The mobilisation of the young generations of future proletarians in France, in the universities and high-schools, and in demonstrations, as well as the inter-generational solidarity around the struggle, confirms the opening of a new period of class confrontations. The real control of the struggle by the general assemblies (mass meetings), the latter’s combativeness but also the reflection and maturity that found expression within them – especially their ability to avoid most of the traps set for them by the ruling class – are signs that a profound development is under way in the class struggle. Its dynamic will have an impact on the workers’ struggles to come.[1] [1] But the struggle against the CPE in France is neither an isolated nor a purely “French” phenomenon: it is the expression of an international rise and maturation of the class struggle. Several new characteristics have appeared in this process which are destined to gain in strength in the future.
We are still a long way from generalised massive struggle, but we can already see the signs of a change in spirit within the working class, of a more profound reflection especially among the younger generations who have not been subjected to all the campaigns about the death of communism after the collapse of the Eastern bloc sixteen years ago. In the “Resolution on the international situation” adopted by the ICC’s 16th Congress and published in International Review n°122, we showed that since 2003 we have witnessed a “turning point” in the class struggle, one of whose main expressions is a tendency to a greater politicisation within the working class. We highlighted the following characteristics in the struggle:
Every one of these points is fully confirmed today, not only by the struggle against the CPE in France but also by other examples of responses to the attacks of the bourgeoisie.
In two of France’s most important neighbours, and at the same time as the struggle against the CPE, the unions have been forced to take the initiative in the face of growing social discontent, and to organise large-scale strikes and demonstrations in some sectors.
In Britain, a strike called by the unions on 28th March was taken up by 1.5 million municipal employees to protest against a reform in their pension scheme which would oblige them to work until 65 instead of 60 before earning the right to a full pension. This was one of the most massive strikes for years. The ruling class orchestrated a major propaganda campaign presenting the workers as “privileged” relative to those in private industry. The unions also did all they could to isolate this category of workers – state employees – who have continued to “benefit” from a legal retirement age of 60 years. The anger of workers in Britain was all the greater since in recent years, 80,000 workers have lost their pensions as a result of the bankruptcy of several pension funds, while all workers have been the object of a long series of attacks by the Blair government.
In Germany, the increase in the working week from 38.5 to 40 hours without any increase in wages has followed hard on massive job losses in the state sector. This increase in the working week is only one of the attacks planned in the “Agenda 2010” initiated by the Social-Democratic chancellor Schröder with the Hartz plan, which also included a reduction of over 50% in holiday and Christmas bonuses for state employees and which led to their first strike for ten years. The strike has lasted, under union leadership, for two and a half months in Baden-Württemberg. In the country at large, the state employer has accompanied these measures with a vast media campaign against its own workers, from the garbage collectors to hospital workers (requisitions, threat to replace strikers accused of “laziness” because they refuse to work an extra 18 minutes each day). While the media campaign presents state employees as “privileged” because they enjoy job security, the DBB and Ver.di unions helped to divide the workers among themselves, presenting each attack as a specific problem and isolating their struggle from those in private industry. Under the pressure of rising social discontent, the IG Metall union called a strike on 28th March of 80,000 engineering workers in 333 companies to demand wage increases, in an industry where wages have stagnated for years and which has been hard hit by job losses and factory closures. On 28th March (the same day as one of the biggest demonstrations against the CPE), the Social-Democratic Minister of Labour within the right-left “Grand coalition” government was persuaded by the mobilisation in France that discretion was the better part of valour, and withdrew a measure similar to the CPE which had been planned to increase the new hire trial period for all jobs from six months to two years.
The social turmoil has also reached the United States. Major demonstrations have been organised in several towns to protest against the law now before the Senate, after its passage through the House of Representatives in December 2005, to make illegal immigration a criminal offence and toughening the repression not only against illegal immigrants themselves, but also against any who offer them shelter or assistance. It is also planned to increase checks on immigrants and to reduce the validity of residence permits from three to six years, renewable once only. To cap it all, there is the administration’s proposal to extend the frontier barrier that already exists in several places (notably between Tijuana and the southern suburbs of San Diego) along the whole 3200 kilometres of the border with Mexico. In Los Angeles between 500,000 and 1 million people mobilised on 27th March, following the demonstration in Chicago of more than 100,000 people; similar gatherings took place in many other towns, notably Houston, Phoenix, Denver and Philadelphia.
Though less spectacular, not a month passes without struggles taking place somewhere in the world, giving expression to the essential characteristics of the workers’ struggle internationally, and bearing with them the seeds of the future: workers’ solidarity across the barriers of corporation, generation, and nationality.
These recent expressions of solidarity have been subject to an almost complete blackout by the media.
Other important struggles have taken place in Britain. In Northern Ireland, 800 Belfast postmen walked out on wildcat strike for nearly three weeks against fines and management pressure, speed-ups and increased workloads. At first, the workers mobilised against disciplinary measures against two colleagues, one in a “Catholic” the other in a “Protestant” post-office. The Communication Workers Union showed its true colours and opposed the strike. One of its spokesmen declared in Belfast: “we repudiated the action and asked them to go back to work, pointing out that the action was illegal”. But the workers continued the struggle, legal or not, and showed that they had no need of the unions to organise.
A joint demonstration crossed the “frontier” separating the Catholic and Protestant districts, going up the main streets of the Protestant, then down the main street of the Catholic district. Other struggles of recent years, especially in the health service, have already shown a real solidarity between workers of different confessions, but this was the first time that such solidarity has appeared in the open between “Catholic” and “Protestant” workers, in a province torn for decades by bloody civil strife.
The unions, with the help of the leftists, then did an about-turn and pretended to declare their “solidarity”, notably by organising strike pickets at each post-office, thus effectively isolating the workers from each other and so sabotaging the struggle. Despite this sabotage, the open unity of Protestant and Catholic workers on the Belfast streets in this strike revived memories of the great unemployed demonstrations of 1932, when proletarians from both sides of the divide came together to fight cuts in the dole. But that was in a period of working class defeat, which made it impossible for these exemplary actions to strengthen the development of the class struggle. Today, there is a greater potential for the class struggles to come to defeat the divide-and-rule policies that the ruling class uses to preserve the capitalist order. This struggle’s importance lies in the experience of class unity put into practice outside the control of the unions. Its implications go far beyond the local situation of the postmen who were its protagonists; it offers an example to be followed as widely as possible.
Nor is this an isolated event. In February, at Cottam, near Lincoln in central England, fifty power workers went on strike in support of Hungarian immigrant workers whose pay was only half that of their English comrades. These immigrant workers’ contracts left them at the mercy of immediate redundancy, or of transfer with no prior notice to sites elsewhere in Europe. Here too, the unions opposed the strike because of its illegality, since neither Hungarian nor English workers had taken a “democratic vote”. The media also denigrated the strike, a local rag even dug up an academic to say that the UK workers had a “certain amount of honour” in striking in solidarity with their fellow workers. In contrast, however, “the foreigners themselves have stayed at their posts throughout” (a scholarly claim somewhat undermined by pictures of Hungarian and British workers standing together on the picket lines). For the working class, however, the recognition that all workers defend the same interests no matter what their nationality or their different rates of pay or work, is an important step forward in their ability to enter the struggle as a united class.
At Reconvilier in the Swiss Jura, after a first strike in November 2004, 300 engineering workers at Swissmetal walked out for a month at the end of January, in solidarity with 27 laid off comrades. The struggle began without the unions, but the latter finally organised negotiations with the bosses and confronted the workers with the alternative of either accepting the loss of pay for their strike days, or of accepting the lay-offs: they were in effect blackmailed into accepting either wage cuts or lay-offs. As one Reconvilier worker said, following the logic of the capitalist system means “choosing between cholera and the plague”. And another wave of 120 redundancies is already planned. But the strike has at least posed clearly the question of the workers’ ability to oppose this blackmail and the logic of capital. Another worker drew this lesson from the strike’s defeat: “We are to blame for having left the control of the negotiations in hands other than our own”.
In India, during July 2005 the workers of the Honda factory in Gurgaon, in the suburbs of Delhi went on strike. Joined by a mass of workers from neighbouring factories in this industrial city, and supported by the local population, the workers were confronted with brutal police repression and a wave of arrests. On 1st February, 23,000 airport workers went on strike in 123 Indian airports. This strike was a direct response to a management plan to reduce the number of airport employees by 40%, lay-offs aimed mostly at older workers who are likely never to find work again. Air traffic in Delhi and Mumbai was paralysed for four days, and was also brought to a halt in Calcutta. Using a law against “illegal acts endangering civil aviation” as an excuse, the authorities declared the strike was illegal and in several towns, notably Mumbai, sent in police and paramilitaries to bludgeon the strikers back to work. As loyal partners of the government coalition led by Congress, the unions and the leftists were already negotiating with the government as early as 3rd February. They then called the strikers to meet with the Prime Minister, pushing them back to work in exchange for an empty promise to re-examine the planned redundancies in the airports. They thus helped to sow division among the workers, between those who wanted to continue the struggle and those who thought they could bring it to an end.
Workers’ combativeness was also in evidence at the Toyota factory near Bangalore, where workers struck for fifteen days from 4th January against line speed-ups which had been the cause of an increase in both accidents and management-imposed fines. These penalties for “inadequate productivity” were being systematically docked from wages. Here too, the workers immediately came up against the opposition of the unions, who declared the strike illegal. The repression has been fierce: 1500 out of 2300 strikers have been arrested for “disturbing the social peace”. The strike received the support of other workers in Bangalore, and this forced the unions and leftist organisations to set up a “coordination committee” in other workplaces in the city that supported the strike, and against the repression of the Toyota workers – in order to keep this example of spontaneous workers’ solidarity under control and sabotage it. During February also, other workers in Bangalore came out to demonstrate their support for 910 workers of Hindustan Lever in a struggle against lay-offs.
These struggles wholly confirm a maturation, a politicisation of the struggle that began with the “turning point” of 2003 against the “reform” of pensions, especially in France and Austria. Since then, there have been a number of clear expressions of workers’ solidarity, which we have reported in our press in opposition to the blackout organised by the media. Such reactions found expression in particular in the strike at Mercedes-Daimler-Chrysler in July 2004, when the workers in Bremen struck and demonstrated alongside their comrades of Sindelfingen-Stuttgart who were being blackmailed into accepting lay-offs in exchange for keeping their “benefits”, while at the same time management was proposing to transfer 6,000 jobs from Stuttgart to Bremen itself.
The same was true of the baggage handlers at Heathrow in August 2005, who in the midst of an anti-terrorist campaign in the wake of the London bombings walked out spontaneously in support of 670 workers of mostly Pakistani origin laid off by the Gate Gourmet airline food company.
There are other examples. In September 2005, 18,000 Boeing mechanics struck for three weeks against the new contract proposed by management which aimed at reducing both pensions and health benefits. In this conflict, the workers were fighting against differentials between younger and older workers, and between workers in different factories. Even more explicitly, the strike in the New York metro on the eve of Christmas 2005, against an attack on the pensions for future recruits demonstrated the workers' ability to refuse such attempts at division. Despite massive pressure, the strike was largely solid since the workers were well aware that they were fighting for their children’s future and for the generations to come (which is a slap in the face for all the bourgeois propaganda about the integration or non-existence of the American proletariat).
Last December, the workers of the SEAT factory in Barcelona walked out against the unions who had signed a “shameful agreement” accepting the lay-off of 600 workers.
The summer of 2005 saw Argentina’s biggest strike wave for fifteen years, hitting the health service, food processing companies, and the Buenos Aires metro, and also involving municipal workers in several provinces, and school teachers. In several places, workers from other companies joined the strikers’ demonstrations. This occurred particularly in the case of the oil industry, of office workers in the legal system, of the teachers, and of the municipal workers who were joined by the unemployed at Caleta Olivia. At Neuquen, health service workers joined a demonstration of striking teachers. At one children’s hospital, the strikers demanded the same wage increase for all professional categories. The workers have come up against both fierce repression and slanderous campaigns in the media.
The development of a feeling of solidarity in the face of massive frontal attacks, which are the consequence of capitalism’s economic crisis, is tending to break through the barriers that each national bourgeoisie tries to impose: the trade, the factory or workplace, the company, the branch of industry, nationality. At the same time, the working class is being pushed to take charge of its struggles itself, to assert itself, and little by little to gain confidence in its own strength. In doing so, it comes up against the manoeuvres of the ruling class and the sabotage of the unions as they try to keep the workers isolated. In this long and difficult process of maturation, the presence of the young generations of workers who have not suffered the impact of the ideological retreat after 1989 is an important element in the dynamic. This is why, whatever their limits and weaknesses, today’s struggles are laying the groundwork for those to come, and bear within them the seeds of the development of the class struggle.
Officially, the world economy is in good health. Unemployment is at its lowest for ten years in the USA, and has been falling for the last year in Europe: Spain’s economy is more dynamic than it has ever been. And yet, there is no respite in the attacks on the working class. On the contrary. In the Detroit region, Ford and General Motors (threatened with bankruptcy) have laid off 60,000 engineering workers. Redundancy plans follow one after another at SEAT in the Barcelona region, and at Fiat in Italy.
Everywhere, the boss state, the supreme representative of the interests of the national capital, is to the fore in attacking the workers: increasing precarious working (the CNE and CPE in France) and labour flexibility, attacking pensions and health benefits (Britain, Germany). Almost everywhere, health and education systems are in crisis. The US bourgeoisie declares that it is not competitive enough because of the weight of pensions on companies’ balance sheets – pensions that are at the mercy of bankruptcies and stock exchange collapse.
This systematic dismantling of the Welfare State (attacks on pensions, on Social Security, on the unemployed through reductions in the dole, waves of redundancies in every country and every branch of industry, the generalisation of precarious working and job flexibility) not only plunges today’s proletarians into poverty, it also means that the system is less and less able to integrate new generations of workers into the productive process.
Everywhere, these attacks are presented as “reforms”, a structural adaptation to the globalisation of the world economy. One of their main characteristics is that they hit both young and old almost simultaneously. The bourgeoisie is not in a state of obvious crisis everywhere, but all these attacks on the working class are demonstrations of capitalism’s historical dead-end, of its utter lack of perspective for the new generations. Those countries which, in Europe, are offered as economic models (Spain, Denmark, Britain) are often those which hide, behind the façade of a “healthy” economy, large-scale attacks on the workers and a serious increase in poverty. The ideological façade does not stand up to reality, as we can see from the example of Britain described in the 1st April issue of Marianne: “The Blair miracle is also one child in three living below the poverty line. One child in five who doesn’t get three meals a day (Tony Blair, in a speech at Toynbee Hall in 1999, promised to ‘eradicate child poverty within a generation’. How many years does the Prime Minister think there are in a generation?). Of these children, almost 100,000 sleep in the bathroom or the kitchen for lack of space: not surprisingly, since you have to go back to 1925 to find a Labour government that has built less council housing than New Labour! Ten million adults are able neither to save, nor to insure the little they have. Six million are unable to clothe themselves properly in winter. Two million households – mostly pensioners – are inadequately heated. It is estimated that 25,000 of the latter died as a result of the cold in 2004”. What better demonstration of the bankruptcy of the capitalist system could there be than its inability not only to provide work for the young, but to protect them from cold, hunger, and poverty!
The riots in the French suburbs are a clear expression of this dead-end. If we look at the world as a “snapshot”, the situation looks desperate. The world is full of unemployment, poverty, war, barbarity, chaos, terrorism, pollution, and insecurity, careless incompetence in the face of natural disasters. After the hammer blow against the older workers and future pensioners, the blows are now falling on the younger workers and future unemployed! Capitalism is openly showing its real face: that of a decadent system with nothing to offer the new generations; a system gangrened by an insoluble economic crisis; a system which since World War II has spent fantastic sums on the production of ever more deadly and sophisticated weapons; a system which, ever since the 1991 Gulf War, has covered the planet in blood notwithstanding the promises of an “era of peace and prosperity” that was supposed to follow the collapse of the Eastern bloc. It is the same bankrupt capitalist system, the same capitalist class at bay, that is dumping millions in poverty and unemployment, and spreading death and destruction in Iraq, the Middle East, and Africa!
But there is hope, as the young generations in France have just shown. By rejecting the CPE, and calling for the support of wage workers and their parents’ generation, they have shown a clear awareness that all generations are affected, that their struggle against the CPE is only a step, and that the attack that the CPE represented is directed against the whole working class.
The bourgeoisie’s hired media not only maintained a blackout lasting several weeks on what was happening in France, around the world, they also systematically distorted events to present the movement against the CPE as a mere repeat of the riots of October-November 2005, endlessly turning the spotlight on the sideshow of confrontations with the police, or of the exploits of the “wreckers” in the demonstrations. Behind the deliberate confusion between the blind and desperate violence of the suburbs last autumn, and the diametrically opposed methods used in the struggle of the student youth and the workers who joined them, lies the deliberate intention of the ruling class to prevent the working class of other countries from developing an awareness that it is both necessary and possible to fight for another future.
This intention on the part of the ruling class is perfectly understandable. Given its class prejudices, it has no clear awareness of the proletarian movement’s perspective, but it nonetheless understands confusedly the importance and the depth of the struggle that has just taken place in France. It is not limited to the working class in France itself. Fundamentally, this is just a moment in an international renewal of the class struggle whose depth expresses, over and above the particular demands around which the student youth mobilised, an increasing rejection by the young generations of the future offered them by the capitalist system, whose increasing attacks on the exploited can only provoke increasingly massive, and above all increasingly conscious, class confrontations, increasingly aware of the solidarity of all workers in struggle.
WIM, 15th April, 2006
In the last issue of the International Review we published a summary of the first volume of our series on communism, which looks at the development of the communist programme during the ascendant period of capitalism, and at the work of Marx and Engels in particular.
The second volume of the series focuses on the further precisions to this programme derived from the practical experiences and theoretical reflections of the proletarian movement during the revolutionary wave which swept the capitalist world in the years after 1917. We are dividing the summary of this volume into two parts: the first, in this issue, examines the heroic phase of the revolutionary wave, when the prospect of world revolution was very real and the communist programme seemed very concrete; the second will be centred on the descending phase of the revolutionary wave, and on the efforts of the revolutionary minorities to understand the remorseless advance of the counter-revolution.
The aim of the second volume of the communism series is to show how the communist programme was developed through the direct experience of the proletarian revolution. Its background is the new epoch of wars and revolutions definitively inaugurated by the first imperialist world war, and more specifically, the rise and demise of the first great revolutionary wave of the international working class between 1917 and the end of the 1920s. We thus modified the overall title of this volume: communism was no longer a prediction of what would become necessary once capitalism had exhausted its progressive mission. It had been placed on the agenda of history by the new conditions of capitalist decadence, an epoch in which capitalism would become not only an obstacle to further progress, but a threat to the very survival of humanity.
However, the volume begins in 1905, a transitional moment when the new conditions could be seen in outline without yet becoming definitive - a period of ambiguity which was reflected in the often ambiguous perspectives drawn up by the revolutionaries themselves. Nevertheless, the sudden explosion of the mass strike and uprising in Russia in 1905 illuminated a discussion that had already begun in the ranks of the marxist movement, and which was axed around an issue that is profoundly relevant to the concerns of this series: how, when the hour of revolution has struck, will the working class actually come to power. This was the real content of the debate on the mass strike, which animated the German Social Democratic Party in particular.
This was in essence a three-way combat: on the one hand, the revolutionary left around figures such as Luxemburg and Pannekoek was leading the fight, first against the openly revisionist theses of Bernstein and others who wanted to explicitly drop all references to the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, and against the trade union bureaucracy who could not envisage any workers’ struggle that was not rigidly controlled by themselves, and wanted any general strike movement to be narrowly limited in its demands and its duration. But once again the “orthodox” centre of the party, while nominally supporting the idea of the mass strike, also saw it as a limited tactic to be subordinated to a fundamentally parliamentary strategy. The left, by contrast, saw the mass strike as the indication that capitalism was nearing the end-point of its ascendant course, and thus as the precursor to the revolution. Although widely rejected as “anarchist” by all the forces of conservatism in the party, the analysis developed by Luxemburg and Pannekoek was not a repackaging the old anarchist abstraction of the general strike, but sought to draw out the real characteristics of the mass movement in the new period:
While Luxemburg drew out these general features of the mass strike, the understanding of the new organisations of the struggle – the soviets – was elaborated largely by the revolutionaries in Russia. Trotsky and Lenin were able to grasp very quickly the significance of the soviet as the organising instrument of the mass strike, as the flexible form that permitted the masses to debate, decide and develop their class consciousness, and as the organ of proletarian insurrection and political power. Against those “super-Leninists” in the Bolshevik party whose first reaction to the soviets was to call on them to dissolve into the party, Lenin insisted that the party, as the organisation of the revolutionary vanguard, and the soviet, as the organisation for the unification of the class as a whole, were not rivals but complemented each other perfectly. He thus revealed that the Bolshevik conception of the party expressed a true rupture with the old social democratic notion of the mass party and was an organic product of the new epoch of revolutionary struggles.
The events of 1905 also gave rise to sharp debates about the perspectives for the revolution in Russia. This too was a three-way debate:
the Mensheviks argued that Russia was fated to pass through the phase of bourgeois revolution, and therefore the principal task of the workers’ movement was to support the liberal bourgeoisie in its struggle against the Tsarist autocracy. The anti-revolutionary content of this theory was to be fully exposed in 1917;
Lenin and the Bolsheviks understood that the liberal bourgeoisie in Russia was too weak to lead the fight against Tsarism. The tasks of the bourgeois revolution would have to be carried out by a “democratic dictatorship” installed by a popular uprising in which the working class would play the leading role;
Trotsky, basing himself on the notion that Marx had developed in 1848, “the revolution in permanence”, reasoned first and foremost from the international angle: he argued that revolution in Russia would necessarily propel the working class to take power, and that the movement could move rapidly into a socialist phase by linking up with the revolution in western Europe. This approach was a link between the writings of the mature Marx about Russia, and the concrete experience of the revolution of 1917; and to a large extent it was taken on board by Lenin in 1917 when he ditched the notion of the “democratic dictatorship”, again in opposition to the “orthodox” Bolsheviks.
Meanwhile in the German party, the defeat of the 1905 uprising strengthened the arguments of Kautsky and others who argued that the mass strike should only be seen as a defensive tactic, and that the best strategy for the working class was that of the gradual, essentially legalistic “war of attrition”, with parliament and elections as the key instruments for the transfer of power to the proletariat. The response of the left was encapsulated in the work of Pannekoek, who argued that the proletariat was developing new organs of struggle that corresponded to the new epoch in the life of capital; and against the notion of the “war of attrition” he reaffirmed the marxist notion that the revolution aims not at the conquest of the state but at its destruction, and its replacement by new organs of political power.
According to the philosophers of bourgeois empiricism, marxism is no more than a pseudo-science, since it offers no possibility for the falsification of its hypotheses. In fact, marxism’s claims to use the scientific method cannot be tested in the closed walls of the laboratory, but only in the wider laboratory of social history. And the cataclysmic events of 1914 proved to be a striking confirmation of the basic perspective outlined both in the Communist Manifesto of 1848 – which outlines the general perspective of socialism or barbarism – and by Engels’ uncannily accurate prediction of a devastating European war, published in 1887. And in the same way, the revolutionary storms of 1917-19 confirmed the other side of the prognosis: the capacity of the working class to offer an alternative to the barbarism of capitalism in decline.
These movements posed the problem of the dictatorship of the proletariat in an eminently practical manner. But for the workers’ movement there can be no rigid separation between theory and practise. Lenin’s State and Revolution, written during the crucial period between February and October 1917 in Russia, obeyed the need for the proletariat to elaborate a clear theoretical understanding of its practical movement. This was especially necessary because the predominance of opportunism in the parties of the Second International had befogged the concept of the proletarian dictatorship, replacing it more and more with a theorisation of a gradual, parliamentary road to workers’ power. Against these reformist distortions – and also against the false answers to the problem offered by anarchism – Lenin set about restoring the fundamental teachings of marxism on the problem of the state and the transition period towards communism.
Lenin’s first task, therefore, was to demolish the notion of the state as a neutral instrument which could be used for good or ill depending on the will of those who managed it. It was an elementary necessity to reaffirm the marxist view that the state can only be an instrument for the oppression of one class by another - a reality hidden not only by the more established arguments of Kautsky and other apologists, but more concretely, in Russia itself, by the Mensheviks and their allies who used grand phrases about “revolutionary democracy” as a fig leaf over the capitalist Provisional Government that came to power after the February uprising.
Because it is an organ adapted to the class rule of the bourgeoisie, the existing bourgeois state could not be “transformed” in the interest of the proletariat. Lenin thus re-traced the development of the marxist view from the Communist Manifesto to the present day, showing how successive experience of the proletarian struggle - the revolutions of 1848, and above all the Paris Commune of 1871 - had clarified the necessity for the working class to destroy the existing state and replace it with a new kind of political power. This new power would be based on a series of essential measures which would allow the working class to maintain its political authority over all the institutions of the transition period: dissolution of the standing army and the general arming of the workers; election and revocability of all public officials, who should receive the same remuneration as the average worker; fusion of executive and legislative functions in a single body.
These were to be the principle of the new soviet power which Lenin was advocating in opposition to the bourgeois regime of the Provisional Government. The necessity to pass from theory to action in September/ October 1917 prevented Lenin from elaborating further on how the soviets constituted a higher form of the proletarian dictatorship than the Paris Commune. But State and Revolution did have the considerable merit of laying to rest certain ambiguities contained in the writings of Marx and Engels, who had speculated that the working class might come to power peacefully in some of the more democratic countries, such as Britain, Holland or the USA. Lenin made it clear that in the conditions of the new epoch of imperialism, where a militarist state everywhere assumed the mantle of arbitrary power, there could be no further exceptions. In the “democratic” countries as much as the more authoritarian regimes, the proletarian programme was the same: destruction of the existing state apparatus and the formation of a “Commune state”.
Against anarchism, State and Revolution also recognises that the state as such cannot be abolished overnight. After the overthrow of the bourgeois state, classes will still exist, and underneath them, the reality of material scarcity. These objective conditions necessitate the semi-state of the transition period. But Lenin makes it clear that the goal of the proletariat is not to continually strengthen this state, but to ensure the gradual diminution of its role in social life, eventually dispensing with it altogether. This required the constant participation of the working masses in political life and their vigilant control over all state functions. At the same time, it necessitated an economic transformation tending in a communist direction: here Lenin takes up the indications contained in Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme, which advocated a system of labour-time vouchers as a temporary alternative to the wage form.
Lenin was writing this work on the very eve of a gigantic revolutionary experience. It was impossible for him to do more than pose the general parameters of the problems of the transition period. State and Revolution thus inevitably contains gaps and insufficiencies which would be considerably clarified through the next few years of victories and defeats:
Even so, State and Revolution contains many insights into the negative side of the state. In recognising that the new state would have to manage a situation of material scarcity and thus of “bourgeois right” in the distribution of social wealth, Lenin even referred to the new state as “a bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie”, a provocative phrase which, while not being entirely precise, certainly represents a glimpse of the potential dangers emanating from the transitional state.
The outbreak of revolution in Germany in 1918 was the conformation of the perspective that had guided the Bolsheviks towards the October insurrection: the perspective of world revolution. Given the historic traditions of the German working class and Germany’s place at the centre of world capitalism, the German revolution was the key to the entire world revolutionary process. It was instrumental in bringing the world war to an end and offered hope to the beleaguered proletarian power in Russia. By the same token, its definitive defeat in the ensuing few years sealed the fate of the revolution in Russia, which succumbed to a terrible internal counter-revolution; and while the victory of the revolution could have opened the door to a new and higher stage in human society, its downfall unleashed a century of barbarism the likes of which humanity had never previously experienced.
In December 1918 – one month after the November uprising and two weeks before the tragic defeat of the Berlin revolt in which Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht lost their lives - the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) held its founding Congress. The new party programme (also known as “What does Spartacus Want?”) was introduced by Rosa Luxemburg herself, who placed the programme in its historic context. While taking its inspiration from the Communist Manifesto of 1848, the new programme had to be set upon very different foundations; and the same was true for the Erfurt programme of German social democracy, with its separation between minimum and maximum demands, which had been suitable for a period in which the proletarian revolution was not yet on the immediate agenda. The world war had ushered in a new epoch in human history – the epoch of the decline of capitalism, the epoch of the proletarian revolution - and thus the new programme had to encapsulate the direct struggle for the proletarian dictatorship and the building of socialism. It demanded a break not only with the formal programme of social democracy, but also with the reformist illusions which had so deeply infected the party in the last part of the 19th and opening decade of the 20th centuries – illusions in a gradual, and parliamentary conquest of power which had even affected revolutionaries as lucid as Engels himself.
But to argue that the proletarian revolution was on the agenda of history did not imply that the proletariat was immediately capable of carrying it through. Indeed the event of the November revolution had shown that the German working class in particular still had a long way to go in throwing off the dead weight of the past, as evidenced by the inordinate influence of the social democratic traitors in the workers’ councils. Luxemburg insisted that the German working class needed to educate itself through a process of struggles, both economic and political, defensive and offensive, which would provide it with the confidence and awareness it needed to take complete charge of society. It was one of the great tragedies of the German revolution that the bourgeoisie succeeded in provoking the proletariat into a premature uprising which would short-circuit this whole process and deprive it of its most far-sighted political leaders.
The KPD’s document begins by asserting its general aims and principles. It makes no bones about recognising the necessity for the violent suppression of bourgeois power, while rejecting the idea that proletarian violence is a new form of terror. Socialism, it points out, represents a qualitative leap in the evolution of human society and it is impossible to introduce it by a series of decrees issued from on high; it could only be the fruit of the creative and collective labour of untold millions of proletarians.
At the same time this document is a real programme in the sense that it puts forward a series of practical measures aimed at establishing the rule of the working class and taking the first steps towards the socialisation of production, for example:
The majority of the measures announced in the KPD programme remain valid today, although by its very nature as a document produced at the beginning of an immense revolutionary experience, it could not be clear on all points. It thus talks about the nationalisation of the economy as a step towards socialism and could not know how easily this form could be co-opted by capital; while it rejects any form of putschism, it retains the notion that the party will put itself forward as a candidate for political power; it is very sketchy about the international tasks of the revolution. But these are weaknesses that could have been overcome had the German revolution not been nipped in the bud before it could really come into bloom.
The platform of the Communist International was drawn up at the CI’s first Congress in 1919, only a few months after the tragic outcome of the Berlin uprising. But the international revolutionary wave was still at its high point: at the very moment the CI held its Congress, news came through of the proclamation of a soviet republic in Hungary. The clarity of the political positions adopted at the First Congress reflected this ascendant movement of the class, just as the CI’s subsequent slide into opportunism was linked to the movement’s descending phase.
Bukharin introduced the Congress discussion on the draft platform, and his remarks were themselves fortified by the considerable theoretical advances that revolutionaries were making in that period. Bukharin insisted that the starting point for the platform was the recognition of the bankruptcy of the capitalist system on a global scale. From the beginning, the CI understood that the “globalisation” of capital was already an accomplished reality, and was indeed a fundamental factor in the decline and collapse of the system.
Bukharin’s speech also highlights a feature of the first Congress – its openness to new developments brought about by the onset of the epoch inaugurated by the war. He thus recognises that, in Germany at least, the existing trade unions have ceased to play any kind of positive role and are being replaced by new class organs thrown up by the mass movement, in particular the factory committees. This contrasts with later congresses when participation in the official unions became mandatory for all parties of the International. But it is in line with the insights into the question of state capitalism contained in the platform, since as Bukharin was to argue elsewhere, the integration of the unions into the capitalist system was precisely a function of state capitalism .
The platform itself is a brief overview of the new period and the tasks of the proletariat. It does not seek to provide a detailed programme of measures for the proletarian revolution. Once again, it affirms very clearly that with the world war, “a new epoch is born. The epoch of capitalism’s decay, its internal disintegration, the epoch of the proletarian communist revolution”. Insisting that the seizure of power by the proletariat is the only alternative to capitalist barbarism, it calls for the revolutionary destruction of all the institutions of the bourgeois state (parliaments, police, courts, etc) and their replacement with organs of proletarian power, founded on the armed workers’ councils; it exposes the hollowness of bourgeois democracy and proclaims that the council system alone enables the masses to exercise real authority; and it provides broad guidelines for the expropriation of the bourgeoisie and the socialisation of production. These include the immediate socialisation of the main centres of capitalist industry and agriculture, the gradual integration of small independent producers into the socialised sector, and radical measures aimed at the replacement of the market by the equitable distribution of products.
In the struggle for victory, the platform insists on the need for a complete political break both with the right wing Social Democrats, “outright lackeys of capital and hangmen of the communist revolution” but also the Kautskyite centre. This position – diametrically opposed to the policy of the United Front adopted only two years later – had nothing to do with sectarianism, since it was combined with a call for unity with genuine proletarian forces, such as elements in the anarcho-syndicalist movement. Faced with the united front of the capitalist counter-revolution, which had already claimed the lives of Luxemburg and Liebknecht, the platform calls for the development of mass struggles in all countries, leading towards a direct confrontation with the bourgeois state.
The existence of a number of different national party programmes, as well as the platform of the Communist International, testifies to the persistence of a certain federalism even in the new International which strove to overcome the national autonomy that had contributed to the demise of the old. But the programme of the Russian party, drawn up at its 9th Congress in 1919, has a particular interest: whereas the programme of the KPD was the product of a party faced with the task of leading the working class in an impending revolution, the new programme of the Bolshevik party was a statement of the aims and methods of the first soviet power, of a real proletarian dictatorship. It was thus accompanied on the more concrete level by a series of decrees which expressed the policies of the soviet republic on various particular issues, even though, as Trotsky admitted, many of these decrees were more in the nature of propaganda statements than immediately realisable policies.
Like the platform of the CI, the programme begins by affirming the onset of the new period of capitalist decline and the necessity for the world proletarian revolution. It also restates the necessity for a complete break with the official social democratic parties.
The programme is then divided into the following sections:
General politics. The superiority of the soviet system over bourgeois democracy is demonstrated by its capacity to draw the immense majority of the exploited and oppressed into the running of the state. The programme points out that the workers’ soviets, by organising on the basis of workplace rather than residence, are a direct expression of the proletariat as a class; while the necessity for the proletariat to direct the revolutionary process is reflected in the disproportionate weight given to urban soviets over rural soviets. There is no theorisation of the idea of the party wielding power through the soviets. In fact the overriding concern of the programme, written during the rigours of the civil war, is to find means to counter-act the growing pressures of bureaucracy within the new state apparatus, by drawing a growing number of workers into the tasks of state management. In the terrible conditions facing the Russian proletariat, these measures proved inadequate, tending to turn militant workers into state bureaucrats rather than impose the will of the militant working class over the bureaucracy. Nevertheless this section reveals an early awareness of the dangers emanating from the state machinery.
The problem of nationality: beginning from a correct starting point – the need to overcome national divisions within the proletariat and the oppressed masses and to develop a common struggle against capital - the programme here displays one of its weaker sides by adopting the notion of national self-determination. At best this slogan can only mean self-determination for the bourgeoisie, and in the epoch of unbridled imperialism it can only involve transferring domination over national units from one imperialist master to the other. Rosa Luxemburg and others would point to the disastrous effects of this policy, by showing how all the nations granted “independence” by the Bolsheviks became bridgeheads of imperialist intervention against the soviet power.
Military affairs. The programme, having recognised the necessity for a Red Army to defend the new soviet regime in a situation of civil war, puts forward a number of measures aimed at ensuring that the new army really does remain an instrument of the proletariat: its ranks should be made up of the proletariat and semi-proletariat; its training methods should be informed by socialist principles; political commissars appointed from among the best communists should work alongside military staff and ensure that former Tsarist military experts worked entirely for the interests of the soviet power; at the same time, more and more officers should be drawn from the ranks of the class conscious workers. But the practise of the election of officers, which had been a demand of the original soldiers’ soviets, was not regarded as a principle and there was a debate at the 9th Congress, animated by the Democratic Centralism group, on the need to maintain the principles of the Commune even in the army, and to oppose the tendency for the army to return to the old hierarchical methods or organisation. A further weakness, and perhaps the most important one, was that the formation of the Red Army had been accompanied by the dissolution of the Red Guards, thus depriving the workers councils’ of their specific armed force in favour of an organ of a statist kind and thus far less responsive to the needs of the class struggle.
Proletarian Justice: the bourgeois courts were replaced by popular courts where the judges were elected from among the working class; the death penalty was to be abolished and the penal system was to be freed of any attitude of revenge. In the brutalising conditions of civil war, however, the death penalty was soon restored and the revolutionary tribunals set up to deal with the emergency situation often committed abuses, to say nothing of the activities of the Special Commissions against Counter Revolution, the Cheka, which more and more escaped the control of the soviets.
Education: given the terrible weight of Russian backwardness, many of the education reforms envisaged by the soviet state simply involved bringing Russia into line with the more enlightened educational practises already current in the bourgeois democracies (such as free and co-educational education for all children up to the age of 17). At the same time, however, the longer-term aim was to transform the school from an organ of bourgeois indoctrination into an instrument for the communist transformation of society. This would necessitate the overcoming of coercive and hierarchical methods, the elimination of the rigid separation between manual and mental labour, and in general the education of new generations into a world where learning and labour had become a pleasure rather than a curse.
Religion: while maintaining the need for the soviet power to conduct intelligent and sensitive propaganda aimed at combating the archaic religious prejudices of the masses, there was a complete rejection of any attempt to forcibly suppress religion, which, as the experience of Stalinism was to prove, only has the affect of strengthening religion’s grip.
Economic Affairs: while recognising that communism could only be established on a global scale, the programme contains general outlines of a proletarian economic policy in the area under its control: expropriation of the old ruling class, centralisation of the productive forces under the control of the soviets; mobilisation of all available labour power, using a new labour discipline founded on the principles of class solidarity; the gradual integration of independent producers into collective production. The programme also recognises the need for the working class to exert its collective management over the productive process; but it sees the instrument for achieving this not as the workers’ councils and the factory committees (which are not even mentioned in the programme), but the trade unions, which by their very nature tended to take collective control of production away from the working class and put in the hands of the state. Most crucially of all, the terrible conditions imposed by the civil war, which tended to disperse and even de-class the proletarian masses of the towns, made it increasingly difficult for the working class to control not only the factories but the state itself.
In the sphere of agriculture, there was a recognition that peasant-based production could not be collectivised overnight but would require a more or less long period of integration into the socialised sector; in the meantime the soviet power would encourage the class struggle in the countryside by giving its principal support to the poor peasants and rural semi-proletarians.
Distribution: the soviet power set itself the grandiose task of replacing trade with the purposive distribution of goods on the basis of need, to be coordinated through a network of consumer communes. And indeed, during the civil war period, the old monetary system more or less collapsed and was replaced by a system of requisitioning and rationing. But this was a product of the direst scarcity and necessity and did not really represent the advent of new communist social relations, even though it was often theorised as such. Real communisation can only be based on an ability to produce abundantly, and this can never be achieved by an isolated proletarian power.
Finance: this overoptimistic evaluation of War Communism was reflected in other areas, particularly the idea that simply combining all existing banks into a single state bank is a step towards the disappearance of banks as such. But the money system soon reappeared in Russia, having merely gone underground during the War Communism period; and so forms of money and means of storing money will persist as long as exchange relations have not been overcome by the creation of a unified human community.
Housing and public health: the proletarian power acted with considerable initiative to relieve homelessness and overcrowding, particularly through the expropriation of bourgeois, but its more far-sighted schemes to build a new urban environment were blocked by the harsh conditions of the post-insurrection period. The same applies to many of the other measures decreed by the soviet power: reduction in the working day, disability and unemployment benefit, drastic improvements in public sanitation. Here again the immediate aim was to bring Russia in line with standards already achieved by the more developed bourgeois countries; here again the new power was often prevented from bringing in real improvements because of the huge draining of resources towards the war effort.
As well as writing the programme of the Russian party, Bukharin wrote a theoretical study of the problems of the period of transition. Although in many respects a flawed work, certain elements of it represent a serious contribution to marxist theory, while an examination of its weaknesses also sheds light on the problems he was trying to pose.
Bukharin had been in the theoretical vanguard of the Bolshevik party during the imperialist war. His book Imperialism and World Economy paralleled Rosa Luxemburg’s investigation into the economic conditions of the new epoch of capitalist decline - The Accumulation of Capital. And Bukharin’s book was one of the first to show that the onset of this period had inaugurated a new stage in the organisation of capital – the stage of state capitalism, which he linked first and foremost to the global military struggle between imperialist nation states. In his article “Towards a theory of the imperialist state” Bukharin also adopted a very advanced position on the national question (again taking a view similar to Luxemburg’s on the impossibility of national liberation in the imperialist epoch) and on the question of the state, coming more rapidly than Lenin himself to the position defended in State and Revolution: the necessity for the destruction of the bourgeois state apparatus.
These conceptions are further developed in his Economics of the Transition Period, written in 1920. Here Bukharin reiterates the marxist view of the inevitably catastrophic and violent end of capitalist class rule, and thus of the necessity for proletarian revolution as the only basis for the construction of a new and higher mode of production. At the same time he goes more deeply into the characteristics of this new phase of capitalist decadence. He anticipates the growing tendency of senile capitalism towards the squandering and destruction of the accumulated productive forces, exemplified above all in war production, irrespective of the quantitative “growth” it may involve. He also shows how, in the conditions of state capitalism, the old workers’ parties and unions are “nationalised”, integrated into the monstrously hypertrophied machinery of the capitalist state.
In its broad lines, Bukharin’s articulation of the communist alternative to this decaying world system is perfectly clear: a world wide revolution founded on the self-activity of the working class in its new organs of combat, the soviets, a revolution aimed at welding the whole of humanity into a united world community which has replaced the blind laws of commodity production with the conscious regulation of social life.
But the means and goals of the proletarian revolution must be made concrete, and this can only be the result of living experience and reflection upon that experience. And it is here we come to the weak side of the book. Although in 1918 Bukharin was part of the Left Communist tendency in the Bolshevik party, for him this was first and foremost around the question of the Brest-Litovsk peace. Unlike other Left Communists, such as Ossinski, he was far less capable of developing a critical view of some of the early signs of the bureaucratisation of the soviet state. On the contrary, if anything, his book tended to serve as an apology for the status quo during the period of the civil war, since it was above all a theoretical justification for the measures of “War Communism” as the expression of an authentic process of communist transformation.
Thus, for Bukharin, the virtual disappearance of money and wages during the civil war – a direct result of the collapse of the capitalist economy – already signifies the overcoming of exploitation and the advent of a form of communism. In a similar way, a dire necessity imposed on the proletarian bastion in Russia - a war of fronts conducted by a Red Army – became not only a “norm” of the period of revolutionary struggles but also the model for the extension of the revolution, which has now been transformed into an epic battle between capitalist and proletarian states. On this point, the “left” Bukharin was far to the right of Lenin, who never forgot that the extension of the revolution was above all a political task and not primarily a military one.
One of the ironies of Bukharin’s book is that, having clearly identified state capitalism as the universal form of capitalist organisation in the epoch of capitalist decline, it becomes wilfully blind to the danger of state capitalism after the proletarian revolution. Under the “proletarian state”, under the system of “proletarian nationalisations”, exploitation became impossible. And by the same token, since the new state is the organic expression of the proletariat’s historic interests, there is everything to be gained by fusing all of the class organs of the workers into the state apparatus, and even by restoring the most hierarchical practices in the management of social and economic life. There is no awareness at all that the transitional state, as the expression of the need to hold together a disparate and transitory social formation, might play a conservative role and even come to detach itself from the interests of the working class.
In the period after 1921, Bukharin underwent a rapid trajectory from the left to the right of the party. But in fact there was a continuity in this evolution: a tendency to accommodate with the status quo. If ETP is an attempt to declare that the harsh regime of War Communism is already the goal of the proletariat’s strivings, it was not a huge leap a few years later to proclaim that the New Economic Policy, which gave free rein to the market forces that had merely been “displaced” in the previous phase, was already the antechamber of socialism. Bukharin even more than Stalin was the theoretician of “socialism in one country” and the precedent is already there in the absurd claims that the isolated Russian bastion of 1918-20, in which the proletariat was being decimated by civil war and increasingly subject to the growth of a new bureaucratic leviathan, was already a communist society.
The isolation of the revolution in Russia was to have a negative impact on the political positions of the new Communist International, which began to retreat on the clarity it had exhibited at its first Congress, not least towards the social democratic parties. Previously denounced as parties of the bourgeoisie, the CI began to formulate the tactic of the “United Front” with these same parties, partly in an attempt to widen support for the stricken Russian bastion. The rise of opportunism in the CI was vigorously opposed by the left communist currents in a number of countries, but in particular Italy and Germany.
One of the early manifestations of the rise of opportunism in the CI was Lenin’s pamphlet Left Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder, and this text has since served as the basis for numerous distortions about the communist left, and especially about the German left in the shape of the KAPD, which was excluded from the KPD in 1920. The KAPD is accused of indulging in the “sectarian” policy trying to replace real workers’ trade unions with artificial “revolutionary unions”; it is accused above all of lapsing into anarchism in its approach to vital questions such as parliament and the role of the party.
It is true that the KAPD, which was the product of a tragic and premature rupture in the German party, was never a homogeneous organisation. It contained a number of elements who were indeed influenced by anarchism; and, in the reflux of the revolution, this influence was to give birth to the councilist ideas which largely took hold of the German communist movement. But a brief examination of the KAPD programme shows that, at its best, the KAPD represented a high point of marxist clarity:
In the same way, the programme defends without hesitation the marxist conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
In the practical measures it puts forward, the KAPD programme is in direct continuity with the programme of the KPD, in particular in its call for the dissolution of all parliamentary and municipal bodies and their replacement by a centralised system of workers’ councils. The 1920 programme, however, is clearer on the international tasks of the revolution, calling for example for immediate fusion with other soviet republics. It also goes further into the problem of the economic content of the revolution, emphasising the necessity to take immediate steps towards gearing production towards need (even if we can take issue with the programme’s contention that the formation of a “socialist economic bloc” with Russia alone could make significant steps towards communism). Finally, the programme raises some “new” issues not dealt with by the 1918 programme, such as the proletarian approach to art, science, education and youth, which shows that the KAPD was far from being a purely “workerist” current and was interested in all the issues posed by the communist transformation of social life.
CDW
In the first part of this article (published in International Review n°124), we examined the historical context within which the IWW was founded, at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, in the watershed between capitalism’s ascendancy and decadence. Based on its theory of “industrial unionism”, the Industrial Workers of the World tried to find an answer to the problems posed by the increasing inability of “parliamentary cretinism” and the reformist union of Samuel Gompers’ American Federation of Labor (AFL) to confront the evolution of both capitalism and the class struggle. Contrary to the federalist vision of the anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists, the IWW’s founders set out to build a centralised, unified class-struggle organization which would be able to bring together the whole proletariat for the seizure of power, and to offer a framework for the exercise of proletarian power after the revolution.
In this article, we will see how far the IWW’s theory and practice allowed it to live up to its own goals, and to the greatest challenge yet faced by the workers’ movement world wide: the outbreak of history’s first great inter-imperialist conflict in 1914.
The IWW preamble adopted at the founding convention was clear in its commitment to the revolutionary destruction of capitalism. “The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life (…) Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the earth and the machinery of production, and abolish the wage system (…) It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism.” The organization was not clear, however, on the nature of this revolution or how it would made. It was not even clear whether the revolution would be a political or an economic act. So while the IWW permitted and even welcomed the participation of political organizations and activists within its ranks and its members supported socialist candidates at the poll, even from the outset it harbored considerable confusions on the nature of political action for the proletariat.
In 1905, Socialist Party members present at the founding convention assumed that the IWW would endorse the Socialist Party.[1] [6] Their DeLeonist rivals hoped that the IWW’s allegiance could be won by the Socialist Labor Party. Such naive expectations seriously underestimated the political skepticism that would prevail at the founding convention. Despite their Marxist sympathies, the dominant view amongst the IWW’s founders held that for the workers the political struggle was subordinate to the economic. For example, prior to the convention the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) had written, “Experience has taught us that the economic organization and the political organization must be distinct and apart from each other (…) To our mind it becomes necessary to unite the workers upon the industrial domain, before it is possible to unite them in the political arena.”[2] [7]
Despite the sharply divergent views on politics, in the interests of unity, the convention formulated a convolutedly worded concession to socialists from both parties, by agreeing to the insertion of a political paragraph in the preamble to the IWW constitution, which read as follows: “Between these two classes a struggle must go on until all the toilers come together on the political, as well as the industrial field, and take hold of that which they produce by their labor, through an economic organization of the working class, without affiliation with any political party.” For most delegates this concessionary reference to politics was incomprehensible. One delegate complained, “I cannot afford to have brother DeLeon along with me every time I meet a man to explain what this paragraph means.” [3] [8]
The opposition to politics derived from a theoretical misunderstanding of the nature of the class struggle and the proletarian revolution and of the proletariat’s political tasks. For the IWW, “political” had a very narrow meaning: it meant parliamentarism, the participation in bourgeois elections. According to this perspective political action, i.e., participation in elections, offered only propagandistic value in demonstrating the futility of electoralism, as exemplified in this statement: “The only value that political activity has to the working class is from the standpoint of agitation and education. Its educational merit consists solely in proving to the workers its utter inefficacy to curb the power of the ruling class and therefore forcing the workers to rely on the organization of their class in the industries of the world.
“It is impossible for any one to be a part of the capitalist state and to use the machinery of the state in the interest of the workers. All they can do is to make the attempt, and be impeached – as they will be—and furnish object lessons to the workers, of the class character of the state.” [4] [9]
These statements are rife with confusion. It is ironic that although the anti-politicals detested DeLeon they shared many of his theoretical conceptions, such as:
When Wobblies railed against politics because it was impossible to use the capitalist state for working class revolutionary purposes they revealed an ignorance of one fundamental lesson that Marx drew from the experience of the Paris Commune: the recognition that the proletariat must destroy the capitalist state. What could be more political than the destruction of the capitalist state, the seizure of the means of production, and the imposition of the proletarian revolutionary perspective over the whole of society? The proletarian revolution will be the most audacious and thoroughgoing social and political act in all of human history – a revolution in which the exploited and oppressed masses rise up, destroy the state power of the exploiting class, and impose their own revolutionary class dictatorship over society in order to achieve the transition to communism. From the correct realization that the workers could not take hold of the bourgeois state and wield it to advance their revolutionary program, the anti-politicals wrongly concluded that the proletarian revolution was an economic, not a political act. Like the anarchists, the anti-politicals in the IWW ended up by concluding that they could ignore, not just parliament but the power of the bourgeois state itself. They believed this in spite of their own experience in the free speech fights which took place not at the point of production, but in the streets as an act of political confrontation with the state.[5] [10] Nor, despite these bitter clashes in which the ruling class frequently rode roughshod over its own laws, did the IWW have any inkling that the time was fast approaching when the bourgeois parliament and law would be nothing but a mask for the most ruthless exercise of power against the proletarian threat. This was to have catastrophic consequences, as we shall see, and it is a tragedy of historical proportions that so many dedicated and courageous militants were to enter the coming struggles bereft of such fundamental aspects of the Marxist perspective.
The political compromise embodied in the arcane wording of the political paragraph in the 1905 preamble was not sufficient to maintain the unity of the organization. By the 1908 convention, the anti-political perspective triumphed. DeLeon was barred from attending the convention on a credentials technicality, and he and his followers split to form their own IWW based in Detroit that was subordinate to the SLP, and doomed to as inauspicious an existence as the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance before it. Debs, along with many other Socialist Party members, permitted their membership to lapse and withdrew from IWW activities. Even the WFM, which had played such a vital role in the founding of the IWW, withdrew from the organization. Haywood remained in the organization and in 1911 served simultaneously as a leading member of the IWW and a board member of the Socialist Party, until he was removed from the latter after membership in the IWW was deemed incompatible by the Socialists because of the IWW’s stance on sabotage and opposition to political action.
For the IWW the industrial union was an all-in-one organizational form. The union would not simply be a unitary organization that would serve as a mechanism for working class self defense and the form for proletarian rule after the revolution, but would also be an organization of revolutionary militants and agitators. According to its 1908 constitution, the IWW believed that “the army of production must be organized, not only for the every-day struggle with the capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.” As we have pointed out earlier in this series, this syndicalist vision that sees the possibility to form “the structure of the new society within the shell of the old (…) springs from a profound incomprehension of the degree of antagonism between capitalism, the last exploiting society, and the classless society which must replace it. This serious error leads to underestimating the depth of social transformation necessary to carry out the transition between these two social forms, and it also underestimated the resistance of the ruling class to the seizure of power by the working-class.” [6] [11]
Moreover, the conception that the same organization could simultaneously be a revolutionary organization of class conscious workers and agitators and an organization open to all workers in the class struggle within capitalism revealed a double confusion characteristic of revolutionary syndicalism.
The first of these confusions was the failure to distinguish between the two types of organization that have historically been secreted by the working class: revolutionary organizations and unitary organizations. The IWW failed to appreciate that a revolutionary organization regrouping militants on the basis of a shared agreement on, and commitment to, revolutionary principles and a revolutionary program, is in essence a political organization, a class party in fact if not in name. Such an organization can only, by definition, regroup a minority of the working class: its most politically conscious and dedicated members who, in the words of the 1848 Communist Manifesto “are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement”. The failure to appreciate this difference condemned the IWW to an unstable existence. The open door to membership that the organization maintained was literally a revolving door, through which perhaps as many as a million workers entered and just as quickly exited between 1905 and 1917. Newly chartered local union branches were created, only to quickly disappear without a trace as soon as the struggle which had brought them into being came to an end.
The tension resulting from the contradictory conception of being a revolutionary organization and a mass membership organization open to all workers would ultimately contribute to the historic failure of the IWW during the revolutionary wave that followed World War I. The IWW’s view of itself as a mass membership union that regrouped all workers increasingly led union-building concerns to predominate over revolutionary principle.
The second confusion sprang from the IWW’s failure to understand that, as fervently as they sought to defend the interests of their class, the battle waged by the industrial unionists against craft and business unionism was increasingly anachronistic. The historic period changed in the early 20th century with the completion and saturation of the world market, which ushered in the onset of capitalist decadence and brought to an end the period when it was possible to fight for durable reforms. Under these changed conditions, the trade union form of organization itself, whether industrial or craft, became irrelevant to the class struggle and was doomed either to disappear, or to be absorbed into the capitalist state apparatus as a mechanism for controlling the working class. The experience of the mass strike in Russia in 1905 and the discovery of soviets, or workers councils, by the proletariat in that country was an historical watershed for the world proletariat. The lessons of these developments and their impact on class struggle were the focus of theoretical work by Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, Anton Pannekoek, and others in the leftwing of the Second International. In the real struggle of the proletariat, as opposed to the theory of revolutionary syndicalism, workers’ councils displaced the trade unions as the unitary organization of the working class. This new type of organization united workers from all industries in a given territorial area for the revolutionary confrontation with the ruling class and constituted the “historically discovered form of the dictatorship of the proletariat” (to use Lenin’s expression). Equally importantly, the experience of 1905 showed that the mass unitary organization of the working class in its struggle for power could not maintain itself as a permanent organization within capitalism once that struggle had been – temporarily – defeated. While the founding IWW convention expressed its solidarity with the 1905 struggle of the Russian proletariat, the theoretical work elaborating the significance of the Russian experience was completely lost on the IWW, which never recognized the significance of the changed period or of the workers councils, and continued to laud “industrial unionism [as] the road to freedom.”[7] [12]
The failure to learn from the real, concrete experience of 1905, or even to take any notice of the theoretical developments taking place within the left wing of the Social Democracy (which would later become the backbone of the Communist International), was only a particularly damaging aspect of the fact that, in general, the theoretical work of the IWW was extremely weak. The theoretical aspects of the propaganda published by the IWW for the most part repeated basic Marxist conceptions pertaining to surplus value, the conflict between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, but failed to take account of the deepening and further elaboration of Marxist theory undertaken by the leftwing of Social-Democracy. On the historic level the IWW added little or nothing to the theory of Marxism or even to the theory of syndicalism. As historian Melvyn Dubofsky has noted, the IWW “offered no genuinely original ideas, no sweeping explanations of social change, no fundamental theories of revolution.”[8] [13] Its critique of capitalism never transcended a visceral hatred of the system’s exploitation and oppression, and never attempted to examine the nuances and intricacies of capitalist development and understand the significance of the consequent changing conditions under which the working class waged its struggles.
One disastrous exception to the avoidance of theoretical elaboration was the IWW’s effort to explain more deeply its conception of “direct action”, which led to a naïve theoretical advocacy and defense of “sabotage” in the class struggle, a term which made it vulnerable to charges of terrorism. The IWW’s definition of sabotage excluded the taking of human life, but it confounded a broad range of activities that could be considered routine tactics in the daily class struggle, such as mass work-to-rule slowdowns or “open mouth sabotage” in which workers make public embarrassing company secrets, with purely individual actions that had more in common with the anarchists’ petty bourgeois notion of “propaganda by the deed” than with working class methods of mass struggle. For example, the IWW defended an incident in a Chicago theatre, in which someone “simply dropped some vile smelling chemicals upon the floor during the performance and then made a quiet and speedy exit.”[9] [14] Some IWW soap box orators demagogically advocated the use of bombs and dynamite. Finding it difficult to reconcile the glorification of sabotage by individual or small groups of workers with its commitment to mass struggle, the IWW resolved the contradiction by declaring it did not exist: “Individual acts of sabotage, performed to the end that class benefit be derived, can in no way militate against solidarity. Rather they promote unity. The saboteur involves no one but himself and is impelled to take the risk by reason of his strong class desires.” [10] [15]
Moments of war and revolution are historically determinant for organizations that claim to defend proletarian class interests, a litmus test revealing their true class nature. In this sense, the outbreak of World War I in August 1914 revealed the betrayal of the major parties of the Social Democracy in Europe who rallied to the side of their respective bourgeoisies, supported the global imperialist war, turned their backs on the principles of proletarian internationalism and opposition to imperialist war, participated in the mobilization of the proletariat for the slaughter, and in so doing crossed the class line to the camp of the bourgeoisie.
For its part, the IWW had nothing but contempt for patriotism. In their words, “of all the idiotic and perverted ideas accepted by the workers from that class who live upon their misery, patriotism is the worst.” The Wobblies adhered formally to principles of proletarian internationalism, and opposed the war. In 1914, shortly after war erupted in Europe, the IWW convention adopted a resolution that stated, “…the industrial movement will wipe out all boundaries and establish an international relationship between all races engaged in industry…We, as members of the industrial army, will refuse to fight for any purpose except for the realization of industrial freedom.” In 1916, the 10th Annual Convention adopted a resolution that committed the organization to a program advocating “anti-militarist propaganda in time of peace, thus promoting Class Solidarity among the workers of the entire world, and, in time of war, the General Strike in all industries.”[11] [16]
But when US imperialism entered the war on the side of the Allies in April 1917, the IWW failed miserably to put its internationalism and anti-militarism into practice. Instead the organization lapsed into a centrist hesitancy, characterized by caution and inaction. Unlike the AFL, the IWW never endorsed the war or participated in mobilizing the proletariat for the slaughter. But neither did it take up an active opposition to the war. Unlike the socialists, it never even adopted a resolution denouncing the war. Instead, antiwar pamphlets like The Deadly Parallel were withdrawn from circulation. IWW soapbox speakers stopped agitating against war. Representing the views of a majority of the General Executive Board, Haywood regarded the war as a distraction from the class struggle and the more important work of building the union and feared that active opposition to the war would open the IWW up to repression.[12] [17] Solidarity editor Ben Williams lashed out at what he termed “meaningless” anti-war gestures. “In the case of war,” wrote Williams, “we want the One Big Union (…) to come out of the conflict stronger and with more industrial control than previously. Why should we sacrifice working class interests for the sake of a few noisy and impotent parades or antiwar demonstrations? Let us rather get on with the job of organizing the working class to take over the industries, war or no war, and stop all future capitalist aggression that leads to war and other forms of barbarism.”[13] [18] Here was the fruit of accumulated confusions: the IWW did not understand the significance of the world war, the dawn of the age of war or revolution and the changed conditions of class struggle that accompanied it; nor did the organization understand its tasks as a revolutionary organization (a party in fact) but instead focused on its outdated role as a mass membership union with the perspective of growth in a business as usual framework.
Despite the promise of their 1916 resolution to “extend assurances of both moral and material support to all workers who suffer at the hands of the capitalist class for their adherence to these [anti-war] principles”, individual militants who faced a choice of submitting to conscription into the imperialist war or resisting were told that it was an individual decision, and received no organizational support. Many IWW leaders were correctly opposed to interclassist anti-war demonstrations and organizations and accurately argued that the IWW did not have sufficient influence within the proletariat to organize a successful antiwar general strike. However, they appeared equally unwilling to seek ways in which they could find a way to oppose the imperialist war on the working class terrain. In a letter to Frank Little, a leader of the anti-war faction on the General Executive Board, Haywood counseled, “Keep a cool head; do not talk. A good many feel as you do but the world war is of small importance compared to the great class war (…) .I am at a loss as to definite steps to be taken against the war.”[14] [19] This advice (which represented the majority view in the GEB) expressed a complete underestimation of the significance of the historic period ushered in by the world war and left the IWW totally disarmed in the face of the coming state repression.
James Slovick, secretary of the IWW’s Maritime Transport Union wrote to Haywood in February 1917 before the US entered the war and recommended preparations for a general strike against the coming war, even if it meant risking the destruction of the organization. Presciently, Slovick was convinced that the bourgeoisie would use the war as a pretext for an all out attack on the IWW whether it took action against the war or not. He contended that an antiwar general strike would have historical importance and demonstrate that the IWW was the only workers’ organization in the world to fight to end the butchery, urging that an emergency IWW convention be convened to decide the matter. Haywood deflected the request: “Of course, it is impossible for this office (…) to take action on your individual initiative. However, I place your communication on the file for future reference.” In the face of the bourgeoisie’s preparations for entry into the global imperialist slaughter, a request for an emergency convention of the Continental Congress of the working class to discuss an appropriate proletarian response was filed for future reference! By none other than the firebrand Big Bill Haywood! All because opposing the imperialist butchery would might disrupt the work of building the union!
For his part, Frank Little regarded the imperialist war as capitalism’s gravest crime against the world working class and advocated a campaign against conscription. He argued, “The IWW is opposed to all wars and we must use all our power to prevent the workers from joining the army.” Against those who warned that opposition to conscription would provoke state repression and doom the IWW, Little responded, “Better to go out in a blaze of glory than give in.”[15] [20] Little’s voice in the internal IWW debate was silenced when he was murdered by management thugs during a miners’ strike in Montana in the summer of 1917. But even this view, while it had the merit of a steadfast defense of proletarian internationalism, suffered from political naivety in its fatalistic acceptance of repression.
Instead of attacking the war, and preparing its leadership and militants for clandestine activity, the IWW focused on union building efforts, organizing struggles in industries deemed vulnerable to pressure, apparently determined that if they were to be attacked by the government it would be for something important like fighting for better wages, rather than against the war. In an irony of history, it was the IWW, which consciously chose not to actively fight against the war once the US had entered the conflict, and not the socialist parties that opposed the war, that was targeted for repression. While individual socialists, like Eugene Debs who had spoken openly against conscription, were arrested and imprisoned, only the IWW, as an organization, faced indictment for conspiracy to sabotage the war effort. In this sense the war provided a pretext for the bourgeoisie to take revenge on the IWW for its past activities and for the fear it inspired. Indeed, we can perhaps say that the American bourgeoisie was more aware than the IWW’s leaders themselves of the danger that the organization represented. One hundred and sixty-five IWW leaders were indicted on September 28, 1917 on charges of obstructing the war effort and conscription, and conspiring to sabotage and interfere with the normal contractual economic functioning in society. The government was so intent on exploiting this opportunity to decapitate the IWW, that it even indicted people who were already dead or had left the organization long before the US entered the war. For example, among the indicted Wobblies were:
At the Great Trial, the Wobbly defendants argued that they had not tried to interfere with the war effort. They pointed out that of the 521 wartime labor strikes, only three were organized by the IWW, the rest by the AFL. In his testimony, Haywood disowned the views of Frank Little, and pointed out that anti-war literature such as Deadly Parallel and the Sabotage pamphlet had been withdrawn from circulation once the US entered the war.
Despite the fact they were innocent of the charges, the Wobblies were convicted after less than an hour of jury deliberation, and the bulk of the IWW’s leadership were sent off to Leavenworth in chains. The organization fell under the control of decentralizing anarcho-syndicalists and went into decline, despite its involvement in general strikes in Winnipeg, Canada and Seattle, and important struggles in Butte Montana, and Toledo, Ohio.
The romanticized image of the Wobbly organizer persists even today in American culture, an image of a rugged, itinerant revolutionary, who hops freight trains and hoboes from town to town, propagandizing and agitating for the One Big Union – a proletarian knight in shining armor. This model of the revolutionary as an exemplary individual figure, so appealing to the anarchist temperament, is of no interest to the proletariat. The class struggle is not waged by isolated, heroic individuals, but by the collective effort of the working class, a class that is both an exploited and a revolutionary class, whose strength is not found in the brilliance of individuals but in the capacity of masses of workers to come to consciousness, to discuss and debate, and to take unified action.
Despite the IWW’s well-founded antagonism to political opportunism and parliamentary cretinism, the theoretical inadequacies characteristic of revolutionary syndicalism left it incapable of understanding the political tasks of the proletariat. The IWW militated in an extremely significant period in the history of the class struggle. It was a period in which world capitalism reached its historic apogee, became a fetter on the further development of the productive forces, and entered its decadent phase. No longer a historically progressive system, capitalism became ripe for revolutionary overthrow and replacement by a new mode of production controlled by the world working class. It was a period in which the proletariat, through its experiences in Russia in 1905, discovered the mass strike as a means to wage its struggle and the workers’ councils as the means to organize its revolutionary class dictatorship and to accomplish the transformation of society. It was a period in which decadent capitalism placed the historic choice of war or revolution before humanity, not as an abstract question, but as an immediate practical issue. These events and struggles gave impetus to a tremendous theoretical undertaking by the leftwing of the Social-Democracy to understand the forces in play, to draw the rapidly emerging lessons of class struggle, and to help shape the way forward. But in the midst of this swirl of historic events and theoretical elaboration, the IWW’s vision of class struggle and revolution remained mired in the framework of the trade unionist debate between craft and industrial unionism that characterized ascendant capitalism and which no longer corresponded to the tasks confronting the proletariat under capitalist decadence.
In the face of the first imperialist world war, the global conflagration that forced those who claimed to defend revolutionary principles and proletarian internationalism to reveal their true class nature, the IWW’s much vaunted internationalism collapsed into hesitancy and centrism. The majority of its leadership, including Haywood regarded the imperialist world war and resistance to that butchery not as a defining moment in the class struggle but rather as a distraction from the “real” work of building the union. In a twist of irony, notwithstanding the IWW’s hesitancy to struggle against World War I, the American ruling class seized the moment as an opportunity to use the organization’s past revolutionary rhetoric against it, and unleashed an unprecedented repressive attack against it, which essentially decapitated it and confined it to the status of an anarcho-syndicalist cult ever after.
Any organization that clings to theoretical conceptions invalidated by history and by concrete experience is condemned either to disappear or to survive as a sect, incapable of understanding, much less of influencing, the class struggle. A vestigial anarchist sect that still calls itself the IWW celebrated its centenary last year but has no capacity whatever to contribute positively to the revolutionary struggle. The best militants in the IWW were lost to state repression at the end of World War I and to the new communist parties after it. The Russian Revolution held a tremendous attraction for the non-anarchists in the IWW, “drawing adherents like flies.”[16] [21] Prominent Wobblies who moved towards the newly founded Communist Party included Harrison George, George Mink, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, John Reed, Harold Harvey, George Hardy, Charles Ashleigh, Ray Brown, and Earl Browder – some of whom later became Stalinists. Big Bill Haywood also moved towards communism, even if he remained in the IWW until he fled to exile in Russia in 1922. “Big Bill Haywood had told Ralph Chaplin, ‘the Russian Revolution is the greatest event in our lives. It represents all that we have been dreaming of and fighting for all our lives. It is the dawn of freedom and industrial democracy’.”[17] [22] Haywood became disillusioned with the Russian Revolution, in part because he was disappointed that the revolution did not take a syndicalist form, but a comment he made to Max Eastman succinctly summed up the failure of the IWW’s revolutionary syndicalism, of which he was such an important architect: “The IWW reached out and grabbed an armful. It tried to grab the whole world and a part of the world has jumped ahead of it.”[18] [23]
There is no doubt that the revolutionary syndicalists of the IWW were profoundly dedicated to their class, but their response to opportunism, reformism and parliamentary cretinism was completely off the mark. Their industrial unionism and revolutionary syndicalism did not correspond to the historic period. The world had “jumped ahead of it” and left it far behind.
The organizational failure to understand what politics really means for the working class and to realize that their role was fundamentally that of a political party led to the great failure of the IWW faced with the imperialist war. First the organization as a whole failed completely to give a political leadership to the proletariat against the war. Second, the utter failure to understand what the war meant on the historic level in the development of capitalism led the leadership to trust in bourgeois democracy and “due process of law” at the Great IWW Trial. As a result the IWW was essentially smashed, its treasury depleted, its leading militants imprisoned or in exile, and this left it incapable of playing its part in throwing the immense weight of the American proletariat into the balance in support of the revolution in Russia.
J.Grevin
[1] [24] Socialist Party of America (SPA). For more details on this and on other organisations and personalities mentioned in this article, see Part 1 in International Review n°124.
[2] [25] Miners’ Magazine, VI (February 23, 1905) p. 3 cited in Dubofsky, Melvyn, We shall be all: a history of the Industrial Workers of the World, Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2nd edition, 1988, p. 83
[3] [26] Dubofsky, pp. 83-85
[4] [27] The IWW and Political Parties by Vincent St John, date unknown, transcribed by J. D. Crutchfield.
[5] [28] See the previous article in International Review n°124.
[6] [29] “What is Revolutionary Syndicalism?” in International Review n°118, p. 23
[7] [30] Ettor, Joseph, Industrial Unionism: The Road to Freedom, 1913.
[8] [31] Dubofsky, Melvyn, p.147
[9] [32] Smith, Walker C. Sabotage: Its History, Philosophy and Function, 1913
[10] [33] ibid.
[11] [34] Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Convention of the IWW, Chicago, 1916, p. 110
[12] [35] Renshaw, Patrick, The Wobblies, Garden City: Doubleday, 1967 p. 217 citing letters, minutes and other IWW documents presented in the US Circuit Court of Appeals, 7th District, October 1919.
[13] [36] Solidarity, Feb. 17, 1917, p. 4, quoted in Dubofsky, p. 353
[14] [37] Haywood to Little, May 6, 1917 quoted in Renshaw, p. 217
[15] [38] Renshaw, p. 212 citing evidence and cross-examination of Haywood in “US v. William D. Haywood”.
[16] [39] Cannon, James P. The IWW: The Great Infatuation, New York: Pioneer Press, 1955 p. 39
[17] [40] Conlin, Bread and Roses Too, p. 146 quoting Ralph Cahplin, Wobbly: the Rough and Tumble Story of an American Radical, University of Chicago University Press, 1948, p. 298
[18] [41] Conlin, Bread and Roses, p. 147, quoting Eastman, Bill Haywood, p. 14
The first articles in this series looked back to examine what this change meant by contrasting the form and the content of 1905 with what had gone before, and how this corresponded to the new period of capitalism’s decadence. We showed that the unions had been superseded by the soviets as the organisational form best suited to the purpose and nature of the struggle now being undertaken by the working class. We have shown that it was wrong to consider the soviets as a product of Russia’s supposed backwardness and have highlighted, on the contrary, the fact that the formation of the soviets was an expression of the advanced level of consciousness achieved by the working class. In this new period, faced with new tasks the unions ceased to be a means for advancing the interests of the working class and increasingly became transformed into an obstacle to the development of the struggle and a trap for the militancy of the working class and its most determined elements. The development of unions in Russia in 1905 and again in 1917 reflected the revolutionary fervour of the working class that tried to make use of any means to advance its struggle, but also a real inexperience of the unions. It was the soviets that led the struggle and that gave it its revolutionary nature; the unions merely trailed behind.
The emergence of the soviets was inseparable from the mass strike, which appeared as the means for struggling against capitalism when partial reforms and palliatives were no longer attainable. Like the soviets, it arose from the needs of the class as a whole and not only drew the working class together but developed its class consciousness. In doing this it confronted the limitations of the unions and parts of the revolutionary movement who could only see in such a movement the spectre of anarchism. It fell to the left of the workers’ movement, with Rosa Luxemburg and then Anton Pannekoek in the lead, to defend the mass strike, not as a mere tactic of the leadership, but as an elemental, revolutionary and renewing force springing from the heart of the working class, capable of uniting its militancy and its consciousness at a new and higher level.
1905 showed that the struggle for reforms was being superseded by the struggle for revolution.
We have also shown that these changes were not specific to Russia, but affected the whole working class as capitalism entered its decadent phase. The working class, which had consolidated itself as an international class capable of fighting for its interests, would henceforth be faced with the struggle to overthrow capitalism and transform the relations of production rather than struggle for improvements within them. Around the world, the decades before the First World War saw an escalation and intensification of strikes that began to put the old ways of organising and old aims of struggle into question and which from time to time flared into open conflict with the state. In short, after 1905 the struggle of the working class became the struggle for communism.
The real significance of 1905 is thus that it pointed to the future and prepared the way for all of the struggles undertaken in decadent capitalism. That is, for all of the struggles of the last hundred years, for those of today and those of tomorrow.
The role 1905 played in preparing the future could be seen with great clarity in 1917 when the soviets were the first weapon of the revolution. They were the form it took. Soviet power stood against the bourgeois power of the provisional government, as Trotsky eloquently describes in his History of the Russian Revolution:
“What was the real constitution of the country after the inauguration of the new power?
“The monarchist reaction was hiding in the cracks. With the very first ebb of the wave, the property owners of all kinds and tendencies gathered around the banner of the Kadet Party, which had suddenly become the only non-socialist party – and at the same time the extreme right party – in the open arena.
“…The masses poured into the Soviet as though into the triumphal gates of the revolution. All that remained outside the boundaries of the Soviet seemed to fall away from the revolution, seemed somehow to belong to a different world…
“…all the active elements of the masses poured into the Soviet, and activity prevails in times of revolution. Moreover, since mass activity was growing from day to day, the basis of the Soviet was continually broadening. It was the sole genuine basis of the revolution”.[1] [45]
The soviets and only the soviets are the organisational form appropriate both to the means and the ends of the struggle for communism. However, this was far from clear at the time, in particular for revolutionaries in Russia. This became evident during the discussion on the union question at the first congress of the Third International, as we show in the article “From Marx to the Communist Left, iii” in International Review n°123.[2] [46] In the discussion delegates from many European countries firmly denounced the counter-revolutionary role now played by the unions. In contrast, Zinoviev, making the report on Russia, argued: “The second form of worker’ organisation in Russia is the trade unions. They developed differently here than in Germany: they played an important revolutionary role in the years 1904-1905, and today are marching side by side with us in the struggle for socialism (…) A large majority of trade union members support our party’s positions, and all decisions of the unions are made in the spirit of those positions”. This in no way confirms that the unions in Russia had any special virtues, but is simply due to certain specificities of the Russian situation and, as the article just referred to concludes, “they were carried along in the wake of the soviets”: during the revolutionary phase, their role as instruments of the capitalist state against the working class was less evident in Russia than elsewhere.
While the revolution of 1917 was made possible by 1905 it did not lead on to the worldwide communist revolution. That could only have happened in 1917 if the revolution had succeeded in spreading and triumphing around the world. Nonetheless, many of its lessons have been drawn by the isolated groups of revolutionaries that survived the crushing of the revolutionary wave of 1917-23 and who have sought to rebuild the revolutionary movement. This has been the particular role of the communist left. The lessons have also been proved time and again by the experience of the working class in its day to day struggles and by its greater efforts, such as in Poland in the early 1980s. The drawing of those lessons began immediately after 1905 and it is to this work that we now turn.
In this last part of our series we will look at how the revolutionary movement responded, both as regards the development of its positions and also as regards the methods it used. This is not an unimportant point if one considers that a change in the real situation requires a change in the means to comprehend that situation.
What is striking about the theoretical struggle and debate undertaken after 1905 is its collective and international nature, even though the participants were not always fully aware of these characteristics.
Whereas after the Paris Commune of 1870 Marx was able, on behalf of the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association (the First International), to summarise its significance in a single pamphlet, after 1905 this was not possible, largely due to the complexity of the questions posed.
In particular, the revolutionaries of the time were confronted with an unprecedented change in the historical period, a change that challenged many of the assumptions and acquisitions of the workers movement, such as the role of the unions and the form of the class struggle. The achievement of the left of the workers movement was not just that it sought to take up this challenge but that it attained such a profound level of insight into so many questions and left such a magnificent legacy of theoretical effort and, above all, a remarkable mastery of the marxist method. This achievement far outweighs the inevitable gaps and weaknesses in their efforts. To expect anything else, to expect perfection is not merely naive but shows a failure to understand the real nature of marxism and of the whole struggle of the working class. It would be like expecting the working class to win every strike, to see through every manoeuvre of the ruling class and ultimately to have been capable of making the communist revolution on the day it was born.
The sometimes fragmented nature of the debate and the contributions to it was not a weakness but an inevitable consequence of the development taking place in the form of the theoretical struggle that was a counterpart of the development of the "practical" struggle. Indeed, one can go so far as to say that the counterpart of the mass strike is the mass theoretical struggle. Obviously, the latter does not embrace the same numbers as the former, but it does express the same collective spirit and requires the same qualities of solidarity, modesty and self-sacrifice. Above all it requires active engagement, as our comrades of Internationalisme stressed nearly sixty years ago: “Against the idea that militants can only act on the basis of certainties…we insist that there are no certainties but only a continual process of going beyond what were formerly truths. Only an activity based on the most recent developments, on foundations that are being continually enriched, is really revolutionary. In contrast, activity based on yesterday’s truths that have already lost their currency is sterile, harmful and reactionary. One might try to feed the members with absolute certainties and truths, but only relative truths which contain an antithesis of doubt can give rise to a revolutionary synthesis”.[3] [47] It is this that separated the left of the workers movement - Lenin, Luxemburg, Pannekoek etc - from the centre embodied by Kautsky and the openly revisionist right headed by Bernstein. The gulf between the centre and the left could be seen in the debate over the mass strike where Kautsky was unable to see the underlying changes in the class struggle that Luxemburg analysed. Unable to go beyond the vision of the past, in which the mass strike was just a tool to be used by the central committee of the party, Kautsky saw nothing in Luxemburg’s arguments and in the second stage of the discussion even tried to block their publication.[4] [48]
It is possible to identify some of the key features of the documents and debates that appeared after 1905:
This reflects the reality of a period of change in which there is both disjuncture and an attempt to understand and master that disjuncture. In a period of immense change many are disorientated. Some reject the whole of the past, some cling to what they know and try to ignore the change, while others recognise the changes and seek to adapt to them, while keeping what remains valid from the past. These different types of response existed within the workers’ movement determined the divisions that developed between the right, the centre and the left. Furthermore, the debates were fundamentally between these tendencies rather than between individuals. It was from the left that the real effort came to understand the new situation, while the right turned away from both the conclusions and the method of marxism and the centre increasingly abandoned its method in favour of a sterile, conservative orthodoxy, that was best exemplified by Karl Kautsky.
The fundamental achievement of the left was that it recognised that something had changed; it recognised that society was entering a new period and sought to understand it. In this the left defended the marxist method, and thus the real heritage of Marx. In Lenin’s, Luxemburg’s and Trotsky’s work there is clear evidence that the objective conditions were pushing them forwards and they each developed vital analyses:
The theoretical effort of the working class was not restricted to these three but embraced many others: left tendencies emerged wherever there was a politically organised workers’ movement. Lenin and Luxemburg were both prompted to try and grasp what had changed within the structure of capitalism as a whole, although this lies outside the scope of this study.
Recognising that the legacy of 1905 is a collective one of the whole of the left of the workers’ movement, we will look at its efforts to understand the vital questions of the goal, the method and form of workers struggles in the new period rather than dealing with each individual in turn.
None declared it but all glimpsed it: they recognised that the proletarian revolution was no longer beyond the horizon, was no longer an aspiration, but was becoming a visible reality. Lenin, Trotsky and Luxemburg all formally define the goal as the bourgeois revolution but their analysis of the nature of this bourgeois revolution and the role of the working class in particular implicitly challenges their own assertion. They all stress that the proletariat will be the main force at work and all recognise, albeit in varying ways and to varying extents, that this changes the situation fundamentally. Hence it is the method that unites them against those who simply applied the old schemas.
In 1906 Trotsky published Results and Prospects in which he set out the idea of permanent revolution, or the “uninterrupted revolution” as it was then described. In it he deals with the “prerequisites for revolution” and suggests they are almost all in place.
The first prerequisite is “productive-technical”, that is the level of development of the means of production. He argues that this has been in place “…ever since the time when social division of labour led to the division of labour in manufacture. It has existed to an even greater extent since the time when manufacture was replaced by factory, machine production”.[5] [49] He goes so far as to suggest that “sufficient technical pre-requisites for collective production have already existed for a hundred or two hundred years”. However, he adds that “The mere technical advantages of socialism were not at all sufficient for it to be realised… Because there were no social forces existent at that time ready and able to carry them out”.
This leads to the second prerequisite, “the social-economic ones”; in other words the development of the proletariat. Here Trotsky poses the question “what must be the relative numerical weight of the proletariat? Must it make up a half, two thirds or nine-tenths of the population?” only to reject such a “schematic effort” in order to assert that “The importance of the proletariat depends entirely on the role it plays in large scale production”. For Trotsky it is the qualitative role the proletariat plays that counts rather than the quantitative one. This has two important implications. Firstly, that it is not essential for the proletariat to form a majority of the population to introduce socialism. Secondly, and more specifically, that the proletariat had a much greater weight in Russia because of the concentration and scale of industry than was the case in countries such as Britain and Germany when the proletariat formed a similar proportion of the total population. After considering the role of the proletariat in other major countries Trotsky concludes: “All this leads us to the conclusion that economic evolution – the growth of industry, the growth of large enterprises, the growth of the towns, and the growth of the proletariat in general and the industrial proletariat in particular - has already prepared the arena not only for the struggle of the proletariat for political power but for the conquest of this power”.
The third pre-requisite is “the dictatorship of the proletariat” by which Trotsky seems essentially to mean the development of class consciousness: “It is… necessary that this class should be conscious of its objective interests; it is necessary that it should understand that there is no way out for it except through socialism; it is necessary that it should combine in an army sufficiently powerful to conquer political power in open battle”. He does not state specifically whether this has been met, but rejects the idea of many “socialist ideologues” that “The proletariat, and even ‘humanity’ in general, must first of all cast out its old egoistical nature, and altruism must become predominant in social life etc” and concludes “Socialism does not aim at creating a socialist psychology as a pre-requisite to socialism but at creating socialist conditions of life as a pre-requisite to socialist psychology”. This recognition of the dynamic relationship between the revolution and consciousness is one of the most important insights into the whole question of how the revolution develops. When he looks at the particular situation in Russia Trotsky suggests that 1905 has directly posed the question of revolution: “…the Russian proletariat revealed a colossal strength, unexpected by the Russian Social-Democrats even in their most optimistic moods. The course of the Russian revolution was decided, so far as its fundamental features were concerned. What two or three years ago was or seemed possible, approached to the probable, and everything points to the fact that it is on the brink of becoming inevitable”.[6] [50]
Earlier in Results and Prospects Trotsky had argued that historical development meant that the revolutionary role has passed from the bourgeoisie to the proletariat. He asserted that the revolution of 1905 and the creation of the St Petersburg Soviet confirmed this. This meant that bourgeois revolutions as they were previously known were no longer possible and Trotsky specifically rejects the idea of the proletariat carrying out a revolution and then handing power to the bourgeoisie: “To imagine that it is the business of Social Democrats to enter a provisional government and lead it during the period of revolutionary-democratic reforms, fighting for them to have a most radical character, and relying for this purpose upon the organised proletariat – and then, after the democratic programme has been carried out, to leave the edifice they have constructed so as to make way for the bourgeois parties and themselves go into opposition, thus opening up a period of parliamentary politics, is to imagine the thing in a way that would compromise the very idea of a workers’ government. This is not because it is inadmissible ‘in principle’ – putting the question in this abstract form is devoid of meaning – but because it is absolutely unreal, it is utopianism of the worst sort – a sort of revolutionary-philistine utopianism”.[7] [51] If the proletariat holds the majority in government its task is no longer to realise the minimum programme of reforms but the maximum programme of the social revolution. This is not a matter of choice but of the dynamic of the situation. Trotsky illustrates this with the example of the eight-hour day. While this measure “by no means contradicts capitalist relations” its introduction is likely to meet with “the organised and determined resistance of the capitalists” resulting in lockouts and factory closures. A bourgeois government faced with this would retreat and repress the workers, but “for a workers government there would only be one way out: expropriation of closed factories and the organisation of production in them on a socialised basis”. In short, for Trotsky “…the Russian revolution will create conditions in which power can pass into the hands of the workers – and in the event of the victory of the revolution it must do so – before the politicians of bourgeois liberalism get the chance to display to the full their talent for governing”.[8] [52]
Lenin, like Trotsky, places the revolution in the context of the international development of the objective conditions: “…we must not be afraid… of Social Democracy’s complete victory in a democratic revolution, i.e. of a revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry, for such a victory will enable us to rouse Europe; after throwing off the yoke of the bourgeoisie, the socialist proletariat of Europe will in its turn help us to accomplish the socialist revolution…Vperoyd[9] [53] set the revolutionary proletariat of Russia an active task: winning the battle for democracy and using this victory to bring the revolution into Europe”.[10] [54]
This is from a long polemic contrasting the positions of the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks with regard to the revolution of 1905, which both saw as bourgeois-democratic. The former (referred to in the following quote as the Congress resolution) calls for the proletariat to take the lead while the latter (referred to as the conference resolution[11] [55]) tends to leave the initiative to the bourgeoisie: “The resolution of the Conference speaks of the old order in the process of mutual struggle among the various elements of society. The Congress resolution says that we, the party of the proletariat, must effect this abolition; that only the establishment of a democratic republic signifies genuine abolition of the old order; that we must win that republic; that we shall fight for it and for complete liberty, not only against the autocracy, but also against the bourgeoisie, when it attempts (and it surely will do so) to wrest our gains from us. The Congress resolution calls on a definite class to wage a struggle for a precisely defined immediate aim. The conference resolution discourses on the mutual struggle of various forces. One resolution expresses the psychology of active struggle, the other that of the passive onlooker…”.[12] [56] This emphasis on the necessity for the proletariat to take the leading role was reiterated time and again by Lenin in opposition to that Mensheviks, who he referred to as the right of the party: “The Right wing of our Party does not believe in the complete victory of the present, i.e. bourgeois-democratic, revolution in Russia; it dreads such a victory; it does not emphatically and definitely put the slogan of such a victory before the people. It is constantly being misled by the essentially erroneous idea, which is really a vulgarisation of marxism, that only the bourgeoisie can independently ‘make’ the bourgeois revolution, or that only the bourgeoisie should lead the bourgeois revolution. The role of the proletariat as the vanguard in the struggle for the complete and decisive victory of the bourgeois revolution is not clear to the Right Social-Democrats”.[13] [57] “The present conditions in Russia impose on the Social-Democrats tasks of a magnitude that no Social-Democratic Party in Western Europe has to face. We are incomparably more remote than our Western comrades from the socialist revolution; but we are faced with a bourgeois-democratic peasant revolution in which the proletariat will play the leading role”.[14] [58] These quotes show the dynamic nature of the Bolshevik’s position such that, while not recognising that conditions had developed globally for the proletarian revolution, it was nonetheless capable of grasping the central role played by the proletariat and of expressing this clearly in terms of a struggle for power. Although Lenin states explicitly that 1905 was a bourgeois revolution,[15] [59] the analysis he develops of the particular role to be played by the proletariat opens the door to the apparent volte-face of April 1917 and the call for a proletarian revolution: “The specific feature of the present situation in Russia is that the country is passing from the first stage of the revolution – which, owing to the insufficient class-consciousness and organisation of the proletariat, placed power in the hands of the bourgeoisie – to its second stage, which must place power in the hands of the proletariat and poorest sections of the peasants”.[16] [60] The question of immediate tactics that occupies so much of Lenin’s writings, and which leads to apparent reversals of position (such as on elections to the Duma) springs from this constant concern to relate the overall understanding of the situation to the real activity of the working class and its revolutionary organisation rather than being trapped within timeless schemas.
Luxemburg’s position on the revolution of 1905 also recognises that it has posed the question of the proletarian revolution, again despite a formal assertion that its task is the bourgeois revolution. This is evident from her analysis of the mass strike as an expression of the revolution: “The mass strike is merely the form of the revolutionary struggle […] the mass strike, as shown to us in the Russian Revolution, is not a crafty method discovered by subtle reasoning for the purpose of making the proletarian struggle more effective, but the method of motion of the proletarian mass, the phenomenal form of the proletarian struggle in revolution”.[17] [61] She also emphasises the central role played by the proletariat: “… on January 22nd… the Russian proletariat burst on the political stage as a class for the first time; for the first time the only power which historically is qualified and able to cast Tsarism into the dustbin and to raise the banner of civilisation in Russia and everywhere has appeared on the scene of action […] the power and the future of the revolutionary movement lies entirely and exclusively in the class conscious Russian proletariat”.[18] [62]
Luxemburg is most explicit about the changing historical period when she compares the French, German and Russian revolutions: “the present Russian Revolution stands at a point of the historical path which is already on the other side of the culminating point of capitalist society, at which the bourgeois revolution cannot again be smothered by the antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat, but, will, on the contrary expand into a new lengthy period of violent social struggles, at which the balancing of the account with absolutism appears a trifle in comparison with the many new accounts which the revolution itself opens up. The present revolution realises in the particular affairs of absolutist Russia the general results of international capitalist development, and appears not so much as the last successor of the old bourgeois revolutions as the forerunner of the new series of proletarian revolutions of the West. The most backward country of all, just because it has been so unpardonably late with its bourgeois revolution, shows ways and methods of further class struggle to the proletariat of Germany and the most advanced capitalist countries”.[19] [63] Later she even seems to argue that the task facing the German proletariat is the proletarian revolution: “in a period of open political popular struggles in Germany, the last historical necessary goal can only be the dictatorship of the proletariat”.[20] [64]
Luxemburg’s greatest contribution to the discussion fuelled by 1905 is her publication The Mass Strike, the Political Party and Trade Unions that was written in August 1906[21] [65] in which she analysed the nature and characteristics of the strike. After reviewing the traditional marxist position on the mass strike, making a critique of the anarchist and revisionist positions and looking at the actual development of the strike in Russia, Luxemburg draws out the main aspects of the mass strike.
Firstly, and contrary to how it was conceived by the anarchists and many in Social Democratic Party the mass strike is not “one act, one isolated action” but “is rather the indication, the rallying idea of a whole period of the class struggle lasting for years, perhaps for decades”.[22] [66] This leads on to a distinction between “Political demonstration” mass strikes and “fighting mass strikes”. The former are tactics wielded by the party, which “exhibit the greatest mass of party discipline, conscious direction and political thought, and therefore must appear as the highest and most mature form of the mass strike”[23] [67] but which, in reality, belong to the beginnings of the movement and become less important “with the development of the earnest revolutionary struggle”.[24] [68] They give way to the more elemental force of the fighting mass strike.
Secondly, this form of the mass strike overcomes the artificial separation between economic and political struggles: “Every new onset and every fresh victory of the political struggle is transformed into a powerful impetus for the economic struggle, extending at the same time its external possibilities and intensifying the inner urge of the workers to better their position, and their desire to struggle. After every foaming wave of political action a fructifying deposit remains behind from which a thousand stalks of economic struggle shoot forth. And conversely. The workers’ condition of ceaseless economic struggle with the capitalists keeps their fighting energy alive in every political interval; it forms so to speak, the permanent fresh reservoir of the strength of the proletarian classes, from which the political fight ever renews its strength…”.[25] [69] The unity of the economic and political struggles “is precisely the mass strike”.[26] [70]
Thirdly “the mass strike is inseparable from the revolution”. However, Luxemburg rejects the schema, prevalent in much of the workers movement, where the mass strike could only lead to a bloody confrontation with the state in which the latter’s monopoly of firepower would inevitably lead to mass bloodshed. This was the basis on which the mass strike was opposed as a futile gesture. In contrast, while the Russian Revolution certainly involved a clash with the state and bloodshed, it arose from the objective conditions of the class struggle; it arose from the movement into action of ever-greater masses of the working class. In short, “the mass strike does not produce the revolution, but the revolution produces mass strikes”.[27] [71]
Fourthly, as the preceding point implies, genuine mass strikes cannot be decreed or planned in advance. This leads Luxemburg to emphasise the element of spontaneity while rejecting the idea that this was due to the supposed backwardness of Russia: “The revolution, even when the proletariat, with the social democrats at their head, appear in the leading role, is not a manoeuvre of the proletariat in the open field, but a fight in the midst of the incessant crashing, displacing and crumbling of the social foundation. In short, in the mass strikes in Russia the element of spontaneity plays such a predominant part, not because the Russian proletariat are ‘uneducated’, but because revolutions do not allow anyone to play the schoolmaster with them”.[28] [72] Nor does this lead her to reject the importance of organisation: “The resolution and determination of the workers also play a part and indeed the initiative and wider direction naturally fall to the share of the most enlightened kernel of the proletariat”.[29] [73]
Luxemburg’s analysis is so different to that of the anarchists and the orthodox marxists because it is situated within a different context: that of the revolution. In the first pages of The Mass Strike she makes it clear that her conclusions, apparently so contradictory to those of Marx and Engels themselves, are the consequence of applying their method to a new situation: “…it is the same train of ideas, the same method, the Engels-marxisn tactics, which lay at the foundation of the previous practice of the German social democracy, which now in the Russian Revolution are producing new factors and new conditions in the class struggle”.[30] [74]
In short, Luxemburg presents an analysis of a revolutionary dynamic with the working class at its heart that arises from the changing objective conditions. This leads her to stress correctly the spontaneity of the mass strike, but also to recognise that this spontaneity is actually no such thing, but is the product of the experience of the working class. This separates her from the likes of Kautsky who, while seen at the time as supporting the mass strike remained wedded to the orthodox view and was incapable of grasping the fundamental changes taking place that the Russian revolution of 1905 embodied.
A second phase of the debate on the mass strike developed in 1910[31] [75] and led to the final split between Luxemburg and Kautsky. In this debate Pannekoek played an important role and not only defended positions close to those of Luxemburg but also developed them further. He begins by explicitly linking the question of the mass strike to the lessons of 1905: “The Russian proletariat… has taught the German people the use of a new weapon, the general strike”; “The Russian revolution has created the conditions for a revolutionary movement in Germany”.[32] [76] In his conception of the nature of the mass strike he follows Luxemburg in seeing it as a process and criticises Kautsky’s conception of it as a “once and for all event”. He argues that it forms a continuum with the day to day struggle and he establishes a link between the current form of actions, that are small scale, and those that will lead to the conquest of power. He relates mass action to the development of capitalism “under the influence of the modern forms of capitalism, new forms of action have developed in the labour movement, namely mass action. … as the practical potential of mass action developed, it began to pose new problems; the question of social revolution, hitherto an undeniably distant ultimate goal now became a live issue for the militant proletariat…”.[33] [77] He goes on to defend the dynamic, developmental aspects of the mass strike: “…what counts in the development of these actions, in which the deepest interests and passions of the masses break surface, is not membership of the organisation, nor a traditional ideology, but to an ever-increasing extent the real class character of the masses”.[34] [78] He concludes that the fundamental difference between his position and that of Kautsky is over the question of the revolution and, in doing so, he shows where Kautsky’s centrism will take him: “It is over the nature of this revolution that our views diverge. As far as Kautsky is concerned, it is an event in the future, a political apocalypse, and all we have to do meanwhile is prepare for the final show-down by gathering our strength and assembling and drilling our troops. In our view, revolution is a process, the first stages of which we are now experiencing, for it is only by the struggle for power itself that the masses can be assembled, drilled and formed into an organisation capable of taking power. These different conceptions lead to completely different evaluations of current practice; and it is apparent that the Revisionists’ rejection of any revolutionary action and Kautsky’s postponement of it to the indefinite future are bound to unite them on many of the current issues over which they both oppose us”.[35] [79]
Trotsky describes the soviets very powerfully in his book 1905, as we saw in previous parts of this series. At the end of the book, in a passage already partly quoted in this series, he sums up the significance of the soviet during the revolution:
“Prior to the Soviet we find among the industrial workers a multitude of revolutionary organizations directed, in the main, by the social-democratic party. But these were organizations within the proletariat, and their immediate aim was to achieve influence over the masses. The Soviet was, from the start, the organization of the proletariat, and its aim was the struggle for revolutionary power. As it became the focus of all the country’s revolutionary forces, the Soviet did not allow its class nature to be dissolved in revolutionary democracy: it was and remained the organized expression of the class will of the proletariat. In the struggle for power it applied methods which were naturally determined by the nature of the proletariat as a class: its role in production, its vast numbers, its social homogeneity. More than that, the Soviet combined its struggle for power as the head of all the revolutionary forces with directing independent class activity by the working masses in many different ways; it not only encouraged the organization of trade unions, but actually intervened in disputes between individual workers and their employees…
“The principal method of struggle used by the Soviet was the political general strike. The revolutionary strength of such strikes consists in the fact that, acting over the head of capital, they disorganize state power. The greater, the more complete the ‘anarchy’ caused by a strike, the nearer the strike is to victory. But on one condition only: the anarchy must not be created by anarchic means. The class which, by simultaneous cessation of work, paralyzes the production apparatus and with it the centralized apparatus of power, isolating parts of the country from one another and sowing general confusion, must itself be sufficiently organized not to become the first victim of the anarchy it has created. The more completely a strike renders the state organization obsolete, the more the organization of the strike itself is obliged to assume state functions. These conditions for a general strike as a proletarian method of struggle were, at the same time, the conditions for the immense significance of the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies”.[36] [80]
After the defeat of the revolution he looked ahead to the role they would play in the future: “Urban Russia was too narrow a base for the struggle. The Soviet tried to wage the struggle on a national scale, but it remained above all a Petersburg institution… there is no doubt that in the next upsurge of revolution, such Councils of Workers will be formed all over the country. An All-Russian Soviet of Workers, organised by a national congress…will assume the leadership… History does not repeat itself. The new Soviet will not have to go through the experiences of these fifty days once again. Yet from these fifty days it will be able to deduce its entire programme of action…: revolutionary co-operation with the army, the peasantry, and the plebeian parts of the middle classes; abolition of absolutism; destruction of the military machine of absolutism; part disbandment and part overhaul of the army; abolition of the police and bureaucratic apparatus; the eight hour day; the arming of the people, above all of the workers; the transformation of the Soviets into organs of revolutionary, urban self-government; the formation of Peasant Soviets to be in charge of the agrarian revolution on the spot; elections to the Constituent assembly… It is easier to formulate such a plan than carry it out. But if victory is destined for the revolution, the proletariat cannot but assume this role. It will achieve a revolutionary performance, the like of which the world has never seen”.[37] [81]
In Results and Prospects Trotsky underlines that the soviets were a creation of the working class that corresponded to the revolutionary period: “These were not previously-prepared conspirative organisations for the purpose of seizure of power by the workers at the moment of revolt. No, these were organs created in a planned way by the masses themselves for the purpose of co-ordinating their revolutionary struggle. And these soviets, elected by the masses and responsible to the masses, are unquestionable democratic institutions, conducting a most determined class policy in the spirit of revolutionary socialism”.[38] [82]
Lenin’s attitude towards the soviets during 1905 has already been touched on in International Review n°123 where we quoted from an unpublished letter in which he rejected the opposition to the soviets from some Bolsheviks and argued for “both the Soviet of Workers deputies and the Party”[39] [83] and rejected the argument that it should be aligned with any one party. After the revolution Lenin consistently defended the role of the soviets in organising and uniting the class. Prior to the unity congress of 1906[40] [84] he drafted a resolution on the soviets of workers deputies that recognised them as a characteristic of the revolutionary struggle rather than a one-off phenomenon of 1905: “Soviets of Workers deputies spring up spontaneously in the course of mass political strikes […] these soviets are rudiments of revolutionary authority”.[41] [85] The resolution went on to set out the attitude of the Bolsheviks to the soviets and concluded that revolutionaries should take part and should induce the working class, as well as peasants, soldiers and sailors, to participate, but warned that the extension of the activities and influence of the soviet would collapse unless it was backed by an army “and that therefore one of the main tasks of these institutions in every revolutionary situation must be to arm the people and strengthen the military organisations of the proletariat”.[42] [86] In other texts Lenin defends the role of the soviets as organs of the general revolutionary struggle while arguing that they are not sufficient in themselves to organise the armed insurrection. In 1917 he recognised that events had gone beyond the bourgeois revolution to the proletarian and that at its centre stood the soviets: “Not a parliamentary republic – to return to a parliamentary republic from the Soviet of Workers Deputies would be a retrograde step – but a republic of Soviets of Workers’, Agricultural Labourers’ and Peasants Deputies throughout the country from top to bottom”.[43] [87] Now, in words strikingly similar to Trotsky’s he analysed the nature of the dual power that existed in Russia: “This dual power is evident in the existence of two governments: one is the main, the real, the actual government of the bourgeoisie, the ‘Provisional Government’ of Lvov and Co., which holds in its hands all the organs of power; the other is a supplementary and parallel government, a ‘controlling’ government in the shape of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers and Soldiers Deputies, which holds no organs of state power, but directly rests on the support of an obvious and indisputable majority of the people, on the armed workers and soldiers”.[44] [88]
The issues that the revolution of 1905 brought to the fore have shaped all subsequent revolutionary practice and debate. In this sense we can conclude that 1905 was not just a dress rehearsal for 1917, as is commonly said, but the first act in a drama that has yet to reach its finale. The issues of practice and theory that we have touched on throughout this series were continued and developed. One constant has been that it has always been the left of the workers movement that led this work. During the revolutionary wave Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky and Pannekoek were joined by many more. In the wake of its defeat these ranks were drastically thinned as the counter-revolution as a whole and Stalinism in particular triumphed. Stalinism was the negation of all the vital, proletarian features of 1905: workers were slaughtered in the name of the “workers” state, the soviets were snuffed out in favour of a centralised bureaucracy and the notion of proletarian revolution was perverted into an ideological weapon of Stalinist state foreign policy.
However, throughout the world minorities resisted the counter-revolution. The most determined and thorough of these minorities were those organisations that we describe as belonging to the Communist Left and which have been the subject of numerous studies by the ICC.[45] [89] The issues of the goal, the method and the form of the revolution were at the heart of all of their work and though their efforts and self-sacrifice many of the lessons of 1905 have been deepened and clarified.
On the central question of the proletarian revolution itself the greatest step forward was the recognition that the material conditions for the worldwide communist revolution had existed since the beginning of the 20th century. This was defended in the first congress of the Third International and was developed further by the Italian Communist Left in the elaboration of the theory of capitalist decadence. This made it clear that the era of bourgeois revolutions was at an end and that the discussion in Russia about the role of the proletariat was not actually a reflection of the lateness of the bourgeois revolution in that country, but an indicator that the whole world was entering a new period in which the task was – and remains – the worldwide communist revolution. This clarification provided the only framework within which all other issues could be understood.
The recognition of the irreplaceable role of the mass strike was a reassertion of the fundamental marxist position that the proletarian revolution is made by the proletariat in class combat with the bourgeoisie. The parliamentary route was never an option; equally communism would not be the result of an accumulation of reforms won through partial struggles. Mass action pitted class against class. It was also the means through which the proletariat developed its consciousness and practical experience. As Pannekoek and Luxemburg recognised, it drew in workers at an accelerating pace, educating and training them for the struggle. It is a heterogeneous movement that arises from the working class and within which the revolutionary minorities play a dynamic role. Its very reality confirms the fundamental marxist position on the inter-relationship between consciousness and action.
The discussion on the role of the soviets or the workers councils led to clarification on the role of the unions, the relationship between the revolutionary organisation and the councils and the whole question of the transitional period from capitalism to communism.
North, 2/2/06
[1] [90] Vol.1, Chapter X “The new power”.
[2] [91] This article is part of a series: “The theory of decadence at the heart of historical materialism”.
[3] [92] “The concept of the ‘brilliant leader’”, International Review n° 33.
[4] [93] See “Theory and Practice” by Luxemburg, 1910. See https://marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1910/theory-practice/ [94]
[5] [95] Trotsky, Results and Prospects, Chapter 7, “The pre-requisites of socialism”.
[6] [96] Op. Cit. Chapter VIII, “A workers government in Russia and Socialism”.
[7] [97] Op.Cit. ChapterVI “The proletarian regime”.
[8] [98] Op. Cit. Chapter IV “Revolution and the proletariat”.
[9] [99] Vperoyd (Forward) was established by the Bolsheviks after the Mensheviks took control of Iskra (The Spark) following the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1903.
[10] [100] Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 9, Two tactics of social democracy in the democratic revolution, Section 10 “’Revolutionary communes’ and the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry”.
[11] [101] In April 1905 the Bolsheviks called the Third Congress of the RSDLP. The Mensheviks refused to participate and held their own conference.
[12] [102] Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 9, Two tactics of social democracy in the democratic revolution, Section 4 “The abolition of the monarchy. The republic”.
[13] [103] Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 10, Report on the unity congress of the RSDLP, Section VIII “The congress summed up”.
[14] [104] Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 10, “The Social-Democratic election victory in Tiflis”, 1906.
[15] [105] “The degree of Russia’s economic development (an objective condition), and the degree of class consciousness and organisation of the broad masses of the proletariat (a subjective condition inseparably bound up with the objective condition) make the immediate and complete emancipation of the working class impossible. Only the most ignorant people can close their eyes to the bourgeois nature of the democratic revolution which is now taking place” (Two tactics of social democracy in the democratic revolution, Section 2 “What can we learn from the resolution of the Third Congress of the RSDLP on a provisional revolutionary government?”).
[16] [106] Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 24, “Tasks of the proletariat in the present revolution” (The April Theses).
[17] [107] The mass strike, Section IV “The interaction of the political and the economic struggle”.
[18] [108] Luxemburg “The Revolution in Russia”. See https://marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1905/02/08.htm [109]
[19] [110] The mass strike, Section VII “The role of the mass strike in the revolution”.
[20] [111] Ibid.
[21] [112] It was written while Luxemburg was in Finland following her release from jail in Poland, where she had participated in the revolutionary movement. Perhaps significantly, she spent much time in Finland with leading Bolsheviks, including Lenin.
[22] [113] The mass strike, Section IV “The interaction of the political and the economic struggle”.
[23] [114] Ibid.
[24] [115] Ibid.
[25] [116] Ibid.
[26] [117] Ibid
[27] [118] Ibid
[28] [119] Ibid
[29] [120] Ibid.
[30] [121] Op. Cit. Section I, “The Russian Revolution, Anarchism and the General Strike”. Our emphasis.
[31] [122] See our book The Dutch and German Communist Left for a fuller discussion of this.
[32] [123] “Prussia in Revolt [124]”, International Socialist Review, Vol X, No.11, May 1910.
[33] [125] “Marxist theory and revolutionary tactics [126]”, Die Neue Zeit, XXXI, No.1, 1912.
[34] [127] Ibid.
[35] [128] Ibid.
[36] [129] Trotsky, 1905, Chapter 22 “Summing up”. https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1905/ch22 [130]
[37] [131] From a contribution to History of the Soviet, quoted by Deutscher, The Prophet Armed, Chapter VI, “Permanent Revolution”.
[38] [132] Chapter III, “1789 – 1848 – 1905”.
[39] [133] Collected Works, Vol.10, “Our tasks and the Soviet of Workers Deputies”
[40] [134] The Unity Congress of the RSDLP was held in April 1906 and reunited the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks and was a consequence of the dynamic of the revolution
[41] [135] Collected Works, Vol.10, “A tactical platform for the unity congress”.
[42] [136] Ibid. There was no discussion of the soviets at the congress, which was dominated by the Mensheviks.
[43] [137] Collected Works, Vol.24, “The tasks of the proletariat in the present revolution”.
[44] [138] Collected Works, Vol.24, “The tasks of the proletariat in our revolution: The peculiar nature of the dual power and its class significance”.
[45] [139] See our books on The Italian Communist Left 1926-45, The Dutch and German Communist Left, The Russian Communist Left and The British Communist Left.
These Theses were adopted by the ICC when the students’ movement was still under way. The 4th April demonstration dashed the government’s hopes that it would be less well attended than that of 28th March. In particular, there were even more private-sector workers in the streets. President Chirac, in his 31st March speech on television, had attempted a ludicrous manoeuvre, announcing at one and the same time both the application of the “Equal opportunities” law, and asking that the law’s 8th article (instituting the Contrat Première Embauche, which was the main target of the students’ anger) should not be put into effect. Far from weakening the movement, this pathetic squirming only spurred it on. It increased the likelihood of spontaneous walkouts in the productive sector of the economy, as in 1968. The government was forced to accept the fact that its wretched manoeuvres had failed to break the movement, and, as a result though not without a few final contortions, it withdrew the CPE on 10th April. The Theses in fact envisaged the possibility that the government would not give way. That said, the epilogue to the crisis, which saw the government retreat in this way, confirms their central idea: the depth and importance of the mobilisation of the young generations of the working class in these spring days of 2006.
Now that the government has retreated on the CPE, which was the movement’s leading demand, the latter has lost its dynamic. Does this mean that things will “return to normal” as all the fractions of the bourgeoisie obviously hope? Certainly not. As the Theses say, “[the bourgeoisie] cannot suppress all the experience accumulated through weeks of struggle by tens of thousands of future workers, their awakening to politics and their developing consciousness. This will be a real treasure-trove for the future struggles of the proletariat, a vital element in their ability to continue down the path towards the communist revolution”. It is of the greatest importance that the actors of this magnificent struggle make this treasure bear fruit, by drawing out all the lessons of this experience, in both its strengths and its weaknesses. Above all, they need to bring into the open the perspective that society is faced with, a perspective already contained in the struggle they have just undertaken: against the increasingly violent attacks that capitalism in its death crisis will inevitably unleash on the exploited class, the only possible answer for the latter is to intensify its resistance and to prepare the system’s overthrow. Like the struggle which is coming to an end, this reflection needs to be undertaken collectively, through debate, new assemblies, discussion circles as open as the general assemblies were to all who want to take part, and in particular to the political organisations that support the struggle of the working class.
This collective reflection will only be possible if its actors maintain the same fraternal attitudes of unity and solidarity that dominated in the struggle. In this sense, now that the great majority of those who took part in the struggle are aware that it is over in its previous form, this is not the time for rearguard actions, for ultra-minority “bitter-end” pickets which are anyway condemned to defeat and which run the risk of provoking divisions and tensions among those who have, for weeks, conducted an exemplary struggle of the working class. 18th April 2006
1) The current mobilisation of students in France is already one of the major episodes in the class struggle in this country in the last fifteen years. It is at least as important as the struggles of autumn 1995 against the reform of the Social Security system and as the one in the public sector in Spring 2003 on the issue of pensions. This affirmation may seem paradoxical, since it is not wage earners that are mobilising today (except for those participating in a certain number of days of action and demonstrations on February 7th, March 7th, March 18th and March 28th) but a sector of society that has not yet entered the field of work, young people in further education. However, this in no way puts into question the profoundly proletarian nature of this movement. This is for the following reasons:
The proletarian nature of the movement has been evident from the start when most of the general assemblies withdrew exclusively “student demands” (like the demand to withdraw the LMD, the European system of diplomas that was recently imposed in France and penalises certain students) from their list of demands. This decision corresponded to a desire expressed from the outset by the great majority of students, not just to seek solidarity from the whole working class (the term “wage earners” was generally the one used in the general assemblies) but also for it to join the struggle.
2) The profoundly proletarian character of the movement is also demonstrated in the forms of struggle adopted, notably the sovereign general assemblies which express a real life that has nothing to do with the caricatures of general assemblies so often called by the unions. There was clearly a great heterogeneity among the various universities at this level. Some assemblies were still very similar in many ways to union assemblies, while others were the living centre of an intense process of reflection, with a high degree of involvement and maturity on the part of the participants. However, despite this heterogeneity, it is remarkable how many assemblies managed to overcome these obstacles after the first days when they had gone round in circles on issues like “voting on whether to have a vote or not on a particular question” (e.g. on the presence or not of people in the assemblies from outside the university, or on whether they should be able to speak). This had led to the departure of a lot of students. There was also the problem that the key decisions were being taken by student union members or political organisations. Over the first two weeks of the movement, the dominant tendency was the presence of more and more students in the assemblies and their increasingly active participation in the discussions, with a corresponding diminution in the intervention of the union members and the political organisations. The fact that the assemblies were taking increasing control of their own activities was clearly expressed by the fact that the students at the presidium organising the debates tended less and less to be those with union or political affiliations and more and more to be individuals with no affiliations or any real experience before the movement started. In a similar way the best organised assemblies would change the teams (usually of three members) who were responsible for organising and animating the debates on a daily basis, while the least lively and less organised assemblies were “led” by the same team each day, which moreover was often overmanned compared to the former. It is important to note that the tendency existed for the second type of assembly to be replaced by the former. One of the important aspects of this evolution was the participation of student delegates from one university in the assemblies of other universities. This, in addition to reinforcing the feelings of strength and solidarity between the different assemblies, has allowed those assemblies that were more hesitant to gain inspiration from the advances being made by those in the forefront.[1] [142] This is also an important feature of the dynamic of workers’ assemblies in class movements that have reached a considerable level of consciousness and understanding.
3) One of the major expressions of the proletarian nature of the assemblies in the universities during this period is the fact that they were not only open to students from other universities, but were very quickly opened to people who were not students. From the start the assemblies called on people in the universities (teachers, technicians or office staff – the IATOS) to come and participate and to join the struggle, but they went even further. In particular, working and retired people, parents and grandparents of the university and school students in struggle, have in general been warmly and attentively welcomed by the assemblies whenever they made interventions that encouraged the movement’s extension, especially to the wage workers.
Opening assemblies up to people who are not employed in the company or in the sector immediately involved, not only as observers but as active participants, is an extremely important aspect of the movement of the working class. It is clear that when a decision has to be taken requiring a vote, it may be necessary to resort to certain ways of working so that only the people who belong to the productive or geographical unit that the assembly is based upon participate in making decisions. This prevents the professional organisers of the bourgeoisie and others in their service from “packing” the assemblies. To this end, a method used by many of the student assemblies was to count the student cards (different from one university to another) held up, not raised hands. The question of the openness of the assemblies is a crucial one for the struggle and for the working class. In “normal” times, i.e. outside periods of intense struggle, it is members of the organisations of the capitalist class (the unions or the “leftist” parties) who exert most influence among the workers, so that keeping outsiders out of assemblies is an excellent way for them to keep control of the workers, to obstruct the dynamic of their struggle and serve the interests of the bourgeoisie. The opening of the assemblies allows the most advanced elements of the class, and especially the revolutionary organisations, to contribute to the development of consciousness by the workers in struggle; and in the history of the class struggle this has always constituted a dividing line between currents who defend a proletarian orientation and those who defend capitalist order. There are numerous examples. Among the most significant is that of the Congress of Workers' Councils in mid-December 1918 in Berlin, after the November uprising of the soldiers and workers against the war had obliged the German bourgeoisie not only to bring the war to an end but also to get rid of the Kaiser and to hand political power over to the Social Democratic party. Because of the immaturity of consciousness within the working class, along with the methods used for appointing the delegates, this Congress was dominated by the Social Democrats who forbade the representatives of the Russian revolutionary soviets, and Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Leibknecht, the two most eminent figures of the revolutionary movement, from taking part, under the pretext that they were not workers. This Congress took the decision in the end to hand over all its power to the government led by the Social Democracy, a government that was to assassinate Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Leibknecht a month later. Another relevant example is that of the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA - the First International). At its 1866 congress certain French leaders, like the bronze engraver Tolain, attempted to impose the rule that "only workers are allowed to vote at the congress" – a rule chiefly aimed at Karl Marx and his closest comrades. At the time of the Paris Commune in 1871, Marx was one of its most ardent defenders while Tolain was in Versailles in the ranks of those responsible for crushing the Commune, with the massacre of 30,000 workers.
With regard to the current students' movement, it is significant that the greatest resistance to opening up the assemblies came from the members of the students’ union, the UNEF (affiliated to the Socialist Party) and that they are much more open where the influence of UNEF was least felt.
4) One of the most important characteristics of the current episode of the class struggle in France is that it took all the sectors of the bourgeoisie and its political apparatus (right wing and left wing parties and union organisations) almost totally by surprise. This is something that allows us to understand both the vitality and the depth of the movement as well as the extremely delicate situation that the ruling class in France is in at this time. In this respect we have to make a clear distinction between the present movement and the massive struggles in the autumn of 1995 and in the spring of 2003.
The mobilisation of workers in 1995 against the “Juppé plan” to reform the Social Security system had, in reality, been orchestrated by virtue of a very clever division of labour between the government and the unions. With typical arrogance the then Prime Minister, Alain Juppé, combined the attacks against Social Security (which affected both employees of the public and private sectors) with specific attacks on the pensions of workers in the SNCF (the French railways) and other state sector transport workers. These workers were the spearhead of the mobilisation. A few days before Christmas, with the strikes a few weeks old, the government withdrew its special schemes for pensions leading, after an appeal by the unions, to a return to work in the sectors concerned. This return in the sectors most directly affected signified the end of the movement in all the other sectors. For their part, most of the unions (apart from the CFDT) had acted in a very militant way, calling for the extension of the movement and holding regular general assemblies. Despite its scale, the workers' mobilisation did not end in a victory but, fundamentally, in a defeat, since the basic demand, the withdrawal of the Juppé plan to reform the Social Security, was not achieved. However, with the government's withdrawal of its special pension schemes, the unions were able to dress the defeat up as a victory, enabling them to refurbish their image, tarnished by their repeated sabotage of workers' struggles during the 1990s.
The mobilisation in 2003 in the public sector was in response to the decision to increase the minimum number of years worked for entitlement to a full pension. This measure was directed against all state employees, but it was the teachers and other employees in the educational establishments, who, in addition to the attack on pensions, also suffered from a further attack under the cover of “decentralisation”. Teachers in general were not targeted by this latter measure, but they felt particularly affected by an attack on their colleagues and by the mobilisation of the latter. In addition, the decision to raise the minimum number of years in work to 40 years or even longer for some sectors of the working class (who because of the time they have to spend in training cannot begin to work before the age of 23 or even 25 years) meant that they will have to continue working in even more punishing and exhausting conditions well beyond the legal age of retirement at 60. Although he had a different style to that of Juppe, Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin talked tough in the same way, declaring that "It's not the street that rules". Finally, despite the combativity of the education sector workers and their tenacity (some endured 6 weeks on strike), despite demonstrations that were among the biggest since May 68, the movement was unable to push back the government. All that happened was that the latter decided, when the mobilisation began to weaken, to go back on particular measures that affected non-teaching personnel from the education establishments, so as to destroy the unity that had developed between the various professional groupings and thus undermine the dynamic of the mobilisation. The inevitable return to work among the personnel of the schools signified the end of the movement; as in 1995, it had not succeeded in pushing back the main attack of the government, the one against pensions. However, whereas it was possible to present the episode from 1995 as a “victory” by the unions, which allowed them to strengthen their influence over all the workers, the return to work in 2003 was felt mainly as a defeat (notably for a large number of teachers who lost almost 6 weeks wages). This had a big effect on the workers’ confidence in the trade unions.
5) We can summarise the main characteristics of the attacks against the working class in 1995 and 2003 as follows:
Regarding the current mobilisation, a number of facts are clear:
6) The government has been deliberately provocative in attempting to pass the law in such a cavalier way. It has used the provisions of the Constitution that allow it to by-pass parliament and decided to do this at a time when the schools and colleges were closed for the holidays. However, Villepin and the government have come unstuck with their “clever manoeuvre”. Rather than avoiding any reaction from students, they have made them even angrier and even more determined to resist this law. In 1995 Prime Minister Juppé's provocative declarations and arrogant attitude radicalised the strike action in a similar way. However, back then, the provocation was deliberate, since the bourgeoisie had foreseen the workers reaction and was confident that it could deal with it. In a situation where the working class was still suffering from the weight of the ongoing ideological campaigns around the collapse of the so-called “socialist” countries (which was bound to reduce the possibility of developing the struggle), it had been able to manipulate these events in order to refurbish the unions’ credibility. Today, on the contrary, Villepin had not anticipated that he would provoke the anger of the students, not to mention a large part of the working class, against this policy. In 2005, Villepin had succeeded in getting the CNE (Contrat Nouvelle Embauche) through parliament without any difficulty. This law allows companies with less than 20 employees to lay off workers of any age who have been employed for less than 2 years without giving a reason. It was expected that the CPE, which extends the provisions of the CNE to both public and private sector companies, but for workers under 26 years of age, would meet with a similar reception when it came in. Subsequent events have showed that the government made a serious error of judgement, since the media and all the political factions of the bourgeoisie agree that the government has ended up in a very delicate situation. In fact, it is not only the government that is extremely embarrassed by this situation, but all the government parties (left and right), as well as the unions who are condemning Villepin’s methods. Moreover, Villepin himself has acknowledged his mistake to some extent by saying he “regretted” adopting this approach.
The government (and Villepin particularly) has clearly made mistakes. Villepin is presented by the left and the unions as a “loner”,[2] [143] a “high-and-mighty” person, incapable of understanding the real needs of the people. His “friends” on the right (especially, of course, those close to his great rival, Nicolas Sarkozy) point out that as he has never been elected to office (unlike Sarkozy, who has been a deputy [i.e. an MP] and a mayor of an important town[3] [144] for many years), and that he has difficulty connecting with the ordinary voter and with the rank and file of his own party. It is also said that his taste for poetry and literature makes him a sort of “dilettante”, with an amateurish understanding of politics. However, the most common criticism directed at him, including by the bosses, is that he failed to consult the “social players” or the “intermediary bodies” (to use the terminology of the media sociologists), in other words the unions, before going ahead with this attack. The strongest criticism comes from the CDFT, the most moderate of the unions, which supported the government's attacks of 1995 and 2003.
We can say therefore that, in the circumstances, the French right has fully lived up to its reputation as the “stupidest” right wing in the world. More generally, it shows that the French bourgeoisie is, in a way, once again paying the price for the same inability to master the political game that has led to electoral “accidents” in the past, as in 1981 and 2002. In the first case, because the right was disunited, the left came into government, bucking the trend of the orientation in the other major countries in response to the unfolding social situation (especially in Great Britain, Germany, Italy and the US). In the second case, the left (because it too was disunited) failed to reach the second round of presidential elections which ended in a run-off between Le Pen (the leader of the far right) and Chirac. Chirac was re-elected with all the votes of the left, transferred to him as the “lesser evil”. Chirac was thus re-elected thanks to the left's, leaving him less room for manoeuvre than if he had defeated the champion of the left, Lionel Jospin. The reduction in Chirac's legitimacy goes some way to explain this government's weakness in facing up to and attacking the working class. That said, this political weakness of the right (and of the political apparatus of the French bourgeoisie in general) has not stopped it carrying out a massive attack on workers’ pensions. In this present case, this weakness in itself does not explain the scale of the current movement, notably the mobilisation of hundreds of thousands of young future workers, the dynamic of the movement, and its adoption of truly proletarian forms of struggle.
7) In 1968 too, the student mobilisation and the formidable workers’ strike (9 million on strike over several weeks – a total of more than 150 million strike days) resulted in part from the mistakes of the Gaullist regime at the end of its reign. The provocative attitude that the authorities displayed towards the students (the police entered the Sorbonne on May 3rd for the first time in hundreds of years and arrested and imprisoned a number of students who tried to object to being evicted by force) was a factor leading to the massive mobilisation of the students during the week of May 3rd to May 10th. After the fierce repression of May 10th and 11th, and the affects it had on public opinion, the government decided to give way on two of the student demands: the reopening of the Sorbonne and the freeing of the students arrested the week before. This government retreat and the enormous success of the demonstration called by the unions on 13th May[4] [145] gave rise to a series of spontaneous walkouts in some big factories, like Renault in Cléon and Sud-Aviation in Nantes. One of the reasons for these walk-outs, mainly by young workers, was the latter’s realisation that if the determination of the students (who after all have no economic muscle) had been successful in forcing the government to back down, then it could also be forced to back down by the workers, who have a much more powerful means of exerting pressure – the strike. The example set by the workers of Cléon and Nantes spread like wildfire, outstripping the unions. Frightened of being completely overwhelmed, they were obliged to jump on the bandwagon after two days and called a strike that paralysed the national economy for several weeks, with 9 million workers involved. Even then, it would have been very short-sighted to think that a movement on this scale could be the product of purely local or national causes. It had to be the product of a very significant change in the balance of forces between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat at the international level, in favour of the latter.[5] [146] This was to be confirmed a year later by the “Cordobazo” of May 29th 1969 in Argentina,[6] [147] the “Hot Autumn” in Italy in 1969 (also known as “Rampant May”), then by the big strikes in the Baltic region, the “Polish winter” of 1970-71 and by many other less spectacular movements, all confirming that May 1968 was no flash in the pan but the expression of the historic recovery of the world proletariat after more than four decades of counter-revolution.
8) Nor can the present movement in France be explained by particular circumstances (Villepin’s “mistakes”) or purely national factors. In fact it is a striking confirmation of what the ICC has been saying since 2003: a tendency towards the revival of international working class struggles and a development of consciousness within the class: “The large-scale mobilisations of the spring of 2003 in France and Austria represent a turning point in the class struggles since 1989. They are a first significant step in the recovery of workers militancy after the longest period of reflux since 1968” (International Review n°117. “Report on the class struggle”) “In spite of all its difficulties, the period of retreat has by no means seen the ‘end of the class struggle’. The 1990s was interspersed with a number of movements which showed that the proletariat still had untapped reserves of combativity (for example in 1992 and 1997). However, none of these movements represented a real shift at the level of consciousness. Hence the importance of the more recent movements which, though lacking the spectacular and overnight impact of a movement like that of 1968 in France, nevertheless constitute a turning point in the balance of class forces. The struggles of 2003-2005 have the following characteristics:
These characteristics, which we highlighted at our 16th Congress, have been amply demonstrated in the present movement of the students in France.
The link between the generations has been established spontaneously in the student assemblies: not only have older workers (including pensioners) been allowed to speak in the assemblies, they have been encouraged to do so and their interventions about their own experience of struggle have been listened to with great warmth and close attention by the younger generation.[7] [148]
A concern for the future, and not just with their immediate situation, has been at the very heart of the movement, which has drawn in young people who will only be faced with the CPE in a number of years’ time (more than 5 years for many high-school students). This concern for the future already emerged in 2003 on the issue of pensions, where we saw many young people on the demonstrations; this was already a sign of solidarity between the generations in the working class. In the current movement, the mobilisation against job insecurity, and thus against unemployment poses implicitly – and explicitly for a growing number of students and young workers – the question of what future capitalism has in store for society, a concern expressed by many older workers who are asking “what kind of society will we leave to our children?”
The question of solidarity, in particular between the generations but also between different sectors of the working class, has been one of the key issues of the movement:
9) One of the main characteristics of the present movement is the fact that that it is being led by the younger generation. And this is no accident. For some years the ICC has been pointing out that within the new generation there is an unspectacular but profound process of reflection going on, manifesting itself mainly in a much more noticeable tendency of young people to gravitate towards communist politics – some of them have already joined our ranks. This is just the tip of the iceberg of a development of consciousness going on in much wider sectors of the new proletarian generation, a process which sooner or later will feed into huge social struggles: “The new generation of ‘searching elements’, minorities moving towards class positions, will have a role of unprecedented importance in the future combats of the class, which will be faced with their political implications much more profoundly than the struggles of 1968-89. These elements, who already express a slow but significant development of consciousness in depth, will make a major contribution to the massive extension of consciousness throughout the class” (International Review n°113, “Resolution on the international situation from the 15th Congress of the ICC”).
The current movement of the students in France expresses the emergence of this subterranean process which got going several years ago. It is a sign that the main impact of the ideological campaigns set in motion in 1989 about the “end of communism” and the “disappearance of the class struggle” is now behind us.
Soon after the historic resurgence of the world proletariat in 1968 we noted that “the situation of the proletariat is different from how it was during the thirties. On the one hand, like all the other pillars of bourgeois ideology, mystifications which in the past weighed down the consciousness of the proletariat, have in part, gradually been exhausted. Nationalism, democratic illusions, anti-fascism, were all intensively utilised over the past half century, but they no longer have the impact they once had. On the other hand, the new generation of workers has not suffered the defeats of its predecessors. The proletarians who today confront the crisis, if they do not have the experience past generations of workers had, are no longer ground down by the same demoralisation.
“The formidable opposition with which the working class since 1968/69 has reacted against the first signs of the crisis, means that the bourgeoisie is not able today to impose the only outcome that, for its part, it could find for this crisis: a new imperialist holocaust. Before that can happen it must be able to defeat the working class. The perspective now is not imperialist war but generalised class war” (Manifesto of the ICC, adopted at its first congress in January 1976)
At our 8th Congress, thirteen years later, the report on the international situation completed this analysis in the following terms: “The generation which had been marked by the counter-revolution from the 30s to the 60s had to give way to one which had not been through it for the world proletariat to find the strength to overcome its impact. Similarly (although we have to moderate the comparison by underlining that between the generation of 68 and the one before it there had been a historic break, whereas there is a continuity with the one that followed it) the generation which will make the revolution cannot be the one which accomplished the essential historic task of opening up a new perspective for the world proletariat after the deepest counter-revolution in its history”.
A few months later, the collapse of the so-called “socialist” regimes and the important retreat by the working class that this brought about made it necessary to be more concrete about this prediction. With all due sense of proportion, the present revival of class combats can be compared to the historic resurgence of 1968 after 40 years of counter-revolution: the generations who had suffered this defeat and above all the terrible pressure of the mystifications of the bourgeoisie could not be at the forefront of this new episode in the confrontation between the classes. In a similar way, today’s generation, which was still at primary school when these campaigns were at their height, and was not directly affected by them, is now the first to take up the torch of the struggle.
10) The comparison between the student mobilisations of today in France and the events of May 68 enables us to draw out some of the more important features of the present movement. The majority of students in struggle today affirm very clearly “our struggle is different from 1968”. This is quite true, but it is important to understand why.
The first difference, and the most fundamental, resides in the fact that the movement of May 68 was situated at the very beginning of the open crisis of the world capitalist economy, whereas now, after worsening abruptly in 1974, the crisis is nearly four decades old. From 1967 on we began to see a rise in unemployment in several countries, notably France and Germany, which was at the root of the disquiet that was beginning to emerge among the students, and of the discontent which led the working class to enter the struggle. This said, the number of unemployed in France is ten times higher today than it was in May 68 and this massive unemployment (up to 10% of the active population according to the official figures) has already lasted for several decades. A whole number of differences result from this.
Even if these first effects of the crisis were an element behind the anger of the students in 1968, they were in no way comparable to the situation today. At the time, there was no major threat of unemployment or job insecurity at the end of your studies. The main concern for student youth at the time was that it would not be able to attain the same social status as the previous generation of people with university degrees. The 1968 generation was in fact the first to be confronted in a rather brutal manner with the proletarianisation of previously more prestigious job roles – a subject abundantly studied by sociologists. This phenomenon had begun a few years earlier, even before the open crisis had made its appearance, and followed a considerable increase in the number of students at the universities. This was the result of the needs of the economy but also of the hopes and desires of their parents, who had been through all the privations of the Second World War and wanted their children to reach a better social and economic situation than they had. This “massification” of the student population had been giving rise for a number of years to a growing malaise, particularly as a result of the persistence within the universities of structures and practices inherited from a time when only a chosen few could attend them, in particular a strongly authoritarian atmosphere. Another element in the malaise in the student world, which was expressed particularly in the USA from 1964 on, was the Vietnam war which undermined the whole myth of the “civilising” role of the great Western democracies, and which led large numbers of the student youth towards Third-Worldist ideas in their Guevarist or Maoist forms. These ideas were fuelled by the theories of pseudo-revolutionary thinkers like Herbert Marcuse, who announced the “integration of the working class” and the emergence of “new revolutionary forces” in the oppressed minorities (blacks, women, etc.), the peasants of the Third World, or indeed… the students. Many students at this time saw themselves as “revolutionaries”, just as they saw people like Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh or Mao as revolutionaries. Finally, one of the components of the situation at that time was the significant gap between the new generation and the previous one, which was the object of all kinds of criticisms. In particular, because this generation had worked hard to get out of the conditions of poverty and even famine resulting from the Second World War, it was reproached with being concerned only with material well-being. Hence the success of fantasies about the “consumer society” and slogans like “never work ever”. The product of a generation which had suffered the full force of the counter-revolution, the youth of the 1960s criticised the older generation for being conformist and submitting to the norms of capitalism. For their part many parents did not understand and could not accept the fact that their children were so contemptuous of the sacrifices they had made to give them a better life.
11) The world today is very different from 1968 and the student youth of today has little in common with that of the 1960s:
12) This is why, paradoxically, “radical” and “revolutionary” themes are not very present in the discussions and concerns of the students today. Whereas in 1968 they often turned the universities into permanent forums debating the question of the revolution, the workers’ councils, etc, the majority of discussions being held today are around much more “down to earth” questions like the CPE and its implications, job insecurity, the methods of struggle (blockades, general assemblies, coordinations, demonstrations etc.). However, their polarisation around the demand for the withdrawal of the CPE, which apparently reveals a much less “radical” ambition than in 1968, does not mean that the current movement is less profound than the one 38 years ago. On the contrary. The “revolutionary” preoccupations of the students in 1968 (in fact, of a minority who formed the “vanguard” of the movement) were certainly sincere but they were strongly marked by Third-Worldism (Guevarism or Maoism) or by antifascism. At best, so to speak, they were influenced by anarchism (in the wake of Cohn-Bendit) or Situationism. Their vision of the revolution was petty bourgeois romanticism, or simply a radical appendage of Stalinism. But whatever were the currents who were putting out “revolutionary” ideas, whether bourgeois or petty bourgeois, none of them had any grasp of the real process through which the working class can move towards the revolution, and still less of the significance of the massive workers’ strikes which were the first expression of the end of the period of counter-revolution.[8] [149] Today, “revolutionary” preoccupations are not yet present to any significant degree in the movement but its undoubted class nature and the terrain on which the mobilisation is taking place – the rejection of a future of submission to the demands and conditions of capitalist exploitation (unemployment, precarious jobs, arbitrary action of the bosses, etc) – are part of a dynamic which will certainly result in important numbers of the present combatants becoming aware of the necessity for the overthrow of capitalism. This development of consciousness will in no way be based on chimaeras like the ones which prevailed in 1968 and which allowed many of the leaders of the movement to be recycled into the official political apparatus of the bourgeoisie (the ministers Bernard Kouchner and Joshka Fischer, senator Henri Weber, the European parliament’s spokesman for the Greens Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the press baron Serge July etc.) or which led others into the tragic dead-end of terrorism (the Red Brigades in Italy, the Red Army Fraction in Germany, Direct Action in France). Far from it. This development of consciousness will be based on an understanding of the fundamental conditions which make the proletarian revolution necessary and possible: the insurmountable economic crisis of world capitalism, the historic impasse of the system, the necessity to see the proletariat’s defensive struggles as so many preparations for the final overthrow of capitalism. In 1968, the rapid hatching of “revolutionary” preoccupations was to a large extent a sign of their superficiality and their lack of theoretical-political consistency, corresponding to their basically petty bourgeois nature. The process through which the workers’ struggle becomes more radical, even if it can go through moments of surprising acceleration, is a much more long-term phenomenon, precisely because it is incomparably more profound. As Marx put it, “to be radical is to go to the root”, and this is an approach which will necessarily take time and will be based on drawing lessons from a whole experience of struggles.
13) In fact, the depth of the present movement can’t be measured by the “radical” nature of the discussions it has given rise to. The depth of the movement is derived from the fundamental question posed by the demand for the withdrawal of the CPE: the future of insecurity and unemployment which capitalism in crisis offers to the younger generations and which signifies the historic bankruptcy of the system. But to an even greater extent the depth of the movement is demonstrated by the methods of struggle and forms of organisation which were noted in points 2 and 3: general assemblies that are animated, open, disciplined, showing a real concern for reflection and for a collective control of the movement through the nomination of commissions, strike committees, and delegations responsible to the general assemblies, the will to extend the struggle to all sectors of the working class. In The Civil War in France Marx noted that the truly proletarian character of the Paris Commune lay not so much in the economic measures it adopted (the suppression of night work for children and a moratorium on rent) but in the means and mode of organisation it took up. Marx’s analysis can be applied very well to the present situation. The most important aspect of struggles that the working class wages is not so much in the contingent aims it may set itself at a given moment, and which will be left behind in more advanced stages of the movement, but in its capacity to really take charge of the struggle and in the methods it adopts to achieve this. It is these means and methods of struggle which are the best guarantee of the capacity of the class to move forward in future. This is one of the main points made by Rosa Luxemburg in The Mass Strike which drew the lessons of the 1905 revolution in Russia. Leaving aside the fact that the current movement is of course not at all at the same political level as that of 1905, we can say that the means it has adopted are, in an embryonic form, those of the mass strike, such as found expression in August 1980 in Poland.
14) The depth of the students’ movement is also expressed by its ability avoid falling into the trap of violence which the bourgeoisie set for it on several occasions, including the use and manipulation of the “wreckers”: at the occupation of the Sorbonne, at the end of the 16th March demo, the police charge at the end of the 18th March demo, the violence by the “wreckers” against the demonstrators on 23rd March. Even if a small minority of students, especially those influenced by anarchistic ideologies, allowed themselves to be pulled into the confrontations with the police, the great majority of them were well aware of the need not to allow the movement to get dragged into repetitive confrontations with the forces of repression. In this sense, the movement of the students today has shown greater maturity than that of 1968. In the period from 3rd May to 10th May 1968, violence – the confrontation with the CRS and the barricades – was one of the components of the movement which, following the repression of the night of 10-11th May and the evasiveness of the government, opened the gates to the immense strike of the working class. Thereafter, however, barricades and violence became an element which allowed the government and the trade unions to regain control of the situation, notably by undermining the considerable sympathy the students had initially obtained from the population at large and from the working class in particular. For the left parties and the unions, it became easy enough to draw an equals sign between those who talked about revolution and those who were burning cars and continually going off to battle the CRS. All the more so because in many cases it was often the same people. For the students who saw themselves as “revolutionaries”, the movement of May 68 was already the Revolution, and the barricades they built day after day were presented as the descendants of those of 1848 and the Commune. Today, even when they pose the question of the general perspective of the movement, and thus of the necessity for revolution, the students are quite aware that the strength of the movement does not lie in confrontations with the police. In fact, even if it is still very far from posing the question of the revolution, and thus of reflecting on the problem of proletarian class violence in the struggle for the overthrow of capitalism, the movement was implicitly faced with this problem, and was able to respond to it in the spirit of the proletariat’s nature and struggle. The proletarian movement has been confronted from the beginning with the extreme violence of the exploiting class, with repression when it tries to defend its interests, with imperialist war but also with the daily violence of exploitation. Unlike exploiting classes, the class that is the bearer of communism is not the bearer of violence; and even though it has to make use of it, it does not do so by identifying with it. In particular, the violence it has to use in the overthrow of capitalism, which it will have to use with great determination, is necessarily a conscious and organised violence and must always be preceded by a whole process of growth in consciousness and organisation through the various struggles against exploitation. The present mobilisation of the students, notably its capacity to organise itself and to discuss and reflect upon the problems it faces, including the problem of violence, thus marks a much clearer step towards the revolution, towards the overturning of bourgeois order, than the barricades of May 68.
15) It is precisely this question of violence which provides one of the essential points of difference between the students’ movement of spring 2006 and the riots in the suburbs of autumn 2005. There is obviously a common cause at the origin of these two movements: the insurmountable crisis of the capitalist mode of production, the future of unemployment and precariousness which it offers to the children of the working class. However, the riots in the suburbs, which basically expressed total despair in the face of this situation, cannot be considered in any sense as a form of class struggle. In particular, the essential components of proletarian movements – solidarity, organisation, the collective and conscious attempt to take charge of the struggle – were completely absent from these riots. No solidarity was shown by these desperate young people towards the owners of the cars they were burning, who were and are victims of unemployment and job insecurity. Very little consciousness was shown by the rioters, whose violence and destruction was carried out in a blind way and often in the form of a game. As for organisation and collective action, it took the form of street gangs directed by a chief who often owes his authority to being the most violent member of the gang, and who often competed among themselves to see who could burn the most cars. In reality, the approach of the young rioters of October/November 2005 not only made them easy prey for all sorts of police manipulation, but also give us an indication of how the effects of the decomposition of capitalist society can be an obstacle to the development of proletarian struggle and organisation.
16) During the present movement, bands of young street gang members have taken advantage of the demonstrations to come to the centre of towns and engage in their favourite sport: fighting the cops and smashing shop windows, and this to the great satisfaction of the foreign media who had already distinguished themselves at the end of 2005 by putting their shock-horror pictures of the riots on the front pages of the newspapers and on the TV. It is clear that the images of violence, which for a whole period were the only ones presented to workers outside of France, were an excellent way of reinforcing the black-out of what was really going on in France and so depriving the world working class of material that could serve the development of its consciousness. But the violence of the gangs was not only used against the proletariat of other countries. In France itself, they were used to present the struggle led by the students as a kind of remake of the violence of last autumn. This didn’t come off: no one fell for this story and this is why the Interior Minister Sarkozy rapidly changed his tune and declared that there was a clear difference between the students and the “thugs”. The violence was then stirred up to the utmost in order to dissuade as many workers, students and high school pupils as possible from participating in the demonstrations, especially on 18th March. The exceptional level of participation in these demos showed that this manoeuvre didn’t work. Finally, on 23rd March, with the blessing of the police, the “wreckers” attacked the demonstrators themselves, to rob them or beat them for no reason. Many students were demoralised by these attacks: “When it’s the CRS beating us, that makes us want to fight back, but when its kids from the suburbs, for whom we are also fighting, that’s a real blow to our morale”. However, once again, the students showed their maturity and their consciousness. Rather than trying to organise violent actions against the young “wreckers” as did the union stewards who on the March 23rd demo started beating them and pushing them towards the police lines, they decided in several places to nominate delegations who were given the job of discussing with the young people in the underprivileged neighbourhoods, in order to explain to them that the struggle of the students and the high school pupils was also a struggle for all young people sunk in the despair of massive unemployment and social exclusion. In an intuitive manner, without knowing the history of the workers’ movement, the majority of the students put into practice one of the essential lessons of this experience: no violence within the working class. Faced with sectors of the proletariat who may be drawn into actions which are contrary to the general interests of the class, persuasion and appealing to consciousness are an essential means of action towards them, providing these sectors are not simple appendages of the bourgeois state (such as the commando units of strike-breakers).
17) One of the reasons for the great maturity of the current movement, especially on the question of violence, is the very strong participation of young women and girls in the movement. It is well known that at this age, young women are generally more mature than their male comrades. Moreover, on the question of violence it is clear that women in general are less likely to be dragged onto this terrain than men. In 1968, female students also participated in the movement but when the barricades became its main symbol, the role they were given was often that of supporting the masked “heroes” standing at the height of the barricades, of being nurses to the wounded and bringing sandwiches so that the young men could revive themselves in between clashes with the CRS. This is not at all the case today. On the picket lines at the university gates, there have been many female students and their attitude has exemplified the meaning that the movement has inspired in the pickets: not a means of intimidation towards those who wanted to get to their classes, but a means of explaining, of arguing and persuading. In the general assemblies and the various commissions, even if, in general, the female students are less “loud-mouthed” and less involved in political organisations, they have been a key element in the organisation, discipline and effectiveness of the assemblies and commissions, as well as in their capacity for collective reflection. The history of the proletarian struggle has shown that the depth of a movement can be measured to some degree by the proportion of women workers involved in it. In “normal” times, working class women, because they are subjected to an even more stifling oppression than the men, are as a general rule less involved in social movements. It is only when these movements attain a great depth that the most oppressed layers of the proletariat throw themselves into the struggle and into the general reflection going on in the class. The high degree of participation by young women and girls in the current movement, the key role they are playing within it, is an added indication not only of the authentically proletarian nature of the movement but also of its depth.
18) As we have seen, the present movement of the students in France is a significant expression of the new vitality of the world proletariat over the past three years, of its growing class consciousness. The bourgeoisie will obviously do all it can to limit this movement’s future impact. If it is able, it will refuse to give in to the movement’s demands in order to maintain the feeling of impotence that has affected the working class in France since the defeat of 2003. At all events, it will do everything it can to prevent the working class drawing out its rich lessons, above all by trying to sap the movement and demoralise its participants, or by recuperating it through the unions and left parties. However, no matter how the bourgeoisie manoeuvres, it cannot suppress all the experience accumulated through weeks of struggle by tens of thousands of future workers, their awakening to politics and their developing consciousness. This will be a real treasure-trove for the future struggles of the proletariat, a vital element in their ability to continue down the path towards the communist revolution. It is up to revolutionaries to participate in it fully, both in order to draw the maximum benefit out of the present experience and to use it for the struggles of the future.
ICC, 3rd April 2006
[1] [150] In order to enable the struggle to be as powerful and unified as possible, the students felt the need to set up a “national coordination” of delegates from different assemblies. In itself, this approach was absolutely correct. However, to the extent that a large number of the delegates are members of the bourgeois political organisations (such as the Trotskyist Lige Communiste Revolutionnaire) present in the student milieu, the weekly meetings of the coordination were often a theatre for the politicians’ manoeuvres of these organisations, who tried, so far without success, to form a ‘Bureau of the Coordination’ which would act as an instrument of their politics. As we have often noted in our press (especially during the strikes in Italy in 1987 and the hospital strike in France in 1988), centralisation, which is a necessity for any widespread struggle, can only really contribute to the development of the movement if it is based on a high degree of vigilance at the base, in the general assemblies. We should also note that an organisation like the LCR tried to provide the student movement with ‘mouthpieces’ in front of the media. The fact that there have not been any media-stars in the movement is not a sign of weakness but an expression of its real depth.
[2] [151] We have even had a specialist in political psychology state on TV that he was a “stubborn narcissist”.
[3] [152] The truth is that the vicinity of Neuilly-sur-Seine where Sarkozy was mayor, is a typically bourgeois town. So we can be sure that it was not with these electors that Sarkozy learned to “speak to the people”.
[4] [153] This was a symbolic date since it marked the 10th anniversary of the coup d'Etat of May 13th 1958 that ended with De Gaulle coming back into power. One of the demonstrators’ main slogans was “10 years is enough”.
[5] [154] In January 1968, our publication in Venezuela, Internacionalismo (the only publication of the ICC existing at that time) announced the opening up of a new period of class confrontations at the international level: “We are not prophets, and we cannot pretend to know when and in what way future events will unfold. But with regard to the mess into which capitalism is sinking, we are convinced that this cannot be halted by reforms, devaluations, or by any other capitalist economic measures and it can only lead into the crisis. And we are also sure that the reverse process of the development of class combativeness, that we have seen develop at the general level, is going to lead the working class into a bloody and direct struggle to destroy the capitalist state.”
[6] [155] On this day, following a whole series of mobilisations in the workers' towns against the violent economic attacks and repression of the military junta, the workers in Cordoba completely overwhelmed the police and army (with its tanks) and took control of the town (second only to Buenos Aires). The government was only able to “restore order” the following day when the army arrived in force.
[7] [156] We have moved a long way from the attitude of many students in 1968 who saw the older generation as “old fools” (who in turn often saw the students as “young idiots”)
[8] [157] It is worth pointing out that this blindness about the real meaning of 1968 not only affects currents coming from Stalinism and Trotskyism, for whom there had not been a “counter-revolution” but a continuation of the “revolution” with the appearance after World War II of the “socialist” or “deformed workers” states and with the “struggles for national liberation” which began in the same period and which continued for several decades afterwards. In fact, the majority of the elements coming from the communist left, especially from the Italian Left, did not understand much of what happened in 1968 since both the Bordigists and Battaglia Comunista thought that we still had not emerged from the counter-revolution.
Links
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[4] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/395/communism-agenda-history
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/34/communism
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[42] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/50/united-states
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[124] https://www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/1910/prussia.htm
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[144] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/125_france_students#_ftn3
[145] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/125_france_students#_ftn4
[146] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/125_france_students#_ftn5
[147] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/125_france_students#_ftn6
[148] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/125_france_students#_ftn7
[149] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/125_france_students#_ftn8
[150] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/125_france_students#_ftnref1
[151] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/125_france_students#_ftnref2
[152] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/125_france_students#_ftnref3
[153] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/125_france_students#_ftnref4
[154] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/125_france_students#_ftnref5
[155] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/125_france_students#_ftnref6
[156] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/125_france_students#_ftnref7
[157] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/125_france_students#_ftnref8
[158] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/france
[159] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/french-students-movement