1) On the eve of the 1980s, the ICC designated these years as the ‘years of truth', in which the formidable extent of what was at stake in the whole life of society would be clearly revealed. Half-way through this decade, the evolution of the international situation has fully confirmed this analysis:
-- through a new aggravation of the convulsions of the world economy which were manifested from the very beginning of the ’80s in the most important recession since the 1930s;
-- through an intensification of tensions between the imperialist blocs, expressed both through a considerable jump in military expenditure and by the development of deafening; campaigns of war ideology conducted by Reagan, the chief of the most powerful bloc;
-- through the resurgence, in the second part of 1983, of class combats after their momentary retreat in 81-83, preceding and following the repression of the workers in Poland. This resurgence has been characterized particularly by an unprecedented simultaneity of struggles, especially in the vital centres of capitalism and of the working class in Western Europe.
But, at the very time when the whole gravity of what's at stake in the period is becoming clear, when all the potential it contains is being revealed, the bourgeoisie is launching a whole series of ideological campaigns which have the aim of:
-- accrediting the myth of an amelioration in the situation of world capitalism, incarnated in the ‘success' of the American recovery in ’83 and ’84 (higher growth rates, fall in inflation and unemployment);
-- making people believe that there is an attenuation of imperialist tensions: Reagan's speeches in ’84 were presented as being more moderate, as ‘holding out a hand' to negotiations with the USSR, and this had its equivalent in the line of diplomatic seduction being pushed by the newcomer Gorbachev;
-- pushing into workers' heads the idea that the proletariat isn't struggling, that it has given up defending its class interests, that it's no longer an actor on the international political stage.
In reality, these are nothing but smokescreens aimed at hiding from the workers the importance of what's at stake today at the very time when a new wave of class struggles is gaining in depth. What is revealed by an examination of world reality is a striking confirmation of the fundamental tendencies of the present historic period, tendencies which have been manifesting themselves since the beginning of the decade.
The economic crisis
2) The myth of an amelioration in the situation of the world economy burst like a soap bubble when you look at the terrible reality of what's happening in the peripheral countries of capitalism. The gigantic debts (900 billion dollars) owed by the countries which by a sinister irony are referred to as being ‘on the road to development', the flagrant failure of the extremely bitter potions prepared ‘for their own good' by the ‘experts' of the IMF (a 50% fall in buying power in two years in Mexico, 20% in 6 months in Argentina, etc...); the incredible rates of inflation (400% in Brazil, the 'model country' of the ‘70s, 10,000% in Bolivia...), the complete failure of the countries previously vaunted for their miraculous growth (Hong Kong, Singapore); the dreadful poverty of the populations of all the third world countries which, through the malnutrition, famines and epidemics that it provokes, is responsible every day for the death of 40,000 people and which makes daily life for billions of human beings a permanent hell - all this frightful reality, which the bourgeoisie of the advanced countries doesn't hesitate to put on display when it wants to portray the economy and workers' living conditions in the industrialized regions as something to be ‘envied', just shows one thing: the total impasse facing the world economy, the definitive incapacity of the capitalist mode of production to overcome its mortal contradictions, for which the peripheral countries are the first to pay the consequences.
Similarly, the permanent inability of the so-called socialist countries to realize national plans which are in any case less and less ambitious, the total and permanent shortage of consumer goods, the decline in production in Czechoslovakia and Poland (the latter country has now regressed to the I974 level), the 150% inflation in Poland over the last 2 years, the lowering of life expectancy in the USSR (66 years in 1964 but only 62 years in I984) - all these characteristics not only clearly unmask the lies about their ‘socialist' nature but mark a definitive end for the ‘theories' which have existed even within the revolutionary milieu about the capacity of state capitalism to overcome the contradictions of classical capitalism, to free itself from the constraints of the law of value. They show that if these countries are no less capitalist than others, it is a poorly developed and uncompetitive capitalism which reigns there, a capitalism which in many ways is similar to that in the third world countries (as in the predominance of raw materials in their exports) and which is thus particularly fragile in the face of the hammer blows of the crisis.
3) The myth of the convalescence of capitalism also comes up against the harsh reality of the situation in the oldest bourgeois countries - those of Western Europe, which contains the most powerful industrial concentration in the world. In this zone, the few improvements which could be seen in recent years in certain of these countries in terms of inflation rates and growth of GNP cannot mask the following realities:
-- despite a certain drop, the result of repeated attacks on workers' living conditions, the present level of inflation for these countries as a whole (7.2%) still represents more than twice that of 1967 (3.3%);
-- the level of industrial production was no higher in I984 than in I981;
-- whole major sectors of the industrial apparatus have been eliminated (in steel, ship building, mines, cars, etc) in the name of ‘health measures' which look like repeated amputations on a body ridden with gangrene;
-- the scourge of unemployment hasn't ceased to develop hitting 25 million workers or over 11% of the working population (between ’81 and ’84 the numbers of unemployed grew more than over the previous 20 years); the daily reality of these countries is the extension, on a scale not seen for decades, of soup kitchens and absolute pauperization.
These facts, since they relate to one of the vital centres of world capitalism, show how all the blather about ‘recovery' and ‘improvement' is indeed nothing but a smokescreen.
4) Similarly, all the discourses about the ‘health' of the American economy are shown to be pure lies when you examine the real content of the ‘Reaganomics' which is supposed to have worked such miracles. In fact, what lies behind the ‘dazzling' 6.8% increase in its GNP in 1984 (the only notable increase in any of the major countries apart from Japan, whose great competitiveness has up to now spared it from the hardest blows of the crisis), behind the fall in unemployment and in inflation rates, is, respectively:
-- a relaunching of production through major Federal budget deficits (up to 379 billion dollars in ’83 and ’84), which is in total contradiction to the principles touted by Reagan when he arrived at the head of state;
-- the continuation of the elimination of whole chunks of the industrial sector (a process which has now begun to affect even the ‘hi-tech’ industries which were supposed to create a marvellous quantity of new jobs); the new jobs which have lowered unemployment have been essentially located in the service sector which can only worsen the competitiveness of the American economy as a whole;
-- the fall in the price of imports due to the considerable increase in the exchange rate of the dollar based on the huge borrowings made by the Federal State to meet its deficits.
As the resolution of the 5th ICC Congress showed, explaining the recession of ’80-’82:
"The ‘monetarist' policies orchestrated by Reagan and followed by all the leaders of the advanced countries register the failure of the neo-Keynesian policies and allow the underlying cause of the capitalist crisis to come to the surface: generalized overproduction, and its ineluctable consequences - the fall in production, the elimination of excess capital, the throwing of millions of workers into unemployment, the massive deterioration in the living standards of the whole proletariat." (International Review 35).
The ‘recovery' of the American economy was permitted by the momentary abandoning of this policy, the aim of which was to prevent: "the astronomical rise in debts upon which the world economy is sitting today from leading to the death of the patient through an apocalyptic rush of the inflationary spiral and the explosion of the international financial system." (ibid).
Thus, the limits of the US ‘recovery', which we can already see today, are contained in the same reality which in 1980 obliged the government of that country to put its foot hard on the brake, plunging the whole world into the brutal recession of ’80-’82: faced with the inevitable and growing engorgement of solvent markets, capital's only perspective can be to reduce production, profits, the labour power it exploits and the wages it pays for it. Because of this, the only ‘recovery' can be a headlong flight into debt, that is to say the accumulation of contradictions on a scale never seen before and growing all the time, turning the world economy into a veritable powder-keg.
5) In reality, since the world economy entered its phase of open crisis in the mid-’60s, it has had no alternative but to oscillate more and more savagely between recession (directly translating the cause of the crisis - the saturation of the world market) and inflation (which merely expresses the abuse of credit and of printing money through which the states and the capitalists have tried to get round this saturation). Each one of the ‘recoveries' the world economy has been through after the recessions of ’71, ’74-75, and ’80-82 has been based on a new outburst of indebtedness:
-- it was mainly the phenomenal indebtedness of the third world in the second half of the ‘70s - an indebtedness fed by loans from the western banks as a way of ‘recycling' the ‘petrodollars' - which allowed the industrial powers to temporarily boost their sales and relaunch production;
-- after 1982, it was the even more major debts of the USA, both external (which would soon make it the biggest debtor in the world) and internal (more than 6,000 billion dollars in 1984, or the equivalent of the total production of west Germany over 10 years), which allowed that country to reach record growth rates in ’84, just as it was its enormous commercial deficits which momentarily benefited the exports of a few other countries (such as west Germany) and thus the production levels.
In the final analysis, just as the astronomical indebtedness of the third world countries could only result in a catastrophic rebound shock, in the form of unprecedented austerity and recession, the even more considerable indebtedness of the American economy can only lead, under the threat of an explosion of its financial system (its vulnerability to which can be measured by the uninterrupted succession of bank collapses), to a new recession both of this economy and the other economies whose external markets will be subject to a severe shrinkage.
The only perspective facing the world, its most industrialized countries, and including, for the first time in an explicit way the 2nd and 3rd industrial powers of the western bloc, Japan and west Germany, is thus:
-- a new dive in production resulting in a terrible aggravation of unemployment;
-- the intensification of the attack on workers' living; conditions in the form of falling wages, reduction in social security and an unprecedented aggravation in the rhythm and conditions of work.
What lies behind all the talk of ‘recovery' and economic ‘health' is a new process in absolute impoverishment, not only in the backward countries but also in the great metropoles of capital. Thus the ‘years of truth' are confirming one of the great teachings of marxism, which all sorts of ‘experts' claimed were ‘false' or ‘out of date': this system leads not only to the relative impoverishment of the exploited class; the latter is now more and more experiencing an absolute impoverishment which is going to reach, notably with the development of mass unemployment in the great metropoles of capital, levels which for more than three decades have been reserved for the backward countries.
The truth that these years are revealing in a sinister and striking manner is the whole barbarism into which decadent capitalism has plunged the whole of society.
Imperialist conflicts
6) This barbarism of decadent capitalism also reveals itself in the shadows behind the speeches about peace which are currently at the centre of the stage. Reagan's change of tone, leaving aside his talk about the ‘Evil Empire' and extending a hand to the chief of the opposing bloc; Gorbachev's ‘good little boy' diplomatic offensive; the forthcoming meeting between the two leaders - all this cannot hide the pursuit of war preparations by the two blocs or hide the development of imperialist tensions between them.
In fact, a simple examination of the efforts made by both blocs at the level of armaments exposes the emptiness of all the speeches about ‘détente'. Thus, during the year 1984 alone, the industrial states spent 1,000 billion dollars on arms: that is, more than the whole of the debt accumulated by the third world countries The countries of the western bloc are about to join those of the eastern bloc in the complete subordination of the productive apparatus to the needs of armaments:
-- right now, two-thirds of American research laboratories work directly for the army;
-- in all the highly technical sectors (aeronautics, electronics, telecommunications, robotics, computers, etc) the effort towards research and innovation are directly determined by military needs into which the best scientific and technical talents are being channelled. This is strikingly illustrated by the American ‘Star Wars' project and its west European appendage ‘Eureka'.
On a world scale, while humanity sinks into an increasingly unbearable poverty and misery in the form of famines and ‘natural' catastrophes whose murderous effects are perfectly avoidable, more than 10% of production is not only sterilized in arms but participates directly or indirectly through the destruction caused by these weapons, in aggravating and multiplying these calamities (as for example in Ethiopia and Mozambique where the terrible famines are much less the result of climatic conditions than of the wars which permanently devastate these areas).
The growth of armaments in both blocs isn't the only thing which reveals the present scale and intensity of imperialist tensions. This intensity corresponds to what is at stake in all the local conflicts which ravage the planet. This scale corresponds to the breadth and objectives of the present offensive of the US bloc.
7) This offensive has the objective of completing the encirclement of the USSR, of depriving this country of all the positions it has been able to maintain outside its direct area of domination. It has as a priority the definitive expulsion of the USSR from the Middle East, through the disciplining of Iran and the reinsertion of this country into the US bloc as an important pawn in its global strategy. It has the ambition of going on to recuperate Indochina. In the final analysis, its aim is to completely strangle the USSR, to strip it of its status as a world power.
The present phase of this offensive, which began right after the invasion of Afghanistan by the armies of the USSR, (which was a major advance by the latter towards the ‘warm seas'), has already achieved some major successes:
-- the winning of complete control over the Near East where Syria, previously linked to the Russian bloc and, along with the PLO, was the main loser from the Israeli invasion of the Lebanon in ’82, has now become one of the pawns of US strategy, sharing with Israel the role of ‘gendarme' in this region and where the resistance of recalcitrant bourgeois factions (PLO etc) has been progressively broken;
-- the alignment of India following the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984;
-- the growing exhaustion of Iran (which is the condition for its complete return to the US fold) due to the terrible war with Iraq, which is supported by the US bloc via France;
-- a greater integration of China into its strategy towards the USSR and Indo-China.
One of the main characteristics of this offensive is the western bloc's more and more massive use of its military power, notably through the sending of expeditionary corps from the US or other central countries (France, UK, Italy) to the battle zones (as was particularly the case with the Lebanon, to ‘convince' Syria of the necessity to align itself with the US bloc, and in Chad in order to put an end to Libya's pretensions to independence). This corresponds to the fact that the economic card so abundantly used in the past to grab hold of the enemy's position is no longer sufficient:
-- because of the present ambitions of the US bloc;
-- because of the aggravation of the world crisis itself, which creates a situation of internal instability in the third world countries that the US bloc used to rely on.
The present offensive of the US bloc is not in contradiction with the fact that, in the period of the decadence of capitalism, it is the bloc which has done worst out of the division of the world which, in the last resort, pushes the whole of society into generalized war (the ‘central' powers in 1914, the ‘Axis' in 1939). Certainly, the present situation differs from the one which preceded the Second World War in that now it is the better placed bloc which is on the offensive:
-- because it enjoys an enormous military superiority, particularly at the technological level;
-- to the extent that, since today's crisis is much more prolonged than that of the 30s without being able to break out into a generalized conflict, there are much more prolonged and extensive preparations for this conflict; obviously the economically stronger bloc is best equipped to carry out these preparations.
However, for the USSR, the stakes involved are considerable: the US offensive means in the end a matter of life or death for Russia, as can be seen by the stubbornness with which it tried, via Syria, to maintain a toe-hold in the Middle East. And if this offensive finally achieves its ultimate objectives (which presupposes that it isn't held back by the class struggle), the USSR will have no alternative but to play the desperate card of a thrust into the European heartlands - the real prize of the inter-imperialist conflict: in other words to resort to the terrible means of generalized war.
8) The present aggravation of imperialist tensions, the threat they pose to the very life of humanity, is the direct expression of the impasse faced by the capitalist economy, of the total bankruptcy of the system.
In the ‘years of truth' therefore, what's being revealed with a hideous clarity is that with the aggravation of the convulsions in society's economic infrastructure, economic war necessarily leads on to armed war, that economic means give way to military means. While in the past military force served as a support and guarantee to economic positions that had been or were to be acquired, today the economy more and more serves as an auxiliary to the needs of military strategy. The whole of economic activity is geared towards supporting military power; the world economy is sinking into the insatiable maws of arms production. Militarism, which contrary to Luxemburg's assertions has never constituted a real field of accumulation, has on the contrary become the terrain upon which the collapse of capitalist production, and of capitalism as a historic system, is being made a reality.
This is in no way an abandonment of marxism, which considers that in the last instance it is the economic base which determines the whole life of society. Capitalism's entry into its decadent period is determined by economic causes, and the history of decadence has seen the capitalist economy getting more and more stuck in a dead-end. Similarly, it is clear that it is the present aggravation of the crisis which is accentuating the pressures towards generalized war - a pressure which has been a permanent fact of life for society since decadence began.
But the important thing to underline is that in the decadence of capitalism, war - even if it is determined by the economic situation - has lost all economic rationality, in contrast to last century when, despite the costs and massacres involved, it was a means for pushing forward the development of the productive forces of capitalism, which in a manner of speaking made it ‘profitable' for the system as a whole.
What has been shown by the first two world wars is the purely destructive nature of war in the period of decadence. The fact that the victorious countries (with the exception of the USA whose territory was kept out of the battle zones) came out of the wars considerably weakened by them, has today reached its fulfilment in the obvious fact that a third world war would have no economic advantage either for capitalism as a whole or for any of its national fractions. And if this doesn't prevent the bourgeoisie from still preparing for it, this only expresses the reality that in the period of decadence the process leading to war is a mechanism completely outside the control of the bourgeoisie. What we can see today is the full development of a tendency which has existed since the beginning of the century and not a ‘new' phenomenon. However, by reaching its extreme point, this tendency has introduced a new element: the threat of the total destruction of humanity, which only the struggle of the proletariat can prevent.
Never in history has the alternative between socialism and barbarism been posed with such terrible clarity. Never has the proletariat had such an immense responsibility as it has in the present period.
The class struggle
9) The key to the whole historical situation is in the hands of the working class. This is precisely what the bourgeoisie is trying to hide from it by seeking to convince it that it is powerless, that its great battles against capitalism belong to a past that is definitely over. This is also something not seen by many revolutionary groups who are incapable of understanding; the historic course and spend their time lamenting the ‘weakness of workers' struggles', thus demonstrating that they themselves are victims of the bourgeoisie's campaigns.
The recognition of the aggravation of imperialist tensions and of a certain number of defeats like that in Poland in 1981 should not lead us to the conclusion that the bourgeoisie has a free hand to impose its own response to the crisis of the system: generalized imperialist war. The analysis of the historic course developed by the ICC takes into account the following elements:
a) by definition, a historic course is something which applies to a whole historical period. It is not conditioned by conjunctural or secondary events. Only major events in the life of society are able to put it into question:
-- the long opportunist degeneration of the IInd International, the complete disorientation of the proletariat that it expressed and aggravated, was the condition for the opening up of the course towards the first world war;
-- three years of generalized imperialist war, involving massacres and sufferings on a scale never before known, was the price to be paid for a new change of course in favour of the proletariat;
-- the long series of defeats of the proletariat from Germany in 1919 to China in 1927, defeats aggravated by the degeneration of the revolution in Russia and of the Communist International, and also by the momentary re-establishment of the capitalist economy between 1923 and 1929, were necessary for the bourgeoisie to free itself of the proletarian obstacle to its logic;
-- the appearance of new workers' generations who haven't been through defeat or world war, the wearing-out of the myth of the USSR as the ‘socialist fatherland' and of the anti-fascist mystification, capitalism's entry into a new open crisis, have been the conditions necessary for the re-establishment of a course towards class confrontations.
b) The present historic course can't be put into question by the partial defeats which, though rarely, have hit the proletariat in secondary or peripheral countries, like Poland ’81. Only a succession of defeats following decisive struggles by the proletariat in the central countries, and notably those of Western Europe, would suffice to open the door to a course towards war.
c) the existence of a course towards class confrontations in no way implies the disappearance of imperialist antagonisms, conflicts between the blocs, the aggravation of these conflicts, or military preparations for a third world war. In particular, in the present period, only struggles of an exceptional breadth, like those in Poland 1980, can have an immediate impact on the tensions between east and west. Within this framework provided by the historic course, the bourgeoisie continues to have a certain margin for manoeuvre. What's at stake today is therefore not the capacity of this or that outburst of class struggle to push back arms production or silence this or that conflict between the blocs; it's the fact that the reserves of combativity that these struggles express prevent these imperialist conflicts from reaching their extreme conclusion: a worldwide conflagration.
d) The existence of a historic course towards class confrontations in no way implies that the proletariat is developing its struggles in a continuous way, that class combats reach, month after month, year after year, an overgrowing breadth and depth. Such a view would be totally at odds with the whole historical experience of the proletariat; it would contradict what Marx put forward in The 18th Brumaire and which Luxembourg and other great revolutionaries analysed later on: the movement of the class struggle through advances and retreats in its progress towards decisive confrontations with capitalism. It would also contradict the fact that, in the period of decadence, such a phenomenon, far from disappearing, can only become more pronounced, which means that within a course towards class confrontations (itself an expression of this phenomenon on a grand scale) there is a succession of waves of struggle, of repeated assaults against the capitalist fortress, broken up by moments of partial defeats, disarray and demoralization.
10) The thesis about the ‘passivity' of the working class, which bourgeois propaganda has got certain revolutionaries to swallow, if it could have some appearance of reality at certain moments in the past such as at the time of defeat for the proletariat in Poland ’81, is today totally contradicted by the facts. In particular it is given the lie too by the formidable development of workers' struggles from the second half of 1983, the characteristics and conditions of which were analysed by the ICC as early as January ‘84:
"The present wave of struggles has already announced that it is going to be broader and more important than the two waves which preceded it since the historic upsurge of struggle at the end of the ‘60s: that of 1968-74 and 1978-80... The present wave has its source in the wearing out of the factors which led to the post-Poland retreat:
-- the vestiges of illusions from the 1970s which have been swept away by the very deep recession of 1980-82;
-- the momentary disarray provoked by the move of the left into opposition and by the defeat in Poland;
It is emerging:
-- after a long period of austerity and mounting unemployment, of an intensification of economic attacks against the working class in the central countries;
-- following several years of using the card of the left in opposition and all the mystifications associated with it.
For these reasons, it is going to carry on with increasingly powerful and determined battles by the proletariat of the metropoles of capital, the culminating point of which will be at a higher level than either of the first two waves.
The characteristics of the present wave, as have already been manifested and which will become more and more discernible are as follows:
-- a tendency towards very broad movements involving large numbers of workers, hitting entire sectors or several sectors simultaneously in one county, thus posing the basis for the geographical extension of the struggle;
-- a tendency towards the outbreak of spontaneous movements, showing, especially at the beginning, a certain bypassing of the unions;
-- the growing simultaneity of struggles at an international level, laying the basis for the world generalisation of struggles in the future;
-- a progressive development, within the whole proletariat, of its confidence in itself, of its awareness of its strength, its capacity to oppose itself as a class to the attacks of the capitalists;
-- the slow rhythm of the development of struggles in the central countries and notably of their capacity for self-organization, a phenomenon which results from the deployment by the bourgeoisie of these countries of a whole arsenal of traps and mystifications." (International Review 37, “Theses on the Present Upsurge in Class Struggle”).
11) Today this analysis remains perfectly valid. It has been confirmed by the unprecedented extent and simultaneity of this third wave of struggle. This simultaneity has been most marked in Western Europe, epicentre of the proletarian revolution. It has been accompanied by massive struggles in the third world. This analysis is not contradicted by the low number of strike days in a certain number of countries (such as France and Italy) over the past year, a point which the bourgeois media have seized upon to prove the ‘passivity' of the working class, its resigned acceptance of its lot. In particular, there is no basis for saying that the third wave of struggles is already exhausted, that we have entered into a situation similar to the one which followed Poland:
-- you cannot judge the whole international situation in an immediate way, on the basis of short-term facts, especially because, as we have shown, the present wave is distinguished by the slow rhythm of its development: when revolutionaries fall into such a short-term view, as is the case for some of them today, they are getting this not from marxism but from bourgeois ideology, and are only reflecting passively the hesitations which affect the whole class:
-- for the last two years the proletariat has been engaged in a long-term combat. Such a combat inevitably goes through moments of respite, of maturation, of reflection. But in contrast to the post-Poland situation where a short but real reflux was opened up by an international defeat for the proletariat and acted like a leaden weight pressing for two years on all the main countries of western Europe, the present moments of respite (reflected in the diminution of strike days in this or that country) which the class may go through are limited in time and space; and although the bourgeoisie does everything it can to turn the workers' expectations, their efforts at reflection into passivity, the situation remains characterized by an accumulation of discontent and of potential combativity which can explode at any moment, as can be seen from recent events in France (Dunkirk, SNCF, etc);
-- the fact that in countries where the working class is traditionally combative, like France and especially Italy, there has been a particularly low numerical level of strikes, should not obscure the significance for the whole class of the development of a very strong combativity in the class movement in countries used to ‘social peace', especially in the Scandinavian countries;
-- statistics on strike days, even if they are an element which revolutionaries must study and take into consideration, do not on their own give a precise indication of the level of discontent, combativity and consciousness within the class. In particular, there is a much more significant indicator of the proletariat's state of mind and fighting potential: the more and more massive distrust towards the unions, expressed notably in an accelerated decline in membership.
12) If the present phenomenon of de-unionisation is so important, it's because of the specific role of trade unionism today as the spearhead of the bourgeois ploy of the left in opposition.
While the political parties of the left naturally have a central role in the strategy of the left in power or as a candidate for power (as in the mid-‘70s), the strategy of the left in opposition is characterised by a language and a practice which claims to directly express the workers' demands and preoccupations, and therefore bases itself principally on the bourgeois institutions closest to the daily life of the workers and present in the workplace: the unions.
Faced with the two vital necessities of the workers' struggle, extension and self-organisation, it's the task of the unions:
-- to disorient the workers, to develop among them a feeling of powerlessness through the division between different union federations or between the ‘base' and the ‘leadership';
-- to imprison and isolate struggles on the corporatist, sectoral or localist terrain;
-- to put forward, against the danger of a real extension, a false extension which aims to drown the most combative nuclei, as was done in Belgium in September ’83, or which presents extension as something limited to a particular industrial branch (miners' strike in GB) or even to the different factories of one enterprise (Renault in October ’85);
-- to prevent any spontaneous outbreak of struggle, any tendency towards self-organization, by acting in advance to call for demobilizing forms of ‘action' and by putting themselves at the head of movements as soon as they arise. This tactic of the bourgeoisie, which aims at occupying the workers' terrain and is the essential component of the strategy of the left in opposition, has been widely used in 1985. At the present time it constitutes a real political offensive of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat. The proletariat cannot avoid this political battle being imposed upon it. It cannot and must not allow the left parties and unions to manoeuvre freely on the terrain of the defence of its living standards, but must resolutely and systematically oppose and confront these manoeuvres. Revolutionaries must put themselves in the front ranks of this political combat, imposing their presence on the workers' terrain by putting forward the necessity for extension and self-organization and by denouncing the obstacles and manoeuvres of the unions.
It's through the proletariat repeatedly confronting these manoeuvres, notably in the metropoles where the most experienced sector of the proletariat confronts the most experienced sectors of the bourgeoisie, the ones capable of putting forward the most sophisticated traps, that the class will be able to develop the weapon of the mass strike, to extend and generalize its combats on an international scale and to launch the decisive confrontations with capitalism, the battles of the revolutionary period.
13) For all these reasons the present development of distrust for the unions is an essential element in the balance of forces between the classes and thus of the whole historic situation. However this distrust is itself partly responsible for the reduction in the number of struggles in different countries, particularly where the unions have been most discredited (as in France following the accidental arrival in power of the left in 1981). When the workers have for decades clung to the illusion that they can only wage the struggle in the framework of the trade unions and with their support, the loss of confidence in these organs leads them to resort to passivity in answer to the so-called ‘calls for struggle' coming from the unions. This is precisely the game the unions are playing more and more: incapable of any long-term mobilisation of the workers behind their banners and slogans, they are skilfully using the passivity and scepticism with which their appeals are met with the aim of transforming this passivity into demoralisation - of participating, in their own way, in the campaign about the ‘disappearance of the class struggle' which seeks to undermine the proletariat's confidence in itself (even though the unions, of course, claim to be the real defenders of this struggle). In this sense, the passivity many workers, including the more combative ones, display towards the ‘actions' called by the unions (strikes and demonstrations), while perfectly explicable and expressing a necessary loss of illusions in trade unionism, should not be seen as being positive in itself, since this response is exactly what the bourgeoisie wants to get from the workers at this time. The only way workers can spring this trap - and revolutionaries must encourage them in this - is not to turn away from these kind of actions but on the contrary use every opportunity for workers to assemble together around issues affecting their class interests, even when they derive from union manoeuvres, participating in them as actively and as massively as possible in order to transform them into places expressing the unity of the class beyond sectoral divisions, the combativity and determination of the proletariat, as was the case for example with the May 1st demonstrations in Hamburg. Just as there is no principle that revolutionaries should refuse to call workers to movements ‘launched' by the unions, calling for workers to be present in such movements is not a recipe that can be applied in all circumstances, but has to be evaluated according to the immediate possibilities for transforming these actions, recognising that the conditions for doing this are coming together more and more.
Because of the enormous discontent developing in the class which can only grow as a new round of capitalist attacks is unleashed in response to the coming recession; because of the considerable fighting potential accumulating; at a profound level, whose strength could be seen recently in the railway strikes in France; because the extension of struggles is being felt as an imperious necessity by a growing mass of workers - any manifestation of real workers combativity, any determined attempt to extend the struggle is, and will be more and more, pregnant with very wide-scale class movements. And it's principally in the face of the obstacles the unions put in the path of such movements, and of their search for extension, that the necessity for self-organization is being imposed more and more on the workers in the great capitalist metropoles, notably in Western Europe.
14) The question of the extension of struggles, of going beyond sectoral and professional barriers, is therefore at the centre of the perspective for the class struggle in the present period. And it's through the generalization of the capitalist attack to all sectors of the class that the conditions for a response to this question are developing. The present growth in the number of unemployed, on a scale unknown for half a century, and which is the most striking result of this generalised attack, is a powerful factor in the maturation of these conditions, to the degree that:
-- it's the whole working class, and not just the unemployed workers, which is hit by unemployment, notably by a drop in living standards brought to many working class families when they have to support one or more unemployed members;
-- unemployment does away with sectoral divisions simply because the workers are ejected from the place of production, and this also has the consequence of a lesser degree of containment by the union apparatus;
-- through the absolute impoverishment that it represents, unemployment indicates the future that lies in store for the whole working class and thus raises the perspective of a struggle for the overthrow of capitalism.
In fact, just like the dizzying ascent of militarism, but in a way that is much more directly grasped by the workers, the irreversible growth of unemployment is an irrefutable indication that capitalism has become an aberration, which plunges the masses into misery not because it produces too little but because it produces... too much. More generally, the ejection from wage labour of a growing; mass of workers demonstrates the total bankruptcy of a mode of production whose historic role was precisely to extend wage labour.
For all these reasons, unemployment will more and more constitute an essential factor in the development of consciousness throughout the class of what's really at stake in the struggles it is waging, of the fact that it has the historic task of abolishing a system that leads to such aberrations.
In this sense, unemployment is going to play, more slowly but in a much more profound manner, the same role as the war did in the emergence of the revolution in Russia and Germany in 1917-18. Furthermore, the unemployed workers will more and more tend to be at the front line of the class struggle, playing a role comparable to that of the soldiers in the Russian revolution of 1917. Against therefore what is claimed by the bourgeoisie and by certain particularly myopic revolutionaries, and even if it can initially create a certain disarray in the class, unemployment is in no way a factor that attenuates the class struggle. On the contrary, it will be an essential element in its development right up to the revolutionary period.
15) The ultimate perspective contained within the workers' struggles of today is the revolutionary confrontation with capitalism. The present situation has an enormous potential for giving rise to proletarian movements.
The total bankruptcy of capitalism revealed by the years of truth, just as it leads to an acceleration of history at the level of inter‑imperialist antagonisms, also does so at the level of the class struggle. This is expressed in particular by the fact that the moments of retreat in the struggle (as in ’81-82) are getting shorter and shorter, whereas the culminating point of each wave of combats is situated at a higher level than the previous one. And this accumulation of the experience of struggle by the proletariat, as well as the proximity between each experience, is an essential element in the coming to consciousness of the whole class about what's really at stake in its struggles. This is why revolutionaries have to be particularly vigilant about the potentialities of the present period and take great care not to underestimate this potential.
However, this does not mean that we have already entered into the phase of combats leading directly to the revolutionary period. This is still a long way ahead of us. This is because of the slow rhythm of the realisation of the irreversible collapse of capitalism, and the bourgeoisie's formidable capacity for political resistance in the decisive centres of the world-historic situation - the great metropoles of capitalism, especially Western Europe.
But these aren't the only elements. In order to understand the present situation, and the one which is to come, we also have to take into account the characteristics of the proletariat that is waging the struggle today:
-- it's composed of workers' generations who haven't gone through a defeat, unlike those who reached their maturity in the ’30s and during World War 2; because the bourgeoisie hasn't managed to inflict a decisive defeat on them, their reserves of combativity are still intact;
-- these generations have the benefit of an irreversible wearing-out of the great mystifications which in the past have made it possible to mobilize the proletariat for imperialist war (fatherland, civilization, democracy, anti-fascism, defence of the USSR, etc) .
These two essential characteristics explain why the present historic course is towards class confrontations and not towards imperialist war. However, that which makes for the present strength of the proletariat also makes for its weakness: precisely because this generation hasn't known defeat and is able to re-discover the road of class struggle, there exists between these generations and those which fought the last decisive combats in the ‘20s, an enormous gulf for which the proletariat today is paying a heavy price:
-- a considerable ignorance of its own past and lessons;
-- the absence of a revolutionary party.
These characteristics explain in particular the highly uneven course of the present workers' struggles. They make it possible to understand the moments when the proletariat loses confidence in itself, unaware of the force it can muster against the bourgeoisie. They also show how long the path in front of the proletariat is; it can't make the revolution if it hasn't consciously integrated the experience of the past and acquired its class party.
The historic resurgence of the proletariat at the end of the ’60s put the formation of the party on the agenda, but this could not be realised owing to:
-- the half-century gap separating us from the previous revolutionary parties;
-- the disappearance or atrophy of the left fractions which came out of them;
-- the distrust many workers have towards any political organization, whether proletarian or bourgeois, which is an expression of the danger of councillism as identified by the ICC, a translation of a historic weakness of the proletariat faced with the necessity to politicize its combat.
It is up to the revolutionary groups who exist today to actively prepare the conditions for the party, not by proclaiming themselves to be The Party or offering the working masses no other perspective than rallying to their banners, as the Bordigists like to do, but by developing a systematic work for the regroupment of revolutionary forces and for intervention in the class. It's through intervention in particular, by putting forward proposals for action that correspond to the needs of the class that revolutionaries will be able to prove concretely to the workers the necessity for a revolutionary organization, thus laying the foundations for the future party of the communist revolution.