It has become blindingly obvious that the longer it continues, the closer capitalist civilisation is taking us towards an ecological catastrophe of planetary proportions.

The basic facts are well known and can be obtained from a growing number of publications, both popular and scientific, so we will not de­scribe them in detail here. A simple list suffices to demonstrate the extent and depth of the danger: the growing adulteration of food through additives and livestock diseases; the contamination of water supplies through the un­restrained use of fertilisers and the dumping of toxic waste; the pollution of the air, especially in the major cities, through the combined ef­fects of industrial emissions and car exhaust fumes; the threat of radioactive contamination from the nuclear reactors and waste-dumps scattered all over the industrialised countries and the ex-Stalinist regimes - a threat that has already become a nightmare reality with the dis­asters at Windscale, Three Mile Island, and above all Chernobyl; the poisoning of the rivers, lakes and seas which have for decades been used as the rubbish tips of the world, and is now resulting in the break-down of the whole complex food chain and the destruction of or­ganisms that play an important role in the reg­ulation of the world’s climate; the accelerating destruction of the world’s forests, particularly the tropical rainforests, also altering the Earth’s climate, inducing land erosion and thus con­tributing in turn to further calamities, like the advancing desert in Africa and floods in Bangla Desh.

Furthermore, it is now apparent that quantity is turning into quality as the effects of pollu­tion are becoming both more global and more in­calculable. They’re global in that every country in the world is affected: not only the highly in­dustrialised West, but also the ‘underdeveloped’ third world and the Stalinist or ex-Stalinist regimes, which are too bankrupt to afford even the minimal controls that have been introduced in the West. Former ‘socialist’ countries like Poland, East Germany and Rumania are perhaps the most polluted in the world; virtually every town in eastern Europe has its horror stories of local factories belching out deadly toxins that cause cancer, respiratory and other diseases, of rivers that burst into flame when you throw a match onto them, and so on. But third world cities like Mexico or Cubutao in Brazil are surely not far behind.

But there’s another and even more terrifying meaning to the word ‘global’ in this context; ie, that the ecological disaster is now tangibly threatening the very life-support system of the planet. The thinning of the ozone layer, which seems to be mainly the result of the emission of CFC gases, is a clear expression of this, since the ozone layer protects all life on Earth from deadly ultra-violet radiation; and it is impossible at this stage to say what the long-term conse­quences of this process will be. The same ap­plies to the problem of the greenhouse effect, which is now being accepted as a real threat by a growing number of scientific panels, the latest being the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climatic Change. The IPCC and others have not only warned of the massive floods, droughts and famines that could result if there is no signifi­cant cut-back in the present level of emissions of greenhouse gases, particularly carbon diox­ide; they have also pointed to the danger of a ‘feedback’ process, in which each aspect of pollution and environmental destruction acts on the other to produce an irreversible spiral of disaster.

It is also obvious that the class whose system has caused this mess is incapable of doing anything about it. Of course, in the last few years nearly all the leading lights of the bour­geoisie have been miraculously converted to the cause of saving the environment. The supermar­kets are stocked full of goods advertising how free they are from artificial additives; cosmetics, detergents and nappy labels vie with each other to prove how much they respect the ozone layer, the air or the rivers. And the political leaders from Thatcher to Gorbachev talk more and more about how we must all work together to protect our endangered planet.

As usual the hypocrisy of this class of gang­sters knows no bounds. The bourgeoisie’s real commitment to saving the planet can be mea­sured by looking at what they are actually pre­pared to do. For example, they made a great fuss about the recent ozone conference in London, where the main countries of the world, including the previously recalcitrant third world giants India and China, agreed to phase out CFCs by the year 2000. But this still means that a further 20 percent of the ozone layer could be destroyed over the next decade; in that pe­riod, a volume of ozone depleting gases would be released representing half as much again as the total volume already released since CFCs were invented.

It’s even worse when it comes to the green­house effect. The US administration has banned the phrase ‘global warming’ from all its official communiques. And the countries who do on pa­per accept the IPCC’s predictions have so far committed themselves to do no more than sta­bilise carbon dioxide emissions at their present level. And above all they have no serious strat­egy for reducing their economies’ dependence on fossil fuels or the private automobile, which are the main contributors to the greenhouse effect. Nothing is being done to halt the de­struction of the rainforests, which both adds to the accumulation of greenhouse gases and re­duces the planet’s capacity to reabsorb them: the UN’s own Tropical Forest Action Plan is en­tirely dominated by logging companies, and be­sides, the denuding of the rainforests by log­ging, cattle and industrial interests, as well as by famished peasants desperate for land or fuel, could only be halted if the third world was suddenly relieved of its massive burden of debt and poverty. As for plans to build defences against floods or to prevent famine, the popula­tions of the most threatened countries, such as Bangla Desh, can expect the same kind of ‘help’ as that given to the inhabitants of the world’s earthquake zones, or the victims of drought in Africa.

The bourgeoisie’s response to all these prob­lems highlights the fact that the very structure of its system renders it incapable of dealing with the ecological problems it has created. Global ecological problems require a global solu­tion. But despite all the international confer­ences, despite all the pious talk about interna­tional cooperation, capitalism is irreducibly based on competition between national economies. Its inability to achieve any real level of global cooperation is in fact being exacerbated today as the old bloc structures crumble and the system slides into a war of each against all. The deepening of the world economic crisis which brought the Russian bloc to its knees is going to aggravate competition and national rivalries; it will mean each company, each country, acting with ever-greater irresponsibility in the mad scramble for economic survival.

Whatever small concessions are made to envi­ronmental considerations, the dominant trend will be for health, safety and pollution controls to be thrown out of the window. This has al­ready been the case over the past decade, which has seen a marked rise in the number of industrial, transport and other disasters, the result of furious cost-cutting in the face of the economic crisis. As the trade war between na­tions hots up, things are due to get a lot worse.

What’s more, this free-for-all will increase the danger of local military conflicts in regions where the working class is too weak to prevent them. Now that these conflicts are no longer contained by the discipline of the old imperialist blocs, they run a far greater risk of unleashing the horrors of chemical and even nuclear war­fare on a ‘local’ scale, massacring millions and further poisoning the atmosphere of the planet. Who can believe that, caught up in a mounting spiral of chaos and confusion, the bourgeoisies of the world are going to work harmoniously to­gether to deal with the threat to the environ­ment? If anything, the results of ecological dif­ficulties - dwindling water supplies, floods, dis­putes over refugees, etc - will further increase local imperialist tensions. The bourgeoisie is al­ready aware of this. As the Egyptian foreign minister Butros Ghali put it recently, " the next war in our region will be over the waters of the Nile, not politics."

In its present phase of advancing decomposi­tion, the ruling class is increasingly losing control of its social system. Humanity can no longer afford to leave the planet in its hands. The ‘ecological crisis’ is further proof that cap­italism has to be destroyed before it drags the whole world into the abyss.

Ideological pollution

But if the bourgeoisie is incapable of repairing the damage it has done to the planet, it cer­tainly doesn’t hesitate to use ecological issues to fuel its campaigns of mystification aimed at the only force in society that can do anything about the problem - the world proletariat.

The ecological question is ideal in this re­spect, which is why the bourgeoisie makes little attempt to hide the gravity of the problem (and may even indulge in a little exaggeration when it suits). Time and time again we are told that problems like the hole in the ozone layer, or global warming, ‘affect us all’, that they ‘make no distinctions’ of colour, class or country. And it is true that pollution, like other aspects of the decomposition of capitalist society (drug ad­diction, crime, etc), does affect all classes of so­ciety (even if it’s usually the most oppressed and exploited who suffer the most). So what better basis could there be for diluting the proletariat, making it forget its own class inter­ests, drowning it in an amorphous mass where there is no longer any distinction of interest between workers, shopkeepers ... or the ruling class itself? The constant ideological barrage about the environment thus complements all the campaigns about democracy and ‘people power’ unleashed after the fall of the eastern bloc.

Look at how they twist the ecological issues to suit their needs. These problems are so terri­fying, so urgent, they say, surely they’re more important than your egoistic fight for higher wages or against job losses? Indeed, aren’t most of these problems due to the fact that ‘we’ in the advanced countries ‘are consuming too much’? Shouldn’t we be prepared to eat less meat, use less energy, even accept this or that factory closure ‘for the good of the planet’? What better alibi for the sacrifices demanded by the crisis of the capitalist economy.

And then there are all the arguments sup­porting the mythology of ‘reforms’ and ‘realistic change’. Surely something has to be done now, they say. So shouldn’t we be looking to see which election candidate offers the best ecologi­cal policies, which party promises to do the most for the environment? Doesn’t the concern expressed by Gorbachev, or Mitterand, or Thatcher prove that the politicians can indeed respond to popular pressure? Don’t the experi­ments in energy conservation, or solar energy, or wind power, which various ‘enlightened’ gov­ernments like Sweden or Holland are carrying out today, prove that change is just a matter of will and enterprise on the part of the politi­cians, combined with pressure from the citizens below? Doesn’t the switch to environmentally friendly products prove that the big companies really can be affected by ‘consumer action’?

And if all these ‘hopeful’ and ‘positive’ ap­proaches fail to convince, then the bourgeoisie can still profit from the feelings of helplessness and despair that can only get reinforced when the isolated citizen peeps out of his window and sees a whole world being poisoned. If you can’t get the exploited to believe your lies, then at least a working class that has been atomised and demoralised doesn’t pose a threat to your system.

The false alternatives of the ‘Greens’

But in the past decade or so a new political force has appeared on the scene - one that claims to stand for a radical approach that puts the defence of the environment above all other considerations: the Greens. In Germany they have become a force to be reckoned with in na­tional political life. In eastern Europe, ecological groups figured heavily in the democratic oppo­sitions that have stepped into the breech left by the collapse of Stalinism. Green parties and pressure groups are appearing in most of the advanced countries, and even in the Third World.

But the Greens are also part of the rotting capitalist order. This is evident when you look at the Greens in Germany: they’ve become a re­spectable parliamentary party, with numerous seats in the national Bundestag and various re­sponsible posts in local and regional govern­ment. The overt integration of the Greens into capitalist normality was symbolised a few years back when the ‘extra-parliamentary’, anarchist rebel of 1968, Daniel Cohn Bendit (remember the slogan ‘Elections, piege a cons’?) himself became an MP in the German parliament, and even ex­pressed his desire to become a minister. In the Bundestag the Greens engage in all the sordid manoeuvres typical of bourgeois parties - now acting as a ‘spoiler’ to keep the SPD in opposi­tion, now forming an alliance with the social democrats against the ruling CDU.

It’s true that the Greens are divided into a ‘realo’ wing which is content to focus on the parliamentary arena, and a ‘fundi’ wing which stresses more radical, extraparliamentary forms of action. And much of the appeal of the Green parties and pressure groups is that they play on people’s distrust of bureaucratic central governments and parliamentary corruption. As an alternative they offer campaigns against local instances of pollution, spectacular protest stunts of the type Greenpeace specialises in, marches and demonstrations, while calling for the devo­lution of political power and ‘citizens’ initiatives’ of all kinds. But none of these activities step an inch outside the general campaigns of the bour­geoisie. On the contrary, they serve to ensure that these campaigns penetrate into the very grassroots of society.

The ‘radical’ Greens are champions of inter­classism. They address themselves to the ‘responsible individual’, to the ‘local community’, to the good conscience of mankind in general. The actions they initiate attempt to mobilise all citizens, regardless of class, into the fight against pollution. And when they criticise bu­reaucracy and the remoteness of central gov­ernment, it’s only to put forward a vision of ‘local democracy’ equally bourgeois in content.

They are no less zealous in their support for the reformist illusion. The actions they organise are invariably aimed at making companies or governments more responsible, cleaner, greener. Just one example: a Friends of the Earth leaflet explaining how Third World debt leads to the destruction of the rainforests. So what’s the an­swer? The big western banks "should cancel all the debts owed by the world’s very poorest countries, and reduce debts owed by the other major debtor countries by at least one half. They can now afford to do so" (‘Stamp out the debt, not the rainforests’). And how will the banks be persuaded of this? "The banks won’t move unless they are shown how strongly their customers feel about this issue. Stamping your cheques with ‘stamp out the debt not the rain­forests’ and taking the ‘Debt Pledge’ are two powerful ways to show them how you feel" (ibid).

Thus the Greens invite us to believe in the effectiveness of ‘consumer power’, and in the possibility of appealing to the better nature of money-bags who think nothing of condemning millions to starvation just by shifting their capital from one country to another. It’s the same when the Greens paint their picture of a possible future: a world where small, ecologically sound businesses never turn into rapacious capitalist giants, a pacifist vision of nation speaking unto nation, in short a gentle, caring, impossible capitalism.

But wait. There are currents in or around the Green movement who claim to be more radical than this, who actually criticise capitalism and even talk about revolution. Some of them are so radical that they claim that marxism itself is no more than the other side of the capitalist ‘megamachine’. Look at the regimes in the east they say: that’s the logical result of marxism’s worship of ‘progress’ technology, industry. Inspired by ‘thinkers’ like Baudrillard, they may even explain in very complex language that marxism is just another ‘productivist’ ideology (in this they are joined by defrocked Stalinists like Martin Jaques, who said at a recent confer­ence of the crumbling British CP that "there is no getting away from the fact that the marxist tradition is productionist at its heart ... the conquest of nature, the forces of production, the commitment to economic growth"). Anarcho-primitivists like the Fifth Estate paper in Detroit call for nothing less than the eradication of industrial-technological society and a return to primitive communism. The ‘deep ecologists’ of Earth First. go even further: for their ideolo­gists, the problem isn’t just industrial society, or civilisation, but man himself ...

Marxism against the Green mystifications

The notion that an abstract entity called ‘man’ is responsible for the current ecological mess is not restricted to a few esoteric Green ideolo­gists; it is in fact a widespread cliché of the conventional wisdom. But in either case, it’s an idea that can only lead to despair, because if human beings are the problem, how can human beings find a solution? It’s no accident that some of the ‘deep ecologists’ have welcomed AIDS as a necessary agent for pruning the world of excess humans ...

The position of the anarcho-primitivists leads to the same bleak conclusions. To be ‘against technology’ is also to be against mankind; man created himself through labour, and "labour be­gins with the making of tools" (Engels, ‘The part played by labour in the transition from ape to man’). The logic of the anti-technological po­sition is to try to get back to a pre-human past when nature was undisturbed by the clangour of human activity: "The animal merely uses its environment and brings about changes in it simply by its presence; man by his changes makes it serve his ends, masters it. This is the final, essential distinction between man and other animals." (ibid)

But even if the ‘anti-technologists’ would be content to return to the hunter-gatherer stage of culture, the result would be the same, since the material conditions of such a society pre­supposed a world population of no more than a few million. These conditions could only be re­stored through a massive ‘cull’ of human beings, something that capitalism in its death-throes is already preparing for us. Thus these ‘radical’ ecologists - products of a disintegrating petty bourgeoisie which has no historical future and can only look back to an idealised past - are recruited as theorisers and apologists for a de­scent into barbarism that is already well under­way.

Against these nihilistic ideologies, marxism, ex­pressing the standpoint of the only class that does have a future today, insists that the pre­sent ecological nightmare can’t be explained by invoking categories like man, technology or in­dustry in a totally vague and ahistoric manner. Man does not exist outside history, and technol­ogy cannot be divorced from the social relations in which it has developed. Man’s interaction with nature can also only be understood in its real historical and social context.

Humanity has existed on this planet for at least several hundred thousand years - most of them at the stage of primitive communism, of hunter gatherer societies where there was a relatively stable equilibrium between man and nature, a fact reflected in the myths and rituals of the primitive peoples. The dissolution of this archaic community and the rise of class society, a qualitative step in the alienation of man from man, also determined new alienations between man and nature. The first cases of extensive ecological destruction coincide with the early city states; there is considerable evidence that the very process of deforestation which allowed civilisations such as the Sumerian, the Babylonian, the Sinhalese and others to develop a large-scale agricultural base also, in the longer term, played a considerable role in their decline and disappearance.

But these were local, limited phenomena: prior to capitalism, all civilisations were based on ‘natural economy’: the bulk of production was still oriented towards the immediate consumption of use values, even though, in contrast to the primitive community, a large part of it was ap­propriated by the exploiting class. Capitalism, by contrast, is a system where all production is geared towards the market, towards the en­larged reproduction of exchange value; it is a social formation far more dynamic than any pre­vious system, and this dynamic compelled it to move inexorably towards the creation of a world economy. But the very dynamism and globality of capital has meant that the problem of ecologi­cal destruction has now been raised to a plane­tary level. For it is not marxism, but capitalism, which is "productionist at its heart". Goaded by competition, by the anarchic rivalry of capitalist units struggling for control of the market, it obeys an inner compulsion to expand to the furthest limits permitted to it, and in this mer­ciless drive towards its own self-expansion, it cannot pause to consider either the health and welfare of the producers, or the future ecologi­cal consequences of how and what it produces. The secret of today’s ecological destruction is to be found in the very secret of capitalist pro­duction: "Accumulate, accumulate. That is Moses and the prophets..." (Capital vol 1, ‘Conversion of surplus value into capital’).

The problem behind the ecological catastrophe, then, is not ‘industrial society’ in the abstract, as so many of the ecologists proclaim: hitherto the only industrial society that has ever existed has been capitalism. This of course includes the Stalinist regimes, who are a veritable caricature of the capitalist subordination of consumption to accumulation; those who blame marxism for the ecological devastation in the east merely lend their voices to the current hue and cry of the bourgeoisie about the ‘failure of communism’ following the collapse of the eastern imperialist bloc. The problem does not lie in this or that form of capitalism, but in the essential mecha­nisms of a society which grows not in conscious harmony with the needs of man and with what Marx called man’s "inorganic body", nature, but for the sake of profit alone.

But the ecological problem also has its specific history within capitalism.

Already in the ascendant period, Marx and Engels had many occasions to denounce the way that capitalism’s thirst for profit poisoned the living and working conditions of the working class. They even considered that the big in­dustrial cities had already become too large to provide the basis for viable human communities, and considered that the "abolition of the sepa­ration between town and countryside" was an integral part of the communist programme (imagine what they would have said about the megacities of the late 20th century ...)

But it is essentially in the present epoch of capitalism, the epoch which since 1914 has been defined by marxists as that of the decadence of this mode of production, that capital’s ruthless destruction of the environment takes on a dif­ferent scale and quality, while at the same time losing any historical justification. This is the epoch in which all the capitalist nations are forced to compete with each other over a satu­rated world market; an epoch therefore, of a permanent war economy, with a disproportionate growth of heavy industry; an epoch charac­terised by the irrational, wasteful duplication of industrial complexes in each national unit, by the desperate pillaging of natural resources by each nation as it tries to survive in the pitiless rat-race of the world market. The consequences of all this for the environment are now becom­ing crystal clear; the intensification of ecological problems can be measured according to the dif­ferent phases of capitalist decadence. The main growth of carbon dioxide emissions has taken place this century, with a considerable increase since the 1960s. CFCs were only invented in the 1930s and have only been used extensively over the past few decades. The rise of the ‘megacities’ is very much a post World War Two phenomenon, as is the development of forms of agriculture that have been no less ecologically damaging than most forms of industry. The frenzied destruction of the rainforests has taken place in the same period, and especially over the last decade: the rate has probably doubled since 1979.

What we are seeing today is the culmination of decades of unplanned, wasteful, irrational eco­nomic and military activity by decadent capital­ism; the qualitative acceleration of the ecological crisis over the past decade ‘coincides’ with the opening of the final phase of capitalist deca­dence - the phase of decomposition. By this we mean that after 20 years of profound and ever-worsening economic crisis, in which neither of the major social classes have been able to carry through their historic alternatives of world war or world revolution, the whole social order is beginning to crack up, to descend into an un­controlled downward spiral of chaos and de­struction (see International Review n°62 ‘Decomposition, final phase of capitalist Decadence’).

The capitalist system has long ceased to rep­resent any progress for mankind. The disas­trous ecological consequences of its ‘growth’ since 1945 is one more demonstration that this growth has taken place on a diseased, destruc­tive basis, and constitutes a slap in the face for all those pundits - some of them unfortunately to be found in the proletarian political movement - who point to this growth in order to challenge the marxist notion of the decadence of capital­ism.

But this doesn’t mean that marxists - unlike most of the bourgeoisie today, and all of its petty bourgeois hangers-on - are abandoning the notion of progress or making any conces­sions to the anti-technological prejudices of the radical Greens.

The marxist concept of progress was never the same as the bourgeoisie’s one-sided, linear notion of a steady ascent from primitive dark­ness and superstition to the light of modern reason and democracy. It is a dialectical vision which recognises that historical progress has taken place through the clash of contradictions, that it has involved catastrophes and even re­gressions, that the advance of ‘civilisation’ has also meant the refinement of exploitation and the aggravation of alienation between man and man and man and nature. But it also recognises that man’s growing capacity to transform nature through the development of his productive pow­ers, to subject the unconscious processes of nature to his own conscious control, provides the only basis for overcoming this alienation and arriving at a higher form of community than the restricted communism of primitive times - a world-wide, unified community that will be based not on scarcity and the submerging of the individual into the collective, but on an un­precedented level of abundance that will supply "the material conditions for the total, universal development of the productive powers of the in­dividual" (Marx, Grundrisse). By creating the material basis for this global human community, capitalism represented an immense step forward over the natural economies which preceded it.

Today the notion of ‘controlling’ nature has been vilely distorted by the experience of capi­talism, which has treated the whole of nature as just another commodity, as dead matter, as something essentially external to man. Against this view - but also against the passive nature-worship which is prevalent amongst many of to­day’s Greens - Engels defined the communist position when he wrote:

"At every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature - but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly" (‘The part played by labour....’)

Indeed, despite all its so-called ‘conquests’, capitalism is revealing today that its control over nature is the ‘control’ of the sorcerer’s apprentice, not of the sorcerer himself. It has laid the basis for a really conscious mastery of nature, but its very mode of operation turns all its achievements into disasters. As Marx put it:

"At the same pace that mankind masters na­ture, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy. Even the pure light of science seems unable to shine but on a dark background of ignorance. All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life and stultifying hu­man life into a material force." (Speech at the anniversary of the People’s Paper, April 1856)

Today this contradiction has reached the point where mankind stands at a two-pronged fork in the road of history, facing the choice between the conscious control over his own social and productive forces, and thus a "correct applica­tion" of the laws of nature, or destruction at the hands of the very forces that he himself has set in motion. The choice, in other words, between communism or barbarism.

Only the proletarian revolution can save the planet

If communism is the only answer to the ecologi­cal crisis, then the only force that can intro­duce a communist society is the working class.

As with other aspects of the decomposition of capitalist society, the threat to the environment highlights the fact that the longer the prole­tariat delays its revolution, the greater the danger of the revolutionary class being ex­hausted and undermined, of the whole course towards destruction and chaos reaching a point of no return that would make both the struggle for revolution, and the construction of a new society, an impossible task. Thus, in so far as it underlines the growing urgency of the commu­nist revolution, an awareness of the depth of the current ecological problems will play its part in the transition of the proletarian strug­gle from a defensive, economic level to the level of a conscious and political combat against cap­ital as a whole.

But it would be an error to think that the ecological issue per se can be a focus for the mobilisation of the proletariat on its own class terrain today. Although certain limited aspects of the problem (eg health and safety at work) can be integrated into authentic class demands, the issue as such doesn’t allow the proletariat to affirm itself as a distinct social force. Indeed, as we have seen, it provides an ideal pretext for the bourgeoisie’s inter-classist campaigns, and the workers will have to resist actively the various attempts of the bourgeoisie, particularly its Green and leftist elements, to use the issue as a means of dragging them off their own class ground. It remains the case that it is above all by struggling against the effects of the eco­nomic crisis - against wage cuts, unemployment, growing impoverishment at all levels - that the workers will be able to constitute themselves into a force capable of confronting the entire bourgeois order.

The working class will only be able to deal with the ecological issue as a whole when it has conquered political power on a world scale. Indeed it has now become plain that this will be one of the most pressing tasks of the transition period, and is in any case intimately bound up with other urgent problems such as world hunger and the reorganisation of agriculture.

This isn’t the place for a detailed discussion of the measures the proletariat will have to take both to clean up the mess bequeathed by capi­talism and to move towards a qualitatively new relationship between man and nature. Here we want to stress one point only: that the problems facing a victorious proletariat will not funda­mentally be technical but political and social.

The existing technical and industrial infras­tructure is profoundly marred by the irra­tionality of capitalist development in this epoch, and no doubt a very considerable part of it will have to be demolished as a precondition for building a productive base that does not become a threat to the natural environment. But on the purely technical level, a number of alternatives have already been developed, or could have been developed if sufficient resources had been devoted to them. It’s possible already, for exam­ple, through the system of combined heat and energy in fossil-fuel burning power stations, to substantially cut carbon dioxide and other harmful emissions while making efficient use of almost 100% of the waste material produced. Similarly, it’s already possible to develop many other alternative sources of energy : solar power, wind power, wave power, etc, which are both renewable and virtually pollution-free; there are also enormous possibilities contained in the process of nuclear fusion, which would avoid many of the problems associated with nu­clear fission.

Capitalism has already developed its technical capacities to the point where the problem of pollution could be solved. But the fact that the real problem is social in nature is highlighted by the many instances in which capitalism’s own short term economic or military interests have not permitted it to develop non-polluting tech­nologies. We know, for example, that the oil, gas and electrical industries in the USA mounted a campaign to crowd out the development of solar power after World War Two; we have recently learned that the British government collaborated in a report which doctored its figures to prove that nuclear power was cheaper than wave power; the motor industry has long stood in the way of the development of less polluting forms of transport, and so on.

But the issue goes deeper than the conscious policies of this or that government or industry. The problem, as we have seen, lies in the basic operation of the capitalist mode of production, and it can only be solved by attacking this mode of production at its very roots.

Capital wantonly destroys the natural envi­ronment because it must accumulate or die; the only answer is to suppress the very principle of capital accumulation, to produce not for profit but for human need. Capital ravages the world’s resources because it is divided into competing national units, because it is funda­mentally anarchic and cannot produce with the interests of the future in mind; the only answer is the abolition of the nation state, the commu­nisation of all the Earth’s human and natural resources, and the drawing up of what Bordiga called a "a plan for living for the human species". In short, the problem can only be solved by a working class that is conscious of the need to revolutionise the very bases of so­cial life, and which has in its hands the political instruments for carrying through the transition to a communist society. Organised in its workers councils on a world scale, drawing all the world’s oppressed masses along with it, the in­ternational proletariat can and must set about the creation of a world where an unprecedented material abundance will not be in conflict with the health of the natural environment, indeed where both are seen to condition each other mutually; a world in which mankind, freed at last from the domination of toil and scarcity, will begin to enjoy living on this planet.

Peering through the fogs of exploitation and pollution with which capitalist civilisation has shrouded the Earth, this surely was the world that Marx glimpsed when he foresaw, in his 1844 Manuscripts, a society which would embody "the unity of being of man with nature - the true resurrection of nature - the naturalisation of man and the humanisation of nature both brought to fulfilment".

CDW

At the time of writing, the US armed forces are encircling and asphyxiating Iraq. There's every sign that we're heading towards a murderous confrontation for which the populations of the region will pay a terrible price. They will be made victims of privations, bombing, gas, terror. Victims of war. Victims of capitalism.

The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait is fundamentally the result of the new historic situation opened up by the collapse of the eastern bloc. It is another expression of the growing decomposition of the capitalist system. And the gigantic deployment of armed force by the great powers, mainly by the USA to be more precise, reveals their increasing concern to do something about the disorder that is spreading across the world.

But in the long run the reaction of the great powers will lead to the opposite of what they intended, turning into another factor of destabilization and disorder. In the long run, it will further accelerate the slide into chaos, dragging the whole of humanity with it.

There's only one force which can offer an alternative - the world proletariat. And the name of that alternative is communism.

What was supposed to happen after the disap­pearance of the eastern bloc? A new era of peace and prosperity was going to begin. By working together, the USA and the USSR were going to put an end to the conflicts which have ravaged the world since 1945. Perpetuating the Stalinist lie about the socialist character of the USSR and the eastern countries, the western bourgeoisie proclaimed the victory of capitalism over 'communism' and 'marxism'. The eastern countries were going to enjoy the delights of western-style capitalism, and the world economy would be revived by this new market. In sum, the best of all possible worlds was before us. Marx was declared old hat, at best a curiosity. Lenin was triumphantly referred to as the 'great corpse' of the year. Certain bourgeois ideologues, carried away by enthusiasm, even proclaimed the end of history!

Six months. Six months was all it took to ex­plode all these chimaeras, all these lies. As the communist groups, the organizations which re­ally remained faithful to marxism, pointed out then and continue to do so now, capitalism is descending inexorably into economic catastrophe[1].

The countries of the periphery, of the so­ called 'third world', are daily hell for the im­mense majority of their inhabitants; a hell which gets worse and worse.

The countries of the former eastern bloc are sunk in the economic swamp inherited from Stalinist state capitalism; a complete and dra­matic disaster for millions of human beings, without any hope of improvement, or even of any slow-down in the decline.

The USA is entering into open recession, a fact openly recognized by the bourgeoisie itself. The world's first economic power is falling and it's already dragging the main industrial coun­tries, such as Britain, along with it.

Six months later, all the grand declarations about peace are being reduced to naught by the conflict in the Middle East. And the year's 'great corpse', Lenin, returns to affirm with re­newed vigor that "in the capitalist system, particularly in its imperialist stage, wars are in­evitable."[2]

The illusion lasted six months. Now the masks are falling and the reality of the capitalist sys­tem in decomposition comes to the surface - a system of implacable barbarism, a system based on misery, hunger, catastrophes, on the seizure of hostages, on murder and repression, mas­sacres and wars. A system covered in muck and blood, which is what Karl Marx said about capi­talism when it was still in its youth; in its pe­riod of senility, it's showing itself to be far worse.

The lies are crumbling and the new historic situation opened up by the collapse of the countries of Stalinist state capitalism and by the disappearance of the two imperialist blocs, far from opening up a new era of peace, is being revealed in all its horror.

The end of the 'cold war' doesn't mean the end of imperialist conflicts.

"In the period of capitalist decadence, all states are imperialist, and take the necessary measures to satisfy their appetites: war econ­omy, arms production, etc. We must state clearly that the deepening convulsions of the world economy can only sharpen the opposition be­tween different states, including and increas­ingly on the military level. The difference, in the coming period, will be that these antago­nisms which were previously contained and used by the two great imperialist blocs will now come to the fore. The disappearance of the Russian imperialist gendarme, and that to come of the American gendarme as far as its one-time 'partners' are concerned, opens the door to the unleashing of a whole series of more local rival­ries. For the moment, these rivalries and confrontations cannot degenerate into a world war (even supposing the proletariat was no longer capable of putting up a resistance). However, with the disappearance of the discipline imposed by the two blocs, these conflicts are liable to become more frequent, and more violent, partic­ularly in those areas where the proletariat is weakest." ('After the Collapse of the Eastern Bloc, Destabilization and Chaos', International Review 61, 2nd Quarter 1990).

Six months later, the reality of capitalist soci­ety, the reality of a system rotting on its feet and sinking deeper and deeper into chaos, has strikingly confirmed these lines.

Iraq's invasion of Kuwait is part of the slide into chaos

Prosperity and peace, we were promised after the fall of the Berlin Wall. What we've got is crisis and war. The war with Iraq isn't all down to the 'new Hitler' Saddam Hussein. After the events in Eastern Europe, it is another major expression of the phase of decomposition which capitalism has entered. It is the product of the new historic situation opened up by the collapse of the eastern bloc, the product of the growing tendency towards a loss of control over the sit­uation by the world bourgeoisie, towards a war of each against all, towards instability and an­archy throughout the world.

Contrary to what we're being told, the strik­ing aspect of the crisis in the Gulf isn't the unanimity of the great powers in their condem­nation of and opposition to Iraq - we'll come back to this - but the fact that a country like Iraq is daring to defy the order established in the region by the world's leading power, with­out the assent or support of another great power.

Yesterday, ie a year ago, Saddam Hussein would have been led to see reason very quickly by the higher logic of the conflict between two imperialist blocs. Today, his adventure has irre­deemably changed and destabilized the whole of the Middle East. Now all the countries of the region, the countries of the Arabian Peninsula, Jordan, even Syria, are entering into an era of instability. The whole region is going towards 'Lebanonization.'

Inevitably, conflicts of this type, more and more numerous, less and less controlled by the great powers, and are going to proliferate through­out the world because of the economic catastro­phe hitting all countries, big or small, and because of a world situation where the discipline of the two blocs has ceased to exist. As a re­sult, small states stuck in a dead-end will be pushed more and more into military adventures.

After the war against Iran, a horrible butch­ery which left a million dead, Iraq found itself with a debt of more than $70 billion, for a pop­ulation of 17 million inhabitants ($4,000 debt per person, including women, children and the el­derly!), and with an army of ... one million sol­diers.

The country was quite incapable of paying back its debts. Completely asphyxiated, it had no alternative but to play the only ace it held: the biggest army in the region. Not only did it do a bit of armed robbery with the treasuries of Kuwait, it is also trying to assert itself as the dominant power over the entire region which is so important from an economic and strategic point of view. This is the unavoidable path of imperialism which all states are forced to take by the growing economic crisis and the general decadence of capitalist society. And in the phase of decomposition, the transition from trade war to imperialist war has become all the more rapid.

Hussein isn't a madman. He is the man of the situation, a product of contemporary capitalism. He's even the creation of those who are fighting him today. Yesterday the western powers didn't have enough words of praise for his far-sight­edness, his courage, his greatness, when Iraq was their instrument for bringing Khomeini's Iran to heel. Yesterday, the great western democracies themselves armed Iraq with the most modern engines of death. And they contin­ued to do so without any qualms even when he was using these weapons to bombard and terrorize civil populations in the big towns of Iran, and gas Kurdish towns in Iraq itself.

They only stopped, or limited, their military deliveries when Iraq was no longer able to pay for them or for its debts. This is what the world bourgeoisie understands by the defense of 'international law' and 'the rights of man.'

Particularly repulsive is the cynical use of thousands of hostages by Iraq and by... the western powers. It's true that Saddam Hussein's seizure of hostages is a hateful act. It's the deed of a hunted beast, surrounded and with no avenue of escape.

But the hostage issue is being used quite consciously by the western bourgeoisie to build up a deafening propaganda campaign which is intended to justify its war aims and enroll the population behind them. If necessary, it won't hesitate to sacrifice the hostages, blaming it on the 'butcher of Baghdad' as he's now presented in the bourgeois press.

Do we have to remind anyone of the shameful use made of the US embassy hostages in Iran in 1979? It's just been revealed that this episode allowed the CIA - whose director at the time was a certain G. Bush - to get Reagan elected and increase military spending[3].

Let's have no illusion: all possible means, how­ever ignoble and barbaric, and particularly ter­ror and terrorism, are going to be used more and more in the coming conflicts by the various states involved. Because other conflicts will in­evitably arise, other Husseins armed and sup­ported by the great powers will launch them­selves into wars of the same kind. Local imperi­alist conflicts, products of the growing chaos into which capitalism is sinking, are going to further aggravate and accelerate this chaos.

The USA alone can be the world's policeman

Faced with this irreversible tendency towards chaos, the great world powers are trying to re­act. Just as the western countries continue to give their support to Gorbachev in his attempts to deal with the anarchy in the USSR, so they can't remain passive in the face of Iraq's ad­venture and the dangers of destabilization it contains.

The unanimous condemnation of Iraq by the great powers expresses an awareness of this danger and a will to limit and prevent the out­break of these kinds of conflicts. Not because of their concern for universal peace or the well­being of the populations, but in order to main­tain their power and their grip over the world. What they call 'peace' and 'civilization' is just the most brutal and barbaric imperialism, the power of the strongest over the weakest.

Of course it's the USA, the world's leading power, which has reacted with the greatest breadth and determination. The blockade adopted by the UN was imposed above all by the USA. The intervention of western military forces has been carried out under the inflexible leadership of the USA.

The Americans could not allow the Arabian Peninsula to plunge into war, could not let Hussein's Iraq control the world's main sources of oil. And above all they needed to call a halt to the imperialist, adventurist, war-like aspira­tions of the increasing number of regimes which might be tempted to imitate Saddam Hussein.

The godfather of the world's mafia doesn't like it when small neighborhood crooks think that everything is permissible and start disrupting business with unauthorized hold-ups. It also can't allow its authority, and the fear it in­spires, to be put into question. Thus the formidable deployment of American military power, not only to cleanse the outrage with blood, to punish Iraq, and probably even get rid of Hussein, but also to make an example to the whole world and call a halt to the slide into chaos.

The American military force is the biggest since the Vietnam War and is backed up by the biggest logistical operation since the Second World War, according to the US generals.

More than 100,000 men already on the ground in Saudi Arabia. Two aircraft carriers in the Sea of Oman, and others in the Mediterranean. The most sophisticated bombers, the F-111 and the F-117, labeled ‘stealth' because undetectable by radar, are based in Turkey and Arabia. Up to 700 planes, 500 of them fighters. Innumerable missiles pointing at Iraq.

Although this information is supposed to be secret, the admiring bourgeois journalists, be­side themselves with excitement at the joyous approach of open warfare, tell us that offensive nuclear submarines are in place around the air­craft carriers. From the Oman Sea, or from the west of. Cyprus, they could bombard Baghdad with an accuracy of up to 500 meters, we are informed. But that's nothing compared with the cruise missiles which can be launched by the American battleships also in place there; they can hit a target in Baghdad with an accuracy of a few meters. Fantastic, eh? For the journalists, a marvel of efficiency. In reality, a nightmare.

A nightmare because we know quite well that the bourgeoisie, whatever its nationality, is quite capable of the mass bombings of civilians. Because we know quite ,well that the American bourgeoisie, saluted by its allies at the time, didn't hesitate to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 - even though Japan had been asking for an armistice for a month - simply to stop the advance of ... the USSR in the Far East[4].

Because US aviation showed its savoir-faire about hitting human targets when it bombarded Panama (December 1989), the poor quarters es­pecially, leaving 10,000 dead, or Tripoli (March 1986), Because we know very well that Bush and his allies could well decide to raze Baghdad to the ground - with or without hostages - to make an example, just like Saddam Hussein gassed the Kurdish population.

It's the best of all possible worlds, capitalism, which holds millions of human beings hostage and which doesn't hesitate to sacrifice them when necessary.

The weapons are now being deployed on an enormous scale and are extraordinarily destruc­tive. Bush has threatened to respond to gas attacks with more gas attacks, and even with nuclear weapons. Horror has become a banality and the threat of using nuclear weapons has become something natural, quite in the order of things. No one takes offence at it. Not even the bourgeois pacifists who are usually only pacifist in times of peace, but as bellicose as anyone else when the conflicts break out.

But hypocrisy and cynicism don't end there.

It appears, discretely, that the USA deliberately allowed Iraq to engage in its adventure. The international bourgeois press has clearly indi­cated it. For example, the French intelligence "are not unaware of the fact that American in­telligence services had precise enough informa­tion to prove that Iraq was preparing to invade Kuwait ... Probably they took advantage of this 'expected circumstance' (the words of a high official) to justify a military face-off. Weren't the Americans waiting for Saddam Hussein to be 'in the wrong', thus allowing the US to 'legitimately' destroy the Iraqi military infras­tructures which could have been used by the Baghdad regime to produce nuclear weapons?"[5].

Whether true or false - and no doubt it is true[6] - this lays bare the methods of the bourgeoisie, its lies, its manipulations, the way it uses events. It also helps us to see more clearly how cynically it has used the thousands of hostages held by Iraq to prepare 'public opinion' for direct military intervention.

But whether true or false, it doesn't alter the fact that Iraq had no choice in the matter. The country was driven to it. And the USA allowed Saddam Hussein's adventure to happen, exploited it, conscious of a situation of growing chaos and the need to make an example.

The USSR: a second-rate imperialist power

Every day there is further confirmation of the fact that the USSR has fallen to the level of a second-rate power. In this conflict, despite the loss of the Iraqi market for its weapons, it has had no choice but to line up behind American power and policy. It's done this from the start, particularly at the UN. From this point of view, the USA's attitude towards Gorbachev is signifi­cant: Bush doesn't hesitate to call him when he considers it necessary. Of course at Helsinki they kept up appearances. But this has to be interpreted as Bush's way of reinforcing Gorbachev's fragile power in the USSR itself ­in exchange, obviously, for its support in the conflict with Iraq.

The economy of the USSR, which is in a state of incredible dilapidation, is increasingly de­pendent on the support of the western coun­tries. Riots against shortages are on the in­crease. The absence of tobacco and vodka has given rise to violent riots, leaving many wounded. Even basic necessities like bread are in short supply. Real famines are not far off.

A large number of Republics are in a state of civil war, and most of them have declared them­selves sovereign and independent: there are pogroms and massacres between nationalities, and even confrontations between rival militias in the same community (Armenia).

All this shows what a state of disorder, the USSR is in. Its main concern is that the chaos outside, particularly in the Middle East, so close to its borders and its Moslem Republics, doesn't get worse and further aggravate the already considerable chaos within the USSR. We are a long way here from the time when the USSR, at the head of the eastern bloc, tried to throw oil from the slightest local conflict in order to un­settle the status quo favorable to the western bloc.

The USSR's feeble participation on the police operation in the Gulf, whose objectives it fully shares, is due to the weakening of its military apparatus, which can't be measured by the number of ships, planes, tanks and soldiers it possesses, but by the fact that the Red Army is in a state of disintegration and is already inca­pable of controlling the internal situation (as for example in the problem of disarming the Armenian militia); the pathetic argument put forward by a Russian official to justify this low level of participation says a great deal about the impotence of this country ("contrary to the American army, the Red Army is not used to intervening outside its frontiers, and has never done this.")

The war in the Middle East confirms that the USSR can no longer play the role of leader of an imperialist bloc, and that it can't even have its own foreign policy. In less than a year, the former number two world power has fallen to a level below that of Germany, Japan, and even Britain or France.

The new imperialist order: the war of each against all

The breadth of the military measures taken by the USA, the intransigent attitude it has shown, testify to its intention of taking advantage of the situation created by the Iraqi adventure in order to affirm clearly its 'leadership' of the whole world. At a time when Japan or the European countries (especially Germany of course) could be tempted, given the disappear­ance of any threat from the USSR, to challenge the discipline they have observed up to now and make the most of their economic advantages over an American economy that is less and less competitive), the USA's timely demonstration of strength permits it to show that it alone is ca­pable of acting as the world's gendarme.

It's already clear that this local war is going to reinforce the USA's position in relation to the other big powers, who have shown themselves incapable of maintaining the stability of the world by themselves. With the growing tendency towards the dislocation of the whole system of international relations, the USA is no longer able to count on any other country to police such a crucial zone, whose instability won't at all diminish once Iraq has been brought to heel. The USA has decided to maintain a massive mil­itary presence in the Middle East. The first of­ficial declarations already talk about staying at least until 1992.

Furthermore, America's control over this emi­nently strategic region, the world's biggest source of oil, is going to be accentuated. This will be a precious asset given the aggravation of the trade war with Europe and Japan.

And, to avoid any possible misunderstanding, the American press has dotted the 'i's, referring to the wheeling and dealing over who pays the bill for the USA's 'Operation Desert Shield':

"As for Germany and Japan, neither has begun to contribute at a level equal to its need for secure oil supply. To be sure, Bonn is preoccu­pied with reunification. Yet Germany would be shortsighted to underestimate its debt to America's sacrifice. That is even more true for Tokyo." (The New York Times from the International Herald Tribune, 31.8.90).

As we can see, the unanimous condemnation of Iraq by the big industrialized countries isn't the product of goodwill as the press would have it. It's the product of a relation of force, in which the USA imposes its military domination, and in which there's no country able to play the role of leader of a rival imperialist bloc, as the USSR did in the past.

The unanimity of the great powers against Iraq isn't the product of peace, or a factor working for peace; it's the product of imperial­ist rivalries and in the long run will serve to aggravate these rivalries.

This forced unanimity has made it plain to the German and Japanese bourgeoisies that they may be economic giants, but they're still politically impotent. Hence the growing pressure within these countries to change the constitutions they inherited from 1945, which limit their armed forces and their field of intervention. There could be no clearer proof of what diplomacy and international policy means for the bourgeoisie: it's the diplomacy and the policy of weapons, of military force. But even if these constitutional changes are adopted, it will take money, and above all time, before these two countries could equip themselves with a military machine com­mensurate with their imperialist ambitions, ie capable of rivaling the USA at this level.

Capitalism is dragging humanity into the abyss of barbarism

At the time of writing, indeed since August 2, the day of the Iraqi invasion, there hasn't been any sign that the dynamic towards US military action against Iraq is being countered or held back. All the diplomatic approaches can be seen clearly for what they are: preparations for war. What's more, all Hussein's offers to negotiate have been rejected by Bush, who insists that the Iraqi army must be withdrawn from Kuwait. This is the only condition for avoiding war, and even then it's not sure.

Such a retreat would mean political suicide for Hussein - and no doubt suicide pure and simple as well. It's hard to see him bowing to the dik­tats of the great powers now. He can only take his adventure another step forward.

Initially, US intervention will call a halt to the destabilization of the Middle East. But this will be temporary and won't reverse the growing tendency towards the Lebanonization of the re­gion. Similarly, it will temporarily stop the out­break of such conflicts in the world, but with­out reversing the overall trend. The USA's restoration of order, its order, will be based on military force alone. But an order based on ter­ror is never stable, and less than ever today in a period of catastrophic world economic crisis, of growing local tensions. The future is one of the explosions of local and civil wars. And the future is near. In fact, it has already arrived.

Look at the conflicts going on now. There are regular military clashes on the frontier between Pakistan and India. And both these countries al­ready have the atomic bomb ... The war in Afghanistan continues in its murderous manner. In Cambodia. In Lebanon. The list is long. This is capitalism.

In Liberia, the population has been subjected to months of terror, rape, extortion and mas­sacre by armed gangs, basically tribal bands, drunk with blood and killing. And all this under the unblinking eyes of western media and a US military flotilla anchored off Monrovia. But Liberia doesn't have the economic and strategic interests of the Middle East.

In fact, the western bourgeoisies are aban­doning a good part of Africa to its own devices. The great powers' growing disinterest in the chaotic situation prevailing in Africa says a lot about their cynicism and their inability to counter-act the slide into decomposition.

For Africa is a particularly good example of what the rotting capitalist system has in store for us. The continent is being swept by riots, massacres, wars, more and more of them, in­creasingly murderous, nearly all along tribal di­visions: in Liberia, in the former French colonies, in South Africa itself, between the partisans of Buthelezi and of Mandela. Do we need to remind anyone of the famines, the epi­demics, both of 'new' diseases like AIDS and of ones that had practically disappeared, like Malaria? And all of this accompanied by frenzied corruption. But isn't this also happening in a number of countries in Asia, even in the USSR? And this is the only perspective that capitalism offers us.

This descent into the depths of the abyss is accompanied by a decomposition of all the 'moral' values that capitalism lays claim to. We can see this very clearly in the conflict in the Middle East. Impudence, hypocrisy, lies and cor­ruption at every level; gangsterism on a plane­tary scale, millions of human lives under threat. Blind terrorism, murder, assassination have be­comes principles of government. They are even a sign of an accomplished statesman: someone who takes thousands of people hostages is a great strategist. And even greater and more re­spected is the one who doesn't hesitate to sac­rifice these same hostages on the altars of bourgeois law and principle. Whether at the economic, social, political or ideological level or even at the level of its morality and principles, this system is bankrupt and is dragging the whole of humanity towards catastrophe.

The proletariat is the only class with a different perspective

"Historically, the dilemma facing humanity today is posed in the following way: a fall into bar­barism, or salvation through socialism ... Thus we are today living out the truth which Marx and Engels formulated for the first time, as the scientific basis for socialism, in that great document, The Communist Manifesto: socialism has become a historic necessity... not only because the proletariat can no longer live in the material conditions being prepared for it by the capital­ist classes, but also because, if the proletariat doesn't carry out its class duty and make so­cialism a reality, the abyss awaits us." (Rosa Luxemburg, Speech to the Founding Congress of the KPD, December 1918).

Seventy-two years later, these words still ap­ply. They could have been written today. Only the world working class, the proletariat, can offer the alternative to the ghastly cataclysm of capitalism in decay: communism.

The terrible open recession which has begun in the USA, and which is rebounding onto the world economy, is going to mean, for the whole world proletariat, but especially for the workers in the industrial countries of Europe, a redou­bled attack on living conditions: millions of re­dundancies, falling wages, deteriorating working conditions, etc - and we've already seen things getting worse over the last few months.

And what's more, the world bourgeoisie hasn't lost a moment in profiting from the conflict in the Middle East to demand sacrifices in the name of the national interest, and ... the oil price rises. We've already seen this trick twice. It's clear: the workers, particularly those in the west, will be asked to pay for the cost of mili­tary intervention.

The working class must not yield to the siren-­songs about national unity and the defense of the capitalist economy. It must not follow the bourgeoisie and take sides in the conflict against Iraq. This isn't the workers' fight. They have everything to lose and nothing to gain from it. The only ground on which they can fight is that of the struggle for the defense of their living conditions. Against economic attacks, against austerity and sacrifices, against the logic of capital which leads only to poverty and war. Against national unity, against the defense of the nation and bourgeois democracy in all countries.         .

Today, one year after the end of Stalinism and the collapse of the eastern bloc, after the huge propaganda campaign about the victory of capi­talism and the triumph of peace, it's clear for every worker that world capitalism is irre­versibly bankrupt. It's equally clear that deca­dent capitalism means imperialist war. Crisis and war are two moments in the life of capitalism, and the one can only fuel the other. Two sides of one coin. But the new historic element is that the coin itself is decomposing, dragging human­ity in a direction in which crisis and war will increasingly get melded together.

The longer the agony of capitalism goes on, the more devastating its ravages will be. The more the decomposition of capitalist social rela­tions advances, the more it threatens to com­promise the very perspective of the proletarian revolution and handicap the future construction of communism.

The massive and increasing destruction of the productive forces - factories, machines, workers ejected from production; the destruction of the environment, of the countryside, the anarchic growth of dump-cities in which millions live in atrocious conditions, mostly without jobs; the atomization and destruction of social relations; the ravages caused by new epidemics, drugs, famine, war, are so many dramas and catastro­phes making the construction of communist soci­ety more difficult.

The stakes are becoming more and more dra­matic. The proletariat doesn't have an unlimited time to accomplish its tasks. The victory of the proletarian revolution or the destruction of hu­manity - that's the alternative. For the prole­tariat, there's no choice but to wage a struggle that leads to the destruction of capitalism and the construction of another society, in which hunger, war and exploitation are no more.

The road to this communist society will be long and arduous. But there is no other road.

RL 4.9.90.

[1] See the article on the crisis on this issue.

[2] Lenin, ‘Resolution on pacifism and the peace slogan', Conference of the sections in Exile of the RSDLP, March 1915.

[3] A former member of the CIA recently revealed the secret deals made at the time between the CIA and the Iranian authorities, deals which ensured that the hostages would be kept long enough to facilitate Carter's defeat in the elections. (This revelation was published in a number of papers in different countries: Liberation in France, Cambio 16 in Spain...).

[4] As the New York Times and Le Monde Dimplomatique themselves recalled in August 1990.

[5] Le Monde, 29.8.90

[6] It wouldn't be the first time that the American bourgeoisie acted in this way. On a much bigger scale, it lured its future enemy to make the first strike in a war that had become inevitably, so that it could present it as the aggressor. We refer to the Japanese attack on the US fleet in Pearl Harbor (Hawaii) in December 1941, which provoked the US's official entry into the war. Later on it was clearly shown that the US President Roosevelt did all he could to incite Japan to take such an initiative, notably by reducing the bases' defenses to a minimum (most of the US soldiers were on leave), even though he knew perfectly well that Japan was getting ready to enter the war. Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor was used to build up ‘national unity' around Roosevelt, and to silence any dissent, both in the population and in certain sectors of the bourgeoisie. 

What is the importance for the working class of the "hunger revolts" of the most wretched and marginalized populations in the under-de­veloped countries, which have become increas­ingly frequent in recent years (Algeria in 1988; Venezuela, Argentina, Nigeria, Jordan in 1989; Ivory Coast, Gabon in 1990, to name only the most important ones)? What attitude should the revolutionary vanguard adopt towards them?

Revolutionary organizations' answers to these questions depend on their overall analysis of the present international situation and their long term vision of the ground the proletariat still has to cover on the road towards revolu­tion: the proletariat's forms of organization and struggle, and the function they attribute to the class party. As these revolts become both more frequent and more widespread, revolutionaries must intervene directly in them, with clear orientations for the working class. It is therefore of immediate and practical importance to have a clear position as far as these revolts are con­cerned.

Faced with the general confusion in the proletarian political movement, which have welcomed the hunger riots as steps forward for the proletariat's class struggle, sometimes even giving them greater importance than factory strikes, only the ICC has insisted that these actions run the risk of taking the working class off its own terrain.

An expression of capital's decomposition

Several organizations of the proletarian political movement have dealt with the question of hunger riots in their press, demonstrating that their fundamental cause is to be found in the deepening crisis of the capitalist system, and in the resulting increase in exploitation and poverty for the working class and other disin­herited social strata. They have shown how the "plans" and "economic measures" that the capi­talist class has set up to try to save the un­der-developed countries from ruin - ie to try to save their own profits - have led to renewed and brutal attacks on the living conditions of millions of people; the hunger revolts, the large scale pillage of shops and supermarkets are the most elementary response to an intolerable and desperate situation. We ourselves have written, for example, that "These riots are first and foremost the response of the marginalized masses to the increasingly barbaric attacks of world capitalism in crisis. They are part of the tremors which are shaking the very foundations of decomposing capitalist society more and more strongly" (International Review, no 57).

Other groups have written on the same sub­ject:

"The revolt appears ( ... ) as a response to the blows of the crisis. If we consider that the proletarian and semi-proletarian masses of these countries [of the capitalist periphery) have taken part in the movement ( ... ), we must neces­sarily conclude that such a movement consti­tutes primarily an action of the exploited class against the effects of its position" (Prometeo, no 13, November 1989).

"The crisis of Argentine capital, which, day after day, is plunging ever greater masses of proletarians and wage-earners into the most dreadful misery, just as in Venezuela or Algeria, has launched the starving masses into a strug­gle for survival" (Le Proletarire, no 403, October/November 1989).

The fact that we share this general viewpoint as to the causes of these hunger revolts indi­cates the existence of a class frontier separat­ing the proletarian political organizations from those of the bourgeoisie. While the latter can­not deny that increasing poverty is at the basis of these actions, they can never admit that the capitalist system as a whole is the cause (and not just a particular government's "bad eco­nomic policy" or "the IMF's measures against the poor countries"), since this would call their own existence into question.

However, this common viewpoint within the proletarian political movement remains extremely general. Major disagreements remain as to the analysis of the crisis (its origins: tendency to­wards a falling rate of profit or saturation of the market; its nature: cyclical or permanent ...), and these are growing deeper. . The ICC is alone in pointing out the importance of the fact that the crisis has already lasted for 20 years without any solution: the course towards class confrontations means that the bourgeoisie has been unable to deal the proletariat a defeat such that it could draw the class into a world war; however, nor has the proletariat yet been able to impose its own historic alternative: the communist revolution. This historic deadlock between the classes has meant that the crisis has gone on getting deeper. However, society has not remained stable; it has entered what we have described as "the phase of capitalism's de­composition" (see "Decomposition, final phase of the decadence of capitalism", in International Review no 62). For the ICC, it is clear that capitalism can lead to the destruction of human­ity, not only through a nuclear war between the great imperialist powers (a danger which has faded temporarily with the Russian bloc's col­lapse into chaos), but also through an ever more uncontrollable proliferation of aspects of this decomposition: famines, epidemics, drug ad­diction, nuclear disasters... The other revolu­tionary organizations would do better to analyze the implications of all these, at first sight un­related, events, and the consequent tendencies within capitalist society, than simply to content themselves with accusing the ICC of "catastrophism".

We have said, as far as the under-developed countries are concerned, that the capitalist crisis creates the misery which is at the heart of the massive food riots. However, as a product of capitalism's decomposition it has also acquired a different content.

The under-developed countries are less resis­tant to the blows of the crisis, and one after another they have been thrown into the most complete and irreversible ruin. During the 1980s, the debts contracted during the previous decade fell due. It proved impossible to pay them, and the flow of capital into these coun­tries dried up, provoking the recession of 1980- 82, which only the most industrialized countries were able to overcome. The under-developed countries never recovered. During the 1980s, the rate of growth for their production was practically zero. Their industrial weakness made them incapable of competing on the world market, and their internal markets were occu­pied by products from the developed countries, and this has led them to bankruptcy. Their main source of revenue (raw materials: ores, oil, agricultural products) has also collapsed follow­ing the fall in prices due to the saturation of the world market. They have now entered a phase of decapitalization and de-industrialization: fields are left fallow, or turned over to producing the raw materials of the drug trade instead of food; unprofitable mines are closed; oil reserves are left untouched, because capital can be more profitably invested in stock ex­change speculation or in the richer countries' banks, or else has to be used to pay interest on the debt.

In these countries, capital and the "local" bourgeoisie - with the support of the great powers - hang on thanks to a ferocious ex­ploitation of the working class: real wages have been reduced by half during the last ten years, largely by the vicious circle of inflation and austerity "plans", and there is nothing to stop this free-fall into decline. At the same time, the growth in unemployment has created a histori­cally unprecedented situation, which must be carefully analyzed.

As capitalist production stagnates, or falls, millions of workers have been expelled from in­dustry. To them are added millions of young­sters who come to working age, without capital being able to integrate them into productive labor, and millions of ruined peasants emigrat­ing constantly into the cities. According to the bourgeoisie's very inadequate figures, 50% of the working population in these countries is un­employed, while in some places the proportion reaches 70% or even 80%. While it is true that the expulsion of the peasants from their land, the existence of an industrial reserve army, and mass unemployment are all inherent to capitalism in periods of crisis, today they have reached such proportions that they have acquired a new content which demonstrates capitalism's ten­dency towards complete disintegration.

How have these masses been able to survive up to now? Thanks to what is known as the "black economy". This "black economy" is made up of a dense network of relations, headed by powerful capitalist " dealers" (dealers in any­thing, from drugs to household goods), who compete effectively with the "official economy", to the point where in some countries their profits are equal or even superior to those of the latter. They provide "jobs" to the millions of unemployed, essentially as street hawkers.

The masses of so-called "under-employed" - in reality unemployed - are the central element of the hunger riots. Marginalized by capitalism, they are close to the proletariat in that they have only their labor to sell and in this sense potentially constitute an anti-capitalist force; however, in analyzing their nature, we cannot simply assimilate them to the working class as a whole, as different groups in the revolutionary movement have done. Their reflection and their struggle as part of the working class are severely hindered by their exclusion from the process of productive labor. We should note that throughout the last 20 years, we have not seen real movements against redundancies, with corresponding means of struggle and organization. This expresses both the loss of the working class' traditions, as a result of the tri­umphant counter-revolution between the 1920's and the end of the 1960's, and the growing in­fluence of the ideology characteristic of decom­posing capitalism: the ideology of "every man for himself". But as we have just said, the numbers of unemployed are swelled by ruined peasants abandoning the countryside, who, retain their individual, small-holder's viewpoint, and by the constant influx of youngsters who have never been able to work. Even if these latter remain in relation with the working class, since many are the children of workers and live in the same districts, this mass cannot escape the influence of the lumpenproletariat, since it pro­vides also the drug dealers, the petty criminals, the police informers, the hired thugs ...

Thus, while we understand that these riots are caused by the capitalist crisis, and that they are the only response possible for a des­perate and starving mass, we must not forget that they are bereft of any class perspective, nor ignore the very real danger that the work­ing class could be drowned in this marginalized mass if it does not succeed in affirming its own class terrain.

The working class and hunger riots

A new disagreement is emerging between the ICC and other groups in the proletarian political movement, as they take position on the recent hunger riots. For them:

"The proletarian nature of these events" re­futes "those who see in the riots against hunger and poverty a sort of diversion from the class struggle" (Le Proletaire, no 403).

"It is affirmed - without being demonstrated ­that this kind of riot does not spring directly from the class struggle, they are presented as a process of social decomposition (and not also as a struggle against this process), as a revolt without any class profile which accentuates the "lumpenization of society" (Emancipacion Obrera, "Report on the social explosion in Argentina").

"To say, as some do, that these movements only illustrate society's state of decomposition as a generic aspect of the decadence of imperi­alist capitalism, is completely useless chatter which only serves to hide their own political blindness and absence of Marxist method ... but the principal and most important significance of these struggles is that within them is expressed a strong material movement of our class against the effects of the crisis. And it is the class' material movement that Marxists consider to be the indispensable condition for the development of the subjective, political movement" (Battaglia Comunista).

Contrary to the ICC then, for these groups the mass looting of shops is proletarian in na­ture, these riots are an integral part of the proletariat's class struggle. This means that we will have to re-examine what we mean by "class struggle".

It certainly goes without saying that a pre­condition of the proletarian struggle is ... that proletarians take part in it. Nor, indeed, do we deny that workers take part in these riots. Quite the contrary, we have pointed this out constantly, but insisting at the same time that this represents a danger for the class. And while it is true that for a struggle to be prole­tarian in nature workers must take part in it, it does not follow that any struggle involving workers is necessarily proletarian. For example, the ethnic or nationalist movements which draw in masses of workers, whose position may also be desperate, are bourgeois in nature.

Workers do indeed take part in these strug­gles, but not regrouped as a class, rather as individuals dissolved in the hungry underem­ployed masses that we have described above.

Other groups, such as the PCI or the CWO, simply make no distinction here, and see in these revolts nothing other than the proletariat in action. Though we should note that Battaglia Comunista seems to have no iced a difference, since they ask us: "Is this wretched and marginalized mass [elsewhere they speak of "semi-proletarians"] on the side of the prole­tariat or of the bourgeoisie" which already im­plies that this marginalized mass cannot be ex­actly identified with the proletariat). "Is its struggle's potential in favor of the proletarian revolution or of the preservation of the bour­geoisie?". BC answers this question straight away, but obliquely: "It is with the poor and marginalized masses that the proletariat of the peripheral countries will be able to conquer during its decisive assault of the capitalist State".

Quite so. The proletariat can and must con­duct its revolutionary struggle with the marginalized masses. But it is not enough to say "with the marginalized masses". The prole­tariat must guide these masses, draw them into its struggle, work to make them adopt its class viewpoint and historical perspective; not the re­verse, which is what happens when the prole­tariat allows itself to be drawn into the desper­ate response of the marginalized masses.

Another quotation: "But above all, these masses' struggle is, in the final analysis, a re­volt against the capitalist order and not against the proletariat and its immediate and historic demands" (Prometeo, no 13).

We too have said that these revolts are "against the capitalist order": "Abruptly woken from its dreams by an explosion of unimagined violence, the bourgeoisie has witnessed the dra­matic collapse of its "social peace"" (ICC section in Venezuela, Communiqué on the revolt).

But here again, we should pay attention to terms. For while the working class struggle necessarily breaks bourgeois order, the reverse is not true: not all destabilization of the bour­geois order in itself implies an anti-capitalist proletarian struggle. Emanncipacion Obrera expresses the same confusion as BC, but more crudely, when it refers to the "recuperable tri­umph" of the revolt in Argentina: "And it was not just any struggle, but a struggle which broke not only the trade union and democratic political control, but also the legal framework" (Report on the social explosion in Argentina).

EO here is harking back to the leftism for which "illegality" is synonymous with "revolutionary". Terrorist actions, lumpenpro­letarian attacks, are also "illegal", yet nobody would consider them as part of the proletarian struggle. Do we mean by this that the riots are the work of lumpens, or of terrorists? No. But it is clear that both these social tumors, lumpens and "guerrilleros", are like fish in wa­ter in these riots; this is their milieu ("expropriations", "executions", "armed actions" ... ), which is why they encourage it so ardently - and the proletariat should be warned of this danger also.

Our meaning is simply this: it is true that any workers' struggle necessarily breaks bourgeois legality, since any strike or resistance confronts capital's juridical-political apparatus, and must overcome it if it is to succeed in spreading; by contrast, not every "illegal" action is in itself a struggle of the working class.

If the participation of workers and the fact of breaking the bourgeois order are insufficient in themselves, what is it then that allows us to define an action as being part of the working class' struggle? The immediate demands, and the historic objectives which are inseparable from them. In other words, the struggle's ori­entation, its perspective. What we call: "the class terrain".

Let us consider the positions of the different groups on this subject. As far as we know, only EO has gone so far as to state that the hunger riots obtain satisfaction for immediate demands, which - with the break from legality ­is supposed to be the second element of the " recuperable triumph" of the revolt in Argentina.

"To begin with, faced with a concrete situation of hunger and very low wages, the movement of struggle [EO refers here to the revolt] has in­volved a real improvement in the "wage" of those taking part [sic]. Apart from anything else, they have shown themselves that it is pos­sible to do something [?], that it is possible to struggle and that this struggle can bear fruit" (op. cit.).

This frivolous statement, which tends to iden­tify the struggle for wages with looting, is quite simply disproved later in the same text, when it describes how the police, during the savage repression of the revolt, swept through the poor districts confiscating everything they could lay their hands on. But for the working class, the greatest danger is precisely that it should abandon its movement of strikes and street demonstrations on its own class terrain, for its own demands, and in the revolutionary perspective, and begin to think that looting is the only solution to the misery of its present condition. And EO is pushing in this direction when it says that the revolt "bore fruit". Other groups have not gone this far, but both BC and the PCI have welcomed EO's document without criticizing this position, since they were above all concerned to use it to attack the ICC.

Let us see what some groups have to say as to the perspective contained within the riots.

CWO: "For revolutionaries the problem is posed in these terms: how can the Venezuelan working class transform this combative but desperate re­sistance into something which will not finish in brutal repression" (Workers' voice no 46, April/May 1989).

PCI: "There is no doubt in this situation that the proletariat will continue to be at the fore­front of the social scene, and what we can hope is that the spontaneity of the revolts in the community will be replaced by a more organized struggle, outside the control of the reformist apparatus, unifying the action of the proletariat and protecting it more effectively against the blows of repression" (Le Proletarire, no 406).

EO: "Its limit lies in the absence of revolu­tionary perspective, the lack of objectives even in the medium-term, and obviously the absence of any revolutionary proletarian organization, which leaves the movement completely vulnera­ble".

Nobody in the proletarian political movement has denied this last, very frank, statement by EO as to the absence of any revolutionary per­spective. The groups simply avoid the problem. Let us pose the question then: if these revolts are part of the proletarian class struggle, why should revolutionaries fight for the struggles to become "something else" (CWO), or for them to "be replaced by a more organized struggle" (PCI), rather than, for example, struggling for the riots to organize themselves, spread, and rise to a higher level?

The answer seems obvious: because if these hunger riots follow their own dynamic, they can only lead to a dead-end. As a desperate, disorganized reaction, incapable of confronting the forces of repression seriously, they can only lead to the masses being crushed by the re­pression, and to finding themselves in a still worse situation than before at every level: ma­terial, organizational, of consciousness.

This is precisely what we have emphasized.

This is why we have warned the working class against any tendency to let itself be drawn into these riots, calling on it to stand on the terrain of its own struggle, instead of irresponsibly urging the class - explicitly or implicitly - to plunge into this kind of action, with great salutes to "the struggles of the working class".

However, BC even suggests that these hunger riots may have a perspective:

" ... apart from the question of their number, there exists a qualitative difference between the struggles which have always existed in the pe­ripheral countries and the riots of recent years ... we cannot but note the difference between an ordinary, economic strike [?] and a revolt, ac­companied by confrontations in the street, as a response to an extraordinary and generalized attack ...

"The intensity of the confrontation determines not only the intensity of the bourgeois repres­sion which follows, but also within certain limits, its policy ...

"While social peace would make it possible to accept without conditions the IMF's diktats, or more generally the situation of crisis at an in­ternational level, the break in social peace op­poses it with limits, or at least serious obstacles ... If the change in attitude ... on the part of governments in the peripheral countries has any influence on the amount of surplus value which is drained from the periphery towards the cen­tre, it would determine a deterioration of the conditions which have made it possible to man­age the crisis and maintain social peace in the metropoles... We want to emphasize that we are speaking here of a possibility... since it is not at all certain that this will happen ... "

BC does not recognize the continuity that links the workers' strikes of recent years in the same movement. In another part of the same text, it sees in the strikes in Europe nothing but "episodes" of no consequence, "ordinary everyday struggles which have not disturbed the social peace in the least". For BC, the international waves of strikes during the last 20 years are nothing but a figment of the ICC's imagination. But this is nothing new; we are accustomed to BC not seeing workers' struggles when they are there, and seeing them when they are not.

What is new is that BC, starting from the idea that the hunger revolts are "qualitatively dif­ferent" from workers' strikes, and sees the for­mer as stronger and more important, not be­cause the immediate "fruits" that excite EO, but because of the grandiose perspectives they open up. For according to BC, looting shops:

- sets limits, creates obstacles for the eco­nomic policy of the governments of the periph­ery;

- can make governments change their opinion as to the application of the "plans" dictated by the IMF;

- can, as a result, weaken the fragile eco­nomic stability of the metropoles

- and could as a result break the social peace within the latter.

To sum up, according to BC looting shops will cause world capitalism to cave in. We can an­swer this affirmation, which is frivolous to say the least, simply by pointing out that none of these revolts has "limited" the application of capital's plans, or even "created obstacles to them" - unless we are to believe naively in the crocodile tears of bankers and governments. The only thing which has changed is the greater brutality with which these plans are applied. The rest of BC's speculations become completely meaningless.

It is true that the economies of the central countries are moving towards an open recession, but this has nothing to do with the riots which have supposedly prevented the "management of the crisis". On the contrary, it is because the "management of the crisis" has already given everything it could, because the plans have al­ready been applied, that the open recession is once again striking capitalism in the central countries.

BC also speaks of "violent riots with con­frontations in the street", giving the impression that these combats were between comparable forces. Here, we prefer to let the CWO speak, which although, with BC, a member of the IBRP, nonetheless has a very different opinion of the "confrontations in the street":

"... in the streets of Caracas and other towns, in particular in the poorest districts, there has been armed resistance to the forces of the State. But where did this resistance come from? Was it a right-wing provocation ... ? Was it a reawakening of the urban guerrilla ... ? Or were the inhabitants of these zones trying desper­ately to avenge the victims of terror? What is certain is that this was not the armed expres­sion of a new proletarian movement. Proletarian movements have no need to sacrifice the work­ers they defend or to make them act outside a mass movement politically prepared to carry the struggle forward".

What is true is that the revolt "is not an ex­pression of the proletarian movement" right from the start, and not just in its phase of "resistance".

After all this, where are we? What of the hunger riots? In fact, these are desperate ac­tions in which workers, insofar as they take part, do not act as a class; actions whose only immediate result is capital's ferocious repression, and which contain no revolutionary per­spective. They are actions which should "become something else".

However, the groups that we have mentioned of the proletarian political milieu continue to salute these hunger riots as "struggles of the working class" since for them the lack of per­spectives in such actions can only have one ex­planation: they are not led by the party.

"If only the Party existed ..."

PCI: "These spontaneous actions, while they re­veal the class weakness ... and the absence of the revolutionary organization ... nonetheless al­low us to perceive a gleam of hope, since they bear witness that the class is not prepared to do nothing while its children die of hunger. The task of revolutionaries is to form and de­velop the revolutionary organization, the class party capable of gathering this will to struggle, and directing this revolutionary energy against class objectives" (Le Proletaire, no 403).

EO: "Its limit lies in the absence of a revolu­tionary perspective ... and of course the ab­sence of a proletarian revolutionary organization, which leaves the movement completely vul­nerable" (opcit.).

BC: "Were there, in this revolt, more semi­-proletarians or sub-proletarians than factory workers? The question makes us laugh ... If the proletariat was not yet sufficiently present in the movement, then this is a limitation of the proletariat and its (still virtually non-existent) political organization, and not of the revolt it­self."

So by following the "Bordigist" path, which makes the party the god of the revolutionary movement, these groups think they have re­solved any doubts as to the nature of these re­volts. But this position, which wants to look so "tough", in reality, hides their inability to offer the proletariat any kind of orientation in the revolts.

Let us remind the reader here that the ICC considers the party to be a vital organ of the proletarian struggle, which gives it an orienta­tion in its revolutionary combat. But the prob­lem here is not to know what will happen to these riots one day when the party exists, but what should be the attitude of revolutionaries today, when existing conditions cause these re­volts to proliferate. If hunger riots are prole­tarian struggles of equal or even greater im­portance than "ordinary" strikes, then revolu­tionary groups should behave in consequence.

For example, with a strike, revolutionaries draw lessons from it and make them known to the rest of the class, so that the next strikes are stronger and confront the state apparatus in more favorable conditions. When a strike breaks out, revolutionaries gather their strength and intervene actively in it, calling for its extension, asking other sectors to join the combat, denouncing the maneuvers of the trade unions and other enemies, they put forward proposals for action and organization; in short they carry out a labor of agitation and propa­ganda with a view to spreading revolutionary consciousness among the workers ...

What should be the attitude of revolutionaries towards this other form of "class struggle": the hunger riot? Should they encourage them? Should they take part? Should they call work­ers to take part in the looting? Should their propaganda explain that these revolts make it possible to win "gains" and that they destabilize the capitalist system?

What we have to say seems to make some com­rades laugh. It should not. All these groups do nothing but go round in circles about a very serious problem: they call "class struggle" ac­tions in which they are not prepared to commit themselves. All they can do is spout formulas of this variety:

"We hope that these revolts will be replaced by a more organized struggle" (PCI);

"Proletarian movements do not need to sacri­fice the workers they defend" (CWO);

"It is obvious that a similar movement will not be repeated in the months to come, for the bourgeoisie would provoke a terrifying bloodbath and a very serious defeat, which is not the case today. And all those that have taken part know this" (EO);

"We want to emphasize that we are speaking here [as regards speculations about future ri­ots] of a possibility... since it is not at all certain that this will happen ..." (BC).

This is the attitude of these groups faced with the hunger riots:

- they welcome them loudly as important milestones of class struggle... but are incapable of offering the slightest alternative concrete proposals for action. They leave this task ... to the future party;

- they admit, unwillingly, that the destiny of these riots can be nothing other than to smash into the wall of repression; that they bear in themselves no revolutionary proletarian per­spective, and that the energy wasted in these combats should be used differently, in other kinds of action, in a real class struggle;

- however, this does not prevent them from continuing to "criticize" the ICC, because this is the only organization which has openly de­nounced the danger these riots constitute for the proletariat, and which distinguishes clearly this kind of action from the terrain of the working class.

These groups' attitude can be summed up in two sentences:

- inability to understand the accelerating upheavals in capitalism's life that we are living through;

- irresponsibility in fulfilling the function for which the class they belong to created them.

Leonardo

This resolution was adopted before the 'Gulf Crisis' which began on 2 August. It deals with the general perspectives for the international situation, with its main aspects, and as such remains perfectly valid today. In particular, the events which took place in the Middle East are an immediate illustration that "the future that capitalism offers us is thus not only one of insoluble crisis, of ever more devastating economic effects (famine in the backward countries, absolute pauperization in the advanced ones, generalized poverty for the whole working class), but also increasingly brutal military confrontations wherever the proletariat hasn't the strength to prevent them, and finally a growing chaos, the bourgeoisie's loss of control over the whole of society, and ever more unrestrained barbarism ... "

The world situation is dominated today, and will be for some time to come, by one major histori­cal event: the brutal and definitive collapse of the Eastern imperialist bloc. This is because this collapse:

- illustrates the depth, gravity, and insoluble nature of the crisis of the capitalist economy;

- confirms decadent capitalism's entry, dur­ing the 1990s, into a new and final phase of its existence: the general decomposition of society;

- has created a general destabilization of the entire world geopolitical organization set up at the end of World War II;

- has a major impact on the consciousness and the struggle of the proletariat, in that the Eastern bloc has been presented since its cre­ation, and by every fraction of the bourgeoisie, as the "socialist bloc", and the heir to the pro­letarian revolution of October 1917.

1) The fundamental causes of the Eastern bloc's collapse are to be found in:

- the congenital economic weakness and backwardness of its dominant power, the USSR, as a result of the latter's late arrival in capi­talism's historical development, and which con­sequently prevented it from becoming a viable bloc leader (the USSR's accession to a position it could not maintain was due to the particular political and military conditions prevailing at the end of World War II);

- the complete economic collapse of the countries making up the bloc, and in the first place of course, of the USSR itself.

This collapse is the result of the inability of the form of state capitalism existing in these countries (which was set up in the USSR on the ruins of the proletarian revolution, fallen victim to its international isolation) to confront the in­exorable aggravation of the world capitalist cri­sis.

Although this form of' state capitalism was able to emerge victorious from a generalized imperi­alist war, it has proved unadapted to confront a situation of extreme competition on the world market, provoked by the crisis of over-produc­tion, because:

- of the major handicap for the competitivity of each national economy, represented by the war economy which reached its most caricatural expressions in the USSR;

- and, above all, because of the total lack of responsibility in all those involved in production (from the factory director to the factory hand and the kolkhoz agricultural, worker) as a result of the economy's complete centralization, the fu­sion, under the aegis of the Party-State, of the political and productive apparatus, and the elimination of any market sanction for economic failure.

The spectacular economic collapse of the whole so-called "socialist" economy represents the law of value's revenge, under the blows of the world crisis, on this particular form of the cap­italist economy, which had tried for years to cheat it on a grand scale.

2) In this sense, the disappearance of the Stalinist type economy, and the frantic reintro­duction of market mechanisms in the Eastern countries, opens no real perspective for a re­covery of the world economy, which has itself only stayed afloat during the last two decades by cheating the same law of value. With one or two exceptions and specific situations (such as East Germany), the Eastern countries as a whole, and the USSR in particular, will not be able to provide the industrialized countries with a new market. Their needs are enormous, but they have no means of payment, and today's historic conditions forbid the creation of any kind of new "Marshall Plan". The latter was able to raise the West European economy from its ruins because it came during a period of post-war reconstruction. Today, by contrast, any development in the East of a competitive industry would inevitably be confronted with the general saturation of the world market.

As was already the case during the 1970s with the "Third World" countries, Western credits aimed at financing such a development in the Eastern countries could only result in a further swelling their debt, consequently increasing still further the weight of debt on the whole of the world economy.

3) In fact, today we are witnessing the burst­ing of the bubble which promised the "end of the crisis" thanks to "liberalism" and "Reaganomics", which had their hour of glory during the 1980s. The supposed "successes" of the Western economies were in reality based on a headlong flight essentially into a colossal level of debt, in particular by the world's greatest economic power: the United States. This coun­try, thanks to enormous trade and budget deficits, and a frenzied arms race, has made it possible to stave off for a few more years the deadline of a new open recession. This latter is the bourgeoisie's great fear; this is what most clearly highlights the complete bankruptcy of the capitalist mode of production. But this "Western" way of cheating with the law of value could only exacerbate still further the funda­mental contradictions of the world economy. Today, the entry of the United States, and of Great Britain, into a new open recession is an illustration of that reality.

As on previous occasions, this new recession of the world economy can only bring the other Western economies down with it.

4) The coming closure of the US market will rebound (as it is already doing on countries like Japan) on the whole world market, leading to a fall in production in the West European economies (even if in the short term German production may be sustained by the process of unification). Moreover, the attenuation of the effects of the world crisis by the policy of state capitalism at the level of the Western bloc will play less and less of a role as the latter disin­tegrates as an inevitable result of the disap­pearance of its Eastern adversary.

More than ever, then, the perspective for the world economy is one of worsening collapse. For a time, the central capitalist countries have been able to push the most brutal effects of a crisis whose origins lie at the centre, onto the countries of the periphery. Increasingly, the most extreme forms of the crisis will boomerang back, with full force, on the central countries. Although they have more resources to limit the damage, the Western capitalist metropoles will now follow the Third World and the Eastern bloc on the black list of economic disaster.

5) The aggravation of the capitalist economy's worldwide crisis will necessarily provoke a new exacerbation of the bourgeoisie's own internal contradictions. As in the past, these contradic­tions will appear on the level of military antag­onisms: in decadent capitalism, trade war cannot but lead to armed conflict. In this sense, the pacifist illusions which may develop following the "warming" of relations between the USSR and the USA must be resolutely combated: mili­tary confrontations between states are not going to disappear, even though they may no longer be used and manipulated by the great powers. On the contrary, as we have seen in the past, militarism and war are decadent capitalism's way of life, and the deepening of the crisis can only confirm this.

By contrast with the previous period, how­ever, these military conflicts no longer take the form of a confrontation between the two great imperialist blocs:

- on the one hand, the Eastern bloc has ceased to exist, as we can see from the fact that its dominant power is already reduced to fighting for its very existence; for the USSR, the perspective is one of the Union's reduction to Russia alone, which will no longer be any­thing but a second-rate power, a good deal weaker than the major West European powers;

- on the other, with the disappearance of the Russian bloc's military threat, the Western bloc has itself lost its main reason for existing and has entered a process of disintegration which can only increase, since as marxism has long demonstrated, there can never exist a world ­dominating "super-imperialism".

6) This is also why the disappearance of the two imperialist constellations which have divided the world between them for more than 40 years, brings with it the tendency to the reconstitu­tion of two new blocs: one dominated by the United States, the other by a new leader. Due to its geographical position and its economic power, Germany is well placed to play this role. However, such a perspective is not on the agenda today, since:

- Germany is still relatively weak militarily (it does not even possess nuclear weapons), and this weakness cannot be surmounted overnight;

- the organizational structures of the Western bloc (OECD, NATO, EEC, etc) still exist formally; above all, the great economic power of the USA tends to limit its "allies" room for maneuver, and it will do everything it can to hold back Germany's military reinforcement);

- the phenomenon of decomposition affecting the whole of society constitutes a major hin­drance; the chaos it provokes within the ruling class limits the latter's ability to enforce the discipline necessary to the formation of new im­perialist blocs.

7) In fact, although the structures inherited from the old organization of the Western bloc have already lost their primary function, they are today being used to limit the growing ten­dency to disorganization, to the "every man for himself" spirit developing within the bour­geoisie. In particular, the political chaos which has already gripped the USSR (in particular in the form of the proliferation of nationalist de­mands), and which can only increase, holds a real threat of contamination for Eastern and Central Europe. This is one of the main reasons for all the fractions of the Western bourgeoisie's unanimous support for Gorbachev. This is also why West Germany, whose perilous absorption of the GDR has put it in the front line of this threat of chaos from the East, has for the mo­ment become a "faithful" ally within NATO.

However, the very fact that a country like Germany, which has been a "model" of economic and political stability should now be seriously shaken by the tempest from the East says much about the general threat of destabilization hanging over the whole European and world bourgeoisie. The future that capitalism offers us is thus not only one of insoluble crisis, of its ever more devastating economic effects (famine in the backward countries, absolute pauperization in the advanced ones, generalized poverty for the whole working class), but also of increasingly brutal military confrontations wherever the proletariat has not got the strength to prevent them, and finally a growing chaos, the bourgeoisie's loss of control over the whole of society, and ever more extreme and unrestrained barbarism whose conclusion, like a world war, can only be the destruction of humanity.

8) For the moment, the growing chaos within the ruling class, and the weakening that this represents for it, is not in itself a favorable condition for the proletariat's struggle and the development of its consciousness. History has already shown on a number of occasions that the bourgeoisie is perfectly capable of over­coming its internal contradictions when faced with a threat from the working class, to put up a formidable united front against it. More gen­erally, in overthrowing the bourgeoisie, the proletariat can count only on its own strength, not on the latter's weakness.

Furthermore, the 1980s, which marked deca­dent capitalism's entry into its final phase of decomposition, have revealed the ruling class' ability to turn the various aspects of this de­composition against the proletariat:

- inter-classist campaigns on ecological, hu­manitarian, or anti-fascist themes against threats to the environment, famine, or massacres and signs of xenophobia;

- the use of despair, of nihilism, of the "every man for himself" attitude, to attack the class' confidence in the future, and to under­mine its solidarity and to catch it in the traps of sectoralism.

9) This negative weight of decomposition on the working class has appeared especially on the question of unemployment. Although this can act as a factor in the awareness of the histori­cal dead-end of the capitalist mode of produc­tion; during the 1980s it has instead helped to encourage despair, the "each for himself" atti­tude, and even lumpenisation amongst not-in­significant sectors of the working class, espe­cially among young workers who have never had the opportunity to be integrated into a collec­tivity of work and struggle.

More concretely, whereas in the 1930s, under far more unfavourable historical circumstances (because they were dominated by the counter­revolution), the unemployed were able to organ­ise and even to conduct, large-scale struggles, this has not been the case at all in recent years. In fact, it has proved that only massive struggles by employed workers can draw the unemployed sectors of the working class into the struggle.

10) The bourgeoisie's ability to turn the col­lapse of its own society against the working class has been particularly illustrated by the collapse of Stalinism and the Eastern bloc. Between the 1920s and 60s, Stalinism was the spearhead of the terrible counter-revolution that descended on the working class. Its his­torical crisis and disappearance, far from clear­ing the political ground for the class' combat and for the development of its consciousness, has on the contrary provoked a marked retreat in this consciousness. The fact that the "socialist" bloc perished from its own internal contradictions (exacerbated by the world economic crisis and the development of decomposi­tion), rather than at the hand of the proletariat, has made it possible for the bourgeoisie to in­crease the weight of reformist, unionist, and democratic illusions, making it more difficult for the proletariat to draw out the perspectives for its combat. The retreat of the working class is on the same level as the event which caused it: the worst it has undergone since the historic recovery of the struggle at the end of the 1960s; in particular, it is a good deal worse than the retreat that followed the defeat of 1981 in Poland.

11) Nonetheless, the undoubted depth of the present reflux in proletarian consciousness does not in the least call into question the historic course towards class confrontations, as it has developed over the last twenty years. The ex­tent of this reflux is limited by the fact:

- that contrary to the 1930s and the post­war period, it is not the proletariat of the cen­tral capitalist countries which is in the front line of these democratic campaigns; the bour­geoisie is using the "wind from the East", origi­nating in regions where the secondary sectors of the world proletariat live;

- this "wind from the East" has itself largely lost its impetus with the first results of the policies of "market liberalization", much vaunted as a cure for the ills of the Stalinist type econ­omy; the irredeemable aggravation of the eco­nomic situation, the loss of even the bare mini­mum of security in employment and of consump­tion, cannot but undermine the illusions in both East and West as to the "benefits" of "liberal" capitalism as applied to the East;

- despite its disarray, the proletariat has not suffered a direct defeat, nor the crushing of its struggle; its combativity has thus not really been affected;

- this combativity is bound to be stimulated by the increasingly ferocious attacks that the bourgeoisie will be forced to unleash; this will allow the proletariat to regroup on its own ter­rain, outside all the inter-classist campaigns.

More fundamentally, the spectacle of the growing bankruptcy of the capitalist economy in all its forms, and especially those that dominate the advanced countries, will be a vital factor in laying bare all the lies about "capitalism's vic­tory over socialism", which are at the heart of the ideological campaign that the bourgeoisie has unleashed on the proletariat.

12) The working class still has a long and dif­ficult road before it to its emancipation. It is all the more difficult in that, unlike the 1970s, time is no longer on its side given the increas­ing and irreversible plunge into decomposition of the whole of society. Nonetheless, the work­ing class has in its favor the fact that its struggle is the only perspective for a way out of barbarism, the only hope for humanity's sur­vival. As the crisis deepens inescapably, and as its struggles inevitably develop, the way is open for the proletariat to become aware of its historic task. The role of revolutionaries is to participate fully in today's class struggle, in order to lay the foundations for it to emerge as well armed as possible from the present difficult situation, and to set forward, tts revolutionary perspective with confidence.