through its own struggle! Such a conception sees only the heterogeneous aspects of this class, and does not see that it is the most unified, the most “socialized”, the most concentrated, and the most numerous class in history. It ignores the fact that this class is the least alienated by the interests of private property, and that its misery is more than just its own misery: it’s the accumulated misery of all humanity. It does not under­stand that this class is the first in history with the capacity to develop a truly global, non-alienated consciousness. And it is from the heights of the mass of ignorance and non-comprehension about the nature of the working class that “consciousness” is supposed to be “injected” into it. Such a theory can only be the product of tiny megalomaniac brains or of the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia.

And the Party? And the Communist Program? In contrast to Kautsky, to Lenin, and, with their permission, to all the Bordigists of every shape and hue, these are not, for us, some mysterious revelation, but, very simply, the product of the existence, life and activity of the class. And we share, with­out any fear of spontaneism, Rosa Luxemburg’s position, which countered Lenin’s form­ulation of “the party in the service of the proletariat” with that of “the party of the class”. In other words, an organism produced by the class for its own needs. The party is not some Messiah delegated by history to save the proletariat, but an organ created by the class in its historic struggle against the capitalist order.

The discussion is not about whether or not the party is a factor in the development of consciousness. Such a debate only has any meaning in confrontation with anarchists or councilists, but not between groups who identify with the communist left. But if Battaglia insists so hard on keeping the debate on this level, it is simply to avoid replying to the question of the nature of the party; that is, who and what does it come from? Battaglia’s obstinate repetitions about the “party-factor” appear in their true light; as a way of getting round recognizing that the party is above all a product of the class and that its existence and its evolution depend on the existence of the working class.

The ‘orthodox’ Bordigists of Programma don’t even need to resort to Battaglia’s so-called ‘dialectical’ sophisms, and proclaim frankly that the class only exists thanks to the party. If they are to be believed, it is the party’s existence that determines that of the class. For them, the party has been in existence since the Communist Manifesto.

Before that date there was no party and so no proletariat. Suppose this is so. This party would then possess the miraculous ability to make itself invisible, since according to them it has not ceased to exist since 1848. If we take a look at history, we observe that this doesn’t go with the facts. The Communist League existed 4 years, the First International 10 years, the Second International 15 years, and the Third International 8 years (counting generously), ie. a total of 37 years out of 132. What happened to the party for almost a century? This question does not embarrass our Bordigists, who have invented a ‘theory’ of the “real Party” and the “formal Party”. According to this ‘theory’, the formal, exterior and therefore material and visible body may disappear, but the real party lives on, no-one knows where, a pure invisible spirit. The Bordigist party itself has had a similar adventure, when it disappeared between 1927 and 1945 (exactly the time that Bordiga was asleep). And this is the shameless garbage that is presented to us as the quintessence of Marxism restored! As for the “complete and invariant Program” and the “real historic Party” they are incarnated today in 4 parties!, all of them PCI, and all of them laying claim to monolithism! All great swaggerers and eminent hunters-down of councilism. Diff­icult, very difficult, to discuss seriously with parties of this variety.

The Bordigists think they can support their conception of the party with quotes by Marx and Engels lifted arbitrarily out of their contexts. In doing so, they abuse the fund­amental spirit underlying the works of these great thinkers and founders of scientific socialism4. This is the case with the famous phrase from the Manifesto; “the organization of the proletariat as a class, and therefore as a political party”. Without wanting to do an exegesis on the literary merit of the translation5, it is enough to read the whole chapter from which the phrase is taken to be convinced that this has nothing to do with the interpret­ation put on it by the Bordigists, who transform this little word “therefore” into a precondition of the class’s existence, where­as for Marx it was a result of the process of working class struggle.

What concerns Marx and Engels in the Manifesto is the unavoidable necessity of working class organization, and not specifically the organ­ization of the party. The organization of a particular party remains very vague in the Manifesto. Thus they can go to the point of proclaiming “The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to other working class parties”, and end the Manifesto with the call, not for the constitution of a communist party, but “Workers of the world, unite”!

It is possible to quote hundreds of pages where Marx and Engels envisage organization as the organization of the whole class. For them, the function of such an organization is not only to defend the proletariat’s immed­iate economic interests but also to carry out the proletariat’s historic aims; the destruct­ion of capitalism, and the creation of a classless society.

We will simply quote from the following passage, in a letter from Marx to Bolte, 23/2/1871:

“The ultimate object of the political movement of the working class is, of course, the conquest of political power for this class, and this naturally requires that the organization of the working class, an organization which arises from its economic struggles, should previously reach a certain level of development.

On the other hand, however, every movement in which the working class as a class confronts the ruling classes and tries to constrain them by pressure from without is a political movement. For instance, the attempt by strikes, etc., in a particular factory or even in a particular trade to compel individual capit­alists to reduce the working day, is a purely economic movement. On the other hand the movement to force through an eight-hour, etc., law is a political movement. And in this way, out of the separate economic movements of the workers there grows up everywhere a political move­ment, that is to say, a class movement, with the object of enforcing its interests in a general form, in a form possessing general, socially coercive force.”

And Marx adds:

“While these movements presuppose a certain degree of previous organization, they are in turn equally a means of developing this organization.”

Here, the movement unfolds without any magic wand-waving by the party. When he talks about organization, Marx is thinking here of the International Workingman’s Association (the First International), where true political parties, like that of Bebel and Liebknecht in Germany, were only one element amongst others. Marx considered this same Inter­national, the general organization of all the workers, to be “the constitution of the prol­etariat as a political party -- indispensable in assuring the triumph of the social rev­olution and of its final goal, the abolition of classes.” This is so obvious that the text continues in these terms; “the unity of its forces that the working class has already realized through its economic struggles must also serve as a lever for the mass of the class in the struggle against the power of its exploiters.” This resolution of the September 1871 London Conference of the IWA “reminds the members of the International that, in the struggles of the working class, its economic and political activity are inseparably linked.”

Compare these texts of Marx to other affirm­ations of the Bordigists and Co: “As long as classes exist, it will be impossible for them or for individuals to consciously gain any results; the party alone can do so.” (Group no. 3, March-April 1957, p.38). But where does this virtue of the “party alone” come from? And why only to it?

“The proletariat is only a class to the extent that it is grouped behind a pro­gram, ie. A collection of rules for action determined by a general and def­initive explanation of the problem faced by the class, and of the goal to be reached in order to resolve that problem. Without this program....its experience does not go beyond the narrowest limits of the misery that its condition imposes on it.” (Work of Group no.4, May-June 1957,p.10)6.

But where do these “rules of action” which constitute the program come from? Accord­ing to the Bordigists, it absolutely can’t come from the working class’s experience of its own struggle, for the simple reason that this “experience does not go beyond the narrow­est limits of the misery that its condition imposes on it.” But where then can the prol­etariat possibly find an awareness of its being? The neo-Bolsheviks reply: “through a general and definite explanation of the problem faced by the class.” Not only do the Bordigists affirm that, through “its condition” the class is absolutely incapable of “going beyond the narrowest limits of its misery”; they claim still more categorically that the proletariat is not even a class, and can have no existence as such, unless as a pre­condition, there exists a Program, “a gener­al and definitive explanation,” behind which it can group itself and so become a class.

What does this have in common with the vision of Marx, for whom:

“Economic conditions have first of all transformed the mass of the country into workers. The domination of capital has given this mass a common situation, common interests. Thus, this mass is already a class in relation to capital, but not yet for itself. In the struggle, of which we have indicated a few steps, this mass unites itself, and constitutes itself as a class for itself. The interests it defends become class interests. But the struggle between classes is a political struggle,”

and this after affirming earlier on that:

“In this struggle -- a veritable civil war -- all the elements necessary for the coming battle unite and develop. Once arrived at this point, association takes on a political character.” (Poverty of Philosophy).

While the Bordigists, with Proudhon, only sees the “misery” of the proletariat’s condition, we see, with Marx, a class in movement which passes from resistance to coalition, from coalition to association, and from the struggle, at first economic, to the political struggle for the abolition of class society. In the same way we can fully subscribe to this idea of Marx:

“Much research has been done to retrace the different historical phases that the bour­geoisie has gone through...But when it comes to making an exact study of the strikes, coalitions, and other forms whereby the proletarians work out before our eyes their organization as a class, some are gripped by a real fear, while others display a transcendental disdain.” (ibid).

What characterizes all the ‘neos’ and ‘ultras’ who call themselves ‘Leninists’ is their deep disdain for the class, for its real movement, and potential. Their profound lack of conf­idence in the class and its capacities leads them to seek security in a new Messiah, who is none other than themselves. In this way they transform their own feelings of insecurity into a superiority complex bordering on megalomania.

The Party’s role and function in the class

If the party is an organ produced by the body of the class, it is necessarily also an active factor in its life. If it is a sign of the process whereby the class grasps an awareness of its struggle, its fundamental function, the task for which the class has engendered it, is to contribute to this process of developing awareness, to be the indispensable crucible of theoretical and programmatic ela­boration. To the extent that the class, living in capitalist society, can escape neither the pressure not the barriers that hinder its homogenization the party is the means of its homogenization. To the extent that the dominant bourgeois ideology weighs down and hinders the development of the proletariat’s consciousness, the party is the organ charged with destroying these barriers, the antidote to the ideology of the enemy class which unceasingly poisons the proletariat’s brain. The range of its functions necessarily evolves as society changes, and with it, the balance of forces between proletariat and bourgeoisie. For example, while at the beginning of the class’ existence, it was a direct and decisive factor in the class’ organization, this task has diminished to the extent that the class has developed, has acquired a longer experience and a greater maturity. While parties played a preponderant role in the birth and develop­ment of the union organizations, the same was not true for the organization of the councils, which emerged before the party understood the phenomenon, and to some extent contrary to the explicit will of the party.

The party does not then live independently of the class; it grows and develops as the class develops. Equally, like the class, it under­goes the influence of the enemy class. And, in time of serious defeat for the class, it can degenerate and go over to the enemy, or momentarily disappear. What remains constant is the class’ need for this indispensable organ. And, like a spider whose web has been destroyed, the class continues to secrete the elements for the reconstitution of an organ which remains so vital to it. This is the process of continuous formation of the party.

The party is not the unique seat of class consciousness, as the epigones who call them­selves Leninists claim to the bitter end. It is neither infallible, nor invulnerable. All the history of the workers’ movement is there to prove it. And history is also there to show that the class as a whole accumulates experience and assimilates it directly. The recent formidable movement of the class in Poland is a witness to its remarkable cap­acity to assimilate and accumulate the experience of ‘70 and ‘76, and to overcome them despite the cruelly-felt absence of a party. The Paris Commune is another example of the immense capabilities of class conscious­ness. This in no way diminishes the role of the party, whose effective intervention is one of the main conditions of the proletariat’s final victory. A major, but not the sole, condition.The party is the principal (not the sole) seat of theoretical elaboration; but again, it mustn’t be seen as an indep­endent body outside the class. It is an organ, a part of the whole that is the class.

Like any organ charged with a specific function within a whole, the party may carry out this function well or badly. Because it is part of the entire living body which is the class, and so is itself a living organ, it is subject to defects due either to external causes or to its own malfunctioning. It is not a motionless body, sitting on top of an invariant program, finished once and for all. It needs to keep a constant watch, and work on itself, to try and find the best means for its upkeep and development. Instead of exalting it as a restorer and museum curator, as the neo-Bolsheviks do, we should keep our eyes open for a particular illness that lies in wait for it (and against which Rosa, in her struggle against ‘orthodox Marxism’ before 1914, Lenin in his struggle against ‘Old Bolsheviks’ in 1917, and Trotsky in ‘the Lessons of October’, put revolutionaries on their guard): its tendency towards conser­vatism. There are no guaranties of ready-made recipes. The symptoms of this disease take the form of a strict fidelity to the letter rather than to the living spirit of Marxism.

The party suffers from defects, not only due to the weight of the past and its tendency of conservatism, but also because it is confronted with new situations, new problems.

Nothing allows us to declare that, faced with situations never before seen in history it will be able to give the correct reply always and at once. History bears this out fully: the party can be mistaken. Moreover, the consequences of its mistakes can be extreme­ly grave and seriously alter its relationship with the class. The Bolshevik Party in power made quite a few, and the Communist Inter­national didn’t make any less. This is why the party cannot claim to be always in the right, and try to impose its leadership and decisions on the class by any means, including violence. It is not a ‘leader by divine right’.

The party is not a pure spirit, an absolute and infallible consciousness, before which the class can only bow its head. It is a political body, a material force acting within the class. It always remains res­ponsible and accountable to the class.

The CWO waxes ironical about our ‘fright’ over the ‘myth’ (sic) of the danger of substitutionism. Since the party is its most conscious part, the class have only had confidence in it, and so the party naturally and by definition takes power. But this is something that has to be proved: We might ask why Marx wrote The Civil War in France, where he emphasized the measures taken by the Paris Commune to keep a constant control over its delegates to public office, the most important of which was the fact that they were revocable at any moment? Were Marx and Engels councilists before their time? Is the CWO itself aware of the difference between an elected and revocable delegate, and the delegation of all power to a party -- because this is nothing less than the difference between the proletariat’s mode of functioning and the way the bourgeoisie operates. In the first case, we are talking about a person constantly responsible to those who have elected him for the execution of a task, and therefore revocable. In the second, we are talking about the delegation of power, all power, to a political body over which there is no control; its members are responsible to their party and to their party alone. The CWO sees our concern about the danger of sub­stitutionism a mere formalism, when in fact it would be falling into the worst formalism -- in other words the worst fraud -- to pretend that anything is changed by renaming the party central committee the executive committee of the councils! The class exercises its control directly over each one of its delegates, not by abandoning this control to someone else, not even to its class party.

The proletarian party is not a candidate for state power, a state party like the bourgeois parties. Its function cannot be to manage the state. This would bring with it the risk of changing the party’s true relationship with the class -- which involves giving the class a political orientation -- into a power relation­ship. In becoming the manager of the state, the party imperceptibly changes its role, and becomes a party of functionaries, with all the tendencies to bureaucratization that this implies. Here, the Bolshevik example is highly edifying.

But this point relates to a different questions that of the relationship between the party and state in the period of transition. Here, we have sought to limit ourselves to a demonstration of how hunting down councilism comes to serve as a pretext for the extravagant over­estimation of the role and function of the party. The end result is quite simply a caricature which terns the party into an elite by divine right.

M.C.