The text published below was written in 1995, 20 years after the founding congress of the International Communist Current in 1975.
We reprint this text in order to give our readers an introduction to the history of our organisation, and an insight into the method which inspired its creation as an international regroupment of local organisations. This remains our method to this day.
Twenty years ago, in January 1975, the International Communist Current was formed. This is a considerable lifespan for a proletarian organisation, when we consider that the IWA only survived 12 years (1864-76), the Socialist International 25 years (1889-1914), and the Communist International 9 years (1919-28). Obviously, we do not pretend that our organisation has played a part comparable to that of the workers' Internationals. Nonetheless, the ICC's 20 years of experience belongs entirely to the proletariat, whence our organisation springs just as did the Internationals of the past, and as do the other organisations which defend communist principles today. In this sense it is our duty, and this anniversary provides us with an opportunity, to pass on to our class some of the lessons which we draw from these two decades of combat.
The comparison between the ICC and the organisations which have marked the history of the workers' movement, especially the Internationals, is disconcerting: whereas the latter organisations included or influenced millions, even tens of millions of workers, the ICC is only known, throughout the world, to a tiny minority of the working class. This situation, which is also the lot of all the other revolutionary organisations, should encourage us to modesty. It should not, however, lead us to underestimate the work we do accomplish, and still less should it discourage us. Ever since the proletariat first appeared as an actor on the social scene a century and a half ago, its historic experience has shown that the periods when revolutionary positions exerted a real influence over the working masses have been relatively limited. And moreover, it is on the basis of this reality that the bourgeoisie's ideologues have claimed that the proletarian revolution is a pure utopia, since most workers do not think it either necessary or possible. This phenomenon, which was already apparent when mass workers' parties existed, at the end of the 20th century, has been further amplified by the defeat of the revolutionary wave which followed World War I.
The working class made the world bourgeoisie tremble, and the latter took its revenge by subjecting its enemy to the longest counter-revolution in its history. And the spearhead of the counter-revolution was precisely those organisations - the socialist and communist parties, and the trades unions - which the working class had founded for its own combat, but which had gone over to the bourgeois camp. The vast majority of the socialist parties were already in the service of the bourgeoisie during the War, calling the on workers for "National Unity", and in some countries even joining the governments which had unleashed the imperialist slaughter. Then, when the revolutionary wave unfurled following the October 1917 revolution in Russia, these same parties played the part of executioners for the bourgeoisie, either by deliberately sabotaging the movement, as in Italy in 1920, or by ordering and organising the murder of workers and revolutionaries in their thousands, as in Germany in 1919. Later on, the communist parties, which had been formed around those socialist party fractions that refused to join the imperialist war effort, and which had taken the lead in the revolutionary wave by rallying around the Communist International (founded in March 1919), went down the same path as their socialist predecessors. Dragged down by the defeat of the world revolution, and by the degeneration of the revolution in Russia, they joined the capitalist camp during the 1930's, to become the most faithful recruiting sergeants for World War II in the name of anti-fascism and "defence of the socialist fatherland". Having been the main architects of the "resistance" movements against the German and Japanese occupying armies, they continued their dirty work by exercising a ferocious control over the workers during the reconstruction of the ruined capitalist economies.
Throughout this period the massive influence that the socialist or "communist" parties were able to have of the working class stifled the consciousness of workers, steeped them in chauvinism and either turned them away from any perspective for the overthrow of capitalism or confused this perspective with the strengthening of the democratic bourgeoisie or subjected them to the lie that the capitalist states of the Eastern bloc were "socialism" incarnate. During this "midnight in the century" the real communist forces who were chased out of the degenerating Communist International were in a situation of extreme isolation when they weren't actually exterminated by Stalinist or fascist agents of the counter-revolution. In the worst conditions in the history of the workers' movement the handful of militants who managed to escape the wreckage of the Communist International worked to defend communist principles in order to prepare the future historic resurgence of the proletariat. Many lost their lives or were worn out to the point that their organisations - the fractions and groups of the communist left - disappeared or else were crippled by sclerosis.
The terrible counter-revolution which crushed the working class following its glorious battles after World War I lasted for nearly forty years. But once the last fires of the reconstruction following the second world war had gone out and capitalism was again faced with the open crisis of its economy at the end of the 60s, the proletariat raised its head once more. May 1968 in France, the "rampant May" in Italy in 1969, workers' struggles in the winter of 1970 in Poland and a whole series of workers' struggles in Europe and on other continents: the counter-revolution was over. The best proof of this fundamental change in the course of history was the appearance and development in various parts of the world of groups who based themselves, often in a confused way, on the traditions and positions of the Communist Left. The ICC was formed in 1975 as a regroupment of some of these formations that the historic resurgence of the proletariat had produced. That fact that since then the ICC has not only continued to exist but has grown, doubling the number of sections is excellent proof of this historic resurgence of the proletariat, an excellent indication that the latter has not been defeated and that the historic course is still towards class confrontations. This is the first lesson to be drawn from the 20 years existence of the ICC against the idea shared by many other groups of the Communist Left who think that the proletariat hasn't yet emerged from the counter-revolution.
In International Review n°40, on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the ICC, we drew a number of lessons from our experience in this earlier period. We recall them briefly here to underline some of the points we made about the period that followed. However before making such an assessment we must quickly go back to the history of the ICC. And for readers who are unacquainted with the article of 10 years ago we reprint large extracts from it here which deal with this history.
"The first organised expression of our Current appeared in Venezuela in 1964. It consisted of very young elements who had begun to evolve towards class positions through discussions with an older comrade who had behind him the experience of being a militant in the Communist International, in the left fractions which were excluded from it at the end of the 1920s - notable the Left Fraction of the Communist Party of Italy - and who was part of the Gauche Communiste de France until its dissolution in 1952. Straight away this small group in Venezuela - which, between 1964 and 1968 published ten issues of its review Internacionalismo - saw itself as being in political continuity with the positions of the Communist Left, especially those of the GCF. This was expressed in particular through a very clear rejection of any policy of supporting so-called "national liberation struggles", a myth that was very prevalent in Latin American countries and that weighed heavily on elements trying to move towards class positions. It was also expressed in an attitude of openness towards, and making contact with, other communist groups - an attitude which had previously characterised the International Communist Left before the war and the GCF after it. Thus the group Internacionalismo established or tried to establish contacts and discussions with the American group News and Letters (...) and in Europe with a whole series of groups who were situated on class positions (...) With the departure of several of its elements for France in '67 and '68, this group interrupted its publication for several years, before Internacionalismo (new series) began in 1974 and the group became a constituent part of the ICC in 1975.
"The second organised expression of our Current appeared in France in the wake of the general strike of May '68 which marked the historic resurgence of the world proletariat after more than 40 years of counter-revolution. A small nucleus was formed in Toulouse around a militant of Internacionalismo. This nucleus participated actively in the animated discussions of Spring '68, adopted a 'declaration of principles' in June and published the first issue of Révolution Internationale (RI) at the end of that year. Straight away, this group continued Internacionalismo's policy of looking for contact and discussion with other groups of the proletarian milieu both nationally and internationally. (...) From 1970 onwards, it established closer links with two groups who managed to swim out of the general decomposition of the councilist milieu after May '68: the 'Organisation Conseilliste de Clermont Ferrand" and "Cahiers du Communisme di Conseils (Marseille)", following an attempted discussion with the GLAT which showed that this group was moving further and further away from marxism. Discussion with the former two groups, however, proved much more fruitful and after a whole series of meetings in which the basic positions of the Communist Left were examined in a systematic manner, RI, the OC of Clermont and CCC came together in 1972 around a platform which was a more detailed and precise version of RI's declaration of principles of 1968. This new group published the Revue Internationale as well as a Bulletin d'Etude at de Discussion and was to be at the centre of a whole work of international contact and discussion in Europe up until the foundation of the ICC two and a half years later.
"On the American continent, the discussions that Internacionalismo had with News and Letters left some traces in the USA and, in 1970, a group was formed in New York (part of which was made up of former members of News and Letters) around an orientation text with the same basic positions as Internacionalismo and RI (...) The new group began to publish Internationalism and like its predecessors set about establishing discussions with other communist groups. Thus it maintained contacts and discussions with Root and Branch in Boston, which was inspired by the councilist ideas of Paul Mattick, but these proved not to be fruitful since the Boston group was more and more turning into a club or marxology. In 1972, Internationalism sent a proposal for international correspondence to twenty groups, in the following terms:
"(...) 'Together with the heightened activity of the working class there has been a dramatic growth in the number of revolutionary groups having an internationalist communist perspective. Unfortunately, contact and correspondence between these groups has largely been haphazard and episodic. Internationalism makes the following proposal with a view towards regularising and expanding contact and correspondence between groups having an internationalist communist perspective (...)
"In its positive response, RI said:
"'Like you we feel the necessity for the like and activities of our groups to have as international a character as the present struggles of the working class. This is why we have maintained contact through letters or directly with a certain number of European groups to whom your proposal was sent. (...) We think that you initiative will make it possible to broaden the scope of these contacts and at the very least, to make our respective positions better known. We also think that the perspective of a future international conference is the logical follow-on from the establishment of this political correspondence (...)
"In its response, RI thus underlined the necessity to work towards international conferences of groups of the Communist Left, without any idea of haste: such a conference should be held after a period of correspondence. This proposal was in continuity with the repeated proposals it had made (in '68, '69 and '71) to the Partito Comunista Internazionalista (Battaglia Comunista - BC) to call such conferences, since at the time this organisation was the most important and serious group in the camp of the Communist Left in Europe (alongside the PCI - Programma Comunista, which was basking in the comfort of its splendid isolation). But despite Battaglia's open and fraternal attitude, these proposals had each time been rejected (...).
"In the end, Internationalism's initiative and RI's proposal did lead, in '73 and '74, to the holding of a series of conferences and meetings in England and France during the course of which a process of clarification and decantation got under way, notably with the evolution of the British group World Revolution (which came out of a split in Solidarity) towards the positions of RI and Internationalism. WR published the first issue of its magazine in May 1974. Above all, this process of clarification and decantation created the bases for the constitution of the ICC in January '75. During this period, RI had continued its work of contact and discussion at an international level, not only with organised groups but also with isolated elements who read its press and sympathised with its positions. This work led to the formation of small nuclei in Spain and Italy around the same positions and who in '74 commences publication of Accion Proletaria and Rivoluzione Internazionale.
"Thus, at the January '75 conference were present Internacionalismo, Révolution Internationale, Internationalism, World Revolution, Accion Proletaria and Rivoluzione Internazionale, who shared the political orientations which had been developed since 1964 with Internacionalismo. Also present were Revolutionary Perspectives (who had participated in the conferences of '73-'74), the Revolutionary Workers' Group of Chicago (with whom RI and Internationalism had begun discussions in '74) and Pour Une Intervention Communiste (which published the review Jeune Taupe and had been formed around comrades who had left RI in '73 (...). As for the group Workers' Voice, which had participated actively in the conferences of the previous years, it had rejected the invitation to this conference because it now considered that RI, WR, etc were bourgeois groups (!) because of the position of the majority of their militants on the question of the state in the period of transition from capitalism to communism (...).
"This question was on the agenda of the January 1975 conference... However it wasn't discussed at the conference which saw the need to devote the maximum of its time and attention to questions that were much more crucial at that point:
that analysis of the international situation;
the tasks of revolutionaries within it;
the organisation of the international current.
"Finally the six groups whose platforms were based on the same orientations decided to unify themselves into a single organisation with an international central organ and publishing a quarterly review in three languages - English, French and Spanish (...) - which took over from RI's Bulletin d'Etude et de Discussion. The ICC had been founded. As the presentation to number 1 of the International Review said, "a great step forward has just been taken". The foundation of the ICC was the culmination of a whole work of contacts, discussions and confrontations between the different groups which had been engendered by the historic awakening of the class struggle. (...) But above all it lay the bases for even more considerable work to come.
"This work can be seen by the readers of the International Review and of our territorial press and confirms what we wrote in the presentation to International Review n°1:
'Some people will consider that the publication of the Review is a precipitous action. It is nothing of the kind. We have nothing in common with those noisy activists whose activity is based on a voluntarism as frenzied as it is ephemeral' (1) (...)
"Throughout the ten years of its existence, the ICC has obviously encountered numerous difficulties, has had to overcome various weaknesses, most of which are linked to the break in organic continuity with the communist organisations of the past, to the disappearance of sclerosis of the left fractions who detached themselves from the degenerating Communist International. It has also had to combat the deleterious influence of the decomposition and revolt of the intellectual petty bourgeoisie, an influence that was particularly strong after '68 and the period of the student movements. These difficulties and weaknesses have for example expressed themselves in various splits - which we have written about in our press - and especially by the major convulsions which took place in 1981, in the ICC as well as the revolutionary milieu as a whole, and which led to the loss of half our section in Britain. In the face on the difficulties in '81, the ICC was even led to organise an extraordinary conference in January '82 in order to reaffirm and make more precise its programmatic bases, in particular concerning the function and structure of the revolutionary organisation. Also, some of the objectives the ICC set itself have not been attained. For example, the distribution of our press has fallen short of what we had hoped for. (...)
"However, if we draw up an overall balance sheet of the last ten years, it can clearly be seen to be a positive one. This is particularly true if you compare it to that of other communist organisations who existed after 1968. Thus, the groups of the councilist current, even those who tried to open themselves up to international work like ICO, have either disappeared or sunk into lethargy: the GLAT, ICO, the Situationist International, Spartacusbond, Root and Branch, PIC, the councilist groups of the Scandinavian milieu... the list is long and this one is by no means exhaustive. As for the organisations coming from the Italian Left and who all proclaim themselves to be THE PARTY, either they haven't broken out of their provincialism, or have dislocated and degenerated towards leftism like Programma (2), or are today imitating, in a confused and artificial way, what the ICC did ten years ago, as is the case with Battaglia and the CWO. Today, after the so-called International Communist Party has collapsed like a pack of cards, after the failure of the FOR in the USA (the FOCUS group), the ICC remains the only communist organisation that is really implanted on an international scale.
"Since its formation in 1975, the ICC has not only strengthened its original territorial sections but has implanted itself in other countries. The work of contact, discussion and regroupment on an international scale has led to the establishment of new sections of the ICC:
- 1975: the constitution of the section in Belgium which published the review, now a newspaper, Internationalisme, in two languages (French and Dutch), and which fills the gap left by the disappearance in the period after World War II of the Belgian Fraction of the International Communist Left.
- 1977: constitution of the nucleus in Holland, which began publication of the magazine Wereld Revolutie. This was particularly important in a country which has been the stamping ground of councilism.
- 1978: constitution of the section in Germany which began publication of the IR in German and, the following year, of the territorial magazine Weltrevolution. The presence of a communist organisation in Germany is obviously of the highest importance given the place occupied by the German proletariat in the past and the role it is going to play in the future.
- 1980: constitution of the section in Sweden which publishes the magazine Internationell Revolution. (...)
"If we underline the contrast between the relative success of our Current and the failure of other organisations, it's because this demonstrates the validity of the orientations we have put forward in twenty years of work for the regroupment of revolutionaries, for the construction of a communist organisation. It is our responsibility to draw out these orientations for the whole communist milieu.
"The bases on which our Current has carried out this work of regroupment even before its formal constitution are not new. In the past they have always been the pillars of this kind of work. We can summarise them as follows:
- the necessity to base revolutionary activity on the past acquisitions of the class, on the experience of previous communist organisations; to see the present organisation as a link in a chain of past and future organs of the class;
- the necessity to see communist positions and analyses not as a dead dogma but as a living programme which is constatly being enriched and deepened;
- the necessity to be armed with a clear and solid conception of the revolutionary organisation, of its structure and its function within the class."
These lessons that we drew 10 years ago (and which are more developed in International Review n°40 which we recommend our readers to refer to) obviously remain valid today and our organisation has striven constantly to put them into practice. However while during the first 10 years of its existence its central task was to build an international pole of regroupment for revolutionary forces, its main responsibility in the subsequent period has been to confront a series of trials ("trials by fire" in a way) that have come out of the convulsions taking place in the international situation in particular.
At the 6th Congress of the ICC which was held in November 1985, a few months after the 10 year anniversary of the ICC we said:
"At the beginning of the 80s the ICC characterised them as 'the years of truth'; years in which the main stakes for the whole of society would be revealed in all their terrible breadth. Half way through the decade the evolution of the international situation has fully confirmed this analysis:
- by a further aggravation of the convulsions of the world economy which has been manifested since the beginning of the 80s by the most serious recession since the 30s;
- by an intensification of tensions between the imperialist blocs which occurred in teh same period and was expressed in a considerable increase in military expenditure and through the development of clamorous war campaigns with Reagan as chantre , head of the most powerful bloc;
- by the resurgence of class struggle during the second half of 1983 after its momentary reflux from 1981 to 1983 just before and after the repression of the workers in Poland. This resurgence is characterised by a hitherto unprecedented simultaneity of the struggles especially in the important centres of capitalism and of the working class in western Europe" (Resolution on the international situation, International Review n°44).
This framework proved valid until the end of the 80s even though the bourgeoisie did what it could to present the "recovery" of 1983 to 1990, that was on the basis of the number 1 world power going into huge debt, as the "definitive end" of the crisis. As Lenin said, facts are stubborn and since the beginning of the 90s capitalism's tricks have led to an open recession even more long and brutal than the previous ones; this has been transformed the euphoria of the average bourgeois into a profound moroseness.
Likewise the wave of workers' strikes that began in 1983 continues with moments of reflux and moments of greater intensity up to 1989 which forced the bourgeoisie to bring forward various forms of base unionism (such as coordinations) in order to counteract the growing discredit of the official union structures.
However one aspect of this framework was dramatically put into question in 1989; that of imperialist conflicts. It's not that the marxist theory had been suddenly proved wrong by the "overcoming" of such conflicts but rather that one of the two main protagonists of such conflicts, the eastern bloc, collapsed dramatically. What we called the "years of truth" had proved fatal for an aberrant regime that had been built on the ruins of the 1917 revolution and for the bloc it dominated. An historic event of such breadth that overturned the map of the world created a new situation unprecedented in history in the sphere of imperialist conflicts. The latter took on forms hitherto unknown that revolutionaries have a responsibility to understand and analyse.
At the same time these upheavals that affected those countries that presented themselves as "socialist" dealt a very heavy blow to the consciousness and combativeness of the working class which had to face the most serious reflux since the historic resurgence at the end of the 60s.
So the international situation in the last ten years has compelled the ICC to confront the following challenges:
- to be an active factor in the class combats that took place between 1983 and 1989;
- to understand the significance of the 1989 events and the consequences they would have in the sphere of imperialist conflicts as well as the class struggle;
- more generally to develop a framework to understand the period in the life of capitalism of which the colllapse of the eastern bloc was the first great manifestation.
After the 6th Congress of the section in France (the largest in the ICC) held in 1984 the 6th ICC Congress placed this concern at the heart of its agenda. However the effort made by our international organisation over several months to rise to its responsibilities towards the class at the beginning of 11984 came up against the persistence within its ranks of conceptions that underestimated the function of the revolutionary organisation as an active factor in the proletarian struggle. The ICC identified these conceptions as a result of centrist slidings towards councilism. This was mainly a product of the historic conditions in which it was constituted as among the groups and elements who participated in its formation there existed a strong distrust of anything resembling Stalinism. In line with councilism these elements tended to put on the same level Stalinism, the conceptions of Lenin on the organisational question and the very idea of the proletarian party. During the 70s the ICC had made a critique of Stalinist conceptions but it hadn't gone far enough and so these continued to weigh on certain parts of the organisation. When the struggle against the vestiges of councilism began at the end of 1983 a number of comrades refused to see the reality of their councilist weaknesses, fantasising that the ICC was conducting a "witch hunt". To avoid the problem posed; centrism towards councilism, they "discovered" that centrism can no longer exist in the decadent period of capitalism (3). Added to such political incomprehensions these comrades, most of whom were intellectuals unwilling to accept criticism, felt a sense of wounded pride as well as "solidarity" towards their friends whom they deemed to be unfairly "attacked". As we pointed out in the International Review n°45 it was a sort of "remake" of the 2nd Congress of the POSDR in which centrism on the organisational question and the weight of the circle spirit, which meant that links of affinity took priority over political relationships, led the Mensheviks to split. The "tendency" that was formed at the beginning of 1985 was to follow the same pathe and split at the time of the 6th Congress of the ICC to constitute a new organisation, the "External Fraction of the ICC" (FECCI). However there is a big difference between the fraction of the Mensheviks and that of the FECCI. The former was to prosper by gathering together the most opportunist currents of Russian Social Democracy and ended up in the bourgeois camp whereas the FECCI has collapsed, keeping more and more of a low profile and producing its publication, International Perspectives at greater and greater intervals. n the end the FECCI rejected the platform of the ICC although at their formation they gave as their main task the defence of this same platform that the ICC which according to them was "degenerating", was in the process of betraying.
At the same time as the ICC was fighting against the vestiges of councilism within it, it participated actively in the struggle of the working class as our territorial press throughout this period shows. Despite the smallness of its forces our organisation was present in the various struggles. Not only did it distribute its press and leaflets, it also participated directly whenever possible in workers' assemblies to defend the need for the extension of the struggles and workers' control over them outside the various union forms; "official" unionism or "rank-and-file" unionism. So in Italy during the schools' strike in 1987 our comrades' intervention had a not negligible impact within the COBAS (rank and file committees) where they were present before these organisms were recuperated by rank-and-file unionism with the reflux in the movement. During this period one of the best indication that our positions were beginning to have an impact among the workers was the fact that the ICC became a particular object of hatred for some of the leftist groups. This was especially so in France where at the time of the strike on the railways at the end of 86 and of the strike in the hospitals in Autumn 88 the Trotskyist group "Lutte Ouvrière" mobilised its "strong arm men" to prevent our militants from intervening in the assemblies called by the "co-ordinations". At the same time ICC militants actively participated in - and were often the animators of - several struggle groups that drew together workers who felt the need to regroup outside the unions to push the struggle forward.
Obviously we mustn't "exaggerate" the impact that revolutionaries, and our organisation in particular, were able to have on the workers' struggles between 1983 and 1989. Generally the movement remained imprisoned by unionism, its "rank-and-file" variations taking the baton from the official unions where the latter had been too discredited. Our impact was very immediate and was anyway limited by the fact that our forces are still very small. But the lesson that we must learn from this experience is that when struggles develop revolutionaries find an echo when they're present because the positions they defend and the perspectives they put forward answer the questions that workers are asking. And for this to be true there's no need whatever for them to "hide their flag" or make the slightest concession to the illusions that may still weigh on the consciousness of the workers, particularly on the question of unionism. This is a valid lesson for all revolutionary groups which are often paralysed when confronted with struggles because the latter don't yet raise the question of capitalism's overthrow so they feel obliged to work with rank-and-file structures "to be heard" and thus give credibility to these capitalist organs.
Just as it is the responsibility of revolutionaries to be present "on the ground" when there are workers' struggles they must also be able at any moment to give the working class as a whole a clear framework of analysis for what's happening in the world.
An important aspect of this task is the understanding of the economic contradiction that affect the capitalist system. Those revolutionary groups who are unable to demonstrate the insoluble nature of the crisis that the system's drowning in show that they haven't understood the marxist tradition they lay claim to and are of no use to the working class. This is so with a group like "Ferment Ouvrier Révolutionnaire" for example who refused even too acknowledge that there was a crisis. Their eyes were so glued to the specific characteristics of the 1929 crisis that they denied all the evidence over the years... until they disappeared.
It's also up to revolutionaries to be able to evaluate the steps that the movement of the class has accomplished; to recognise the moments when it's going forward and also those when it is in retreat. This task firmly conditions the kind of intervention to make among the workers because then the movement is going forward their responsibility is to push it to its limits and in particular to call for its extension. When it's in retreat to call the workers to struggle is to push them to fight in isolation and to call for extension is to contribute to the extension... of the defeat. It's often precisely at such moments that the unions call for extension.
Finally following and understanding the various imperialist conflicts also constitutes a responsibility of the greatest importance for communists. A mistake in this sphere can have dramatic consequences. For example at the end of the 30s the majority of the Italian Communist Fraction with Vercesi, its main animator, at its head, beleived that the different wars of the period, notably the war in Spain, in no way augured a generalised conflict. The outbreak of world war in September 1939 left the Fraction completely crippled and it was several years before they were able to reconstitute themselves in the south of France and take up militant work again.
As for the present period it was extremely important to be clear on the events taking place during the summer and autumn of 1989 in the eastern bloc countries. For its part the ICC mobilised itself to understand what was happening from the time that Solidarnosc came to power in Poland in the middle of the summer when usually "current affairs" are on holiday." (4) It adopted the position that what was happening in Poland was a sign that all the European Stalinist regimes were entering a crisis of unprecedented depth: "The perspective for all the Stalinist regimes is...by no means a "peaceful democratisation" or a "recovery" of the economy. With the intensification of the world crisis of capitalism these countries entered a period of convulsions of a breadth unknown even in their past that is "rich" in violent upheavals" (International Review n°59, "Capitalist convulsions and workers' struggles"). This idea is developed further in the "Theses on the economic and political crisis in the USSR and in the eastern countries" drafted on 15 September (almost two months before the fall of the Berlin wall) and adopted by the ICC at the beginning of October. In these theses we read (see International Review n°60):
"...since virtually the only cohesive factor in the Russian bloc is that of armed force, any policy which tends to push this into the background threatens to break up the bloc. Already, the Eastern bloc is in a state of growing dislocation. For example, the invective traded between East Germany and Hungary, between "reformist" and "conservative" governments, is not just a sham. It reveals real splits which are building up between different national bourgeoisies. In this zone, the centrifugal tendencies are so strong that they go out of control as soon as they have the opportunity (...)
We find a similar phenomenon in the peripheral republics of the USSR. These regions are more or less colonies of Tsarist or even Stalinist Russia (eg the Baltic countries annexed under the 1939 Germano-Soviet pact). However, unlike the other great powers Russia has never been able to decolonise, since this would have meant losing all control over these regions, some of which are vital economically. The nationalist moevements which today are profiting from a loosening of central control by the Russian party, are developing more than half a century late relative to the movements which hit the British and French empires; their dynamic is towards separation from Russia" (Point 18).
"...however the situation in the Eastern bloc evolves, the events that are shaking it today mean the historic crisis, the definitive collapse of Stalinism (...) In these countries, an unprecedented period of instability, convulsions and chaos has begun, whose implications go far beyond their frontiers. In particular, the weakening, which will continue, of the Russian bloc, opens the gates to a destabilisation of the whole system of international relations and imperialist constellations which emerged from World War II with the Yalta Agreements" (Point 20).
A few months later (January 1990), this last idea was given greater precision:
"The world's geopolitical configuration as it has lasted since World War II has been completely overturned by the events of the second half of 1989. There are no longer two imperialist blocs sharing the world between them. It is obvious (...) that the Eastern bloc has ceased to exist (...).
Does this disappearance of the Eastern bloc mean that capitalism will no longer be subjected to imperialist confrontations? Such a hypothesis would be entirely foreign to marxism (...) Today, the collapse of this bloc can absolutely not given renewed credence to such analyses: this collapse will eventually bring with it the collapse of the Western bloc (...) 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 (...) However, with the disappearance of the discipline imposed by the two blocs, these conflicts are liable to become more frequent and more violent, especially of course in those areas where the proletariat is weakest (...)
The disappearance of the two major imperialist constellations which emerged from World War II brings with it the tendency towards the recomposition of two new blocs. Such a situation, however, is not yet on the agenda..." (International Review n°61, "After the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, destabilisation and chaos").
Events since then, especially the crisis and war in the Gulf in 1990-91, have only confirmed our analyses (5). Today, the whole world situation, and notably what is happening in ex-Yugoslavia, is a blinding proof of the complete disappearance of all the imperialist blocs, just as some European countries, France and Germany in particular, are trying with great difficulty to encourage the formation of a new bloc based on the EEC, which would be capable of standing up to the power of the United States.
As far as the evolution of the class struggle is concerned, the Theses of the summer of 1989 also took position:
"Even in its death throes, Stalinism is rendering a last service to the domination of capital: in decomposing, its cadaver continues to pollute the atmosphere that the proletariat breathes (...) We thus have to expect a momentary retreat in the consciousness of the proletariat (...) In particular, reformist ideology will weigh very heavily on the struggle in the period ahead, greatly facilitating the action of the unions.
Given the historic importance of the facts that are determining it, the present retreat of the proletariat - although it doesn't call into question the historic course, the general perspective of class confrontations - is going to be much deeper than the one which accompanied the defeat of 1981 in Poland" (Point 22).
Once again, the last five years have amply confirmed this forecast. Since 1989, we have witnessed the most serious retreat by the working class since historic re-emergence at the end of the 60s. Revolutionaries had to be prepared for this situation in order to adapt their intervention accordingly, and above all, not to "throw the baby out with the bathwater" by mistaking the long reflux for a definitive incapacity of the proletariat to conduct and develop combats against capitalism. In particular, the signs of renewed workers' combativity, especially autumn 92 in Italy and autumn 93 in Germany (see International Review nos 72 and 75), should neither be overestimated (given the extent of the proletarian retreat), not underestimated, since they are the forerunners of an inevitable recovery in the combat and development of class consciousness throughout the industrialised countries.
Marxism is a scientific method. However, unlike the natural sciences it cannot verify its theories in laboratory conditions, or by improving its recording technology. Marxism's "laboratory" is social reality, and it demonstrates its validity through its ability to forecast that reality's evolution. The fact that the ICC was thus able to forecast, from the first symptoms of the Eastern bloc's collapse, the main events which were to shake the world in the five years that followed should not be put down to an aptitude for reading tea-leaves or astrological charts. It is simply the proof of the ICC's attachment to the marxist method, which is responsible for the success of our forecasts.
This being said, it is not enough to call yourself marxist to be able to use the method successfully. In fact, our ability to understand rapidly what was at stake in the world situation flows from the application of the method which we have taken from Bilan, and which we described ten years ago as one of the main lessons of our own experience: the necessity of attaching oneself firmly to the gains of the past, the necessity of regarding communist positions and analyses as a living programme, not a dead dogma.
The 1989 Theses thus began by recalling, in the first ten points, the framework that our organisation had adopted at the beginning of the 80s, following the events in Poland, for understanding the characteristics of the Eastern bloc countries. It was this analysis that allowed us to demonstrate that the Stalinist régimes of the Eastern bloc were finished. And it was a much older gain of the workers' movement (pointed out in particular by Lenin against Kautsky) - the understanding that there cannot exist only one imperialist bloc - that allowed us to declare that the end of the Eastern bloc opened the way to the disappearance of the Western bloc also.
Similarly, to understand what was happening, we had to call into question a schema which had remained valid for more than forty years: the world's division between a Western bloc led by the USA, and an Eastern bloc led by the USSR. We also had to be capable of understanding that the Russia which had been built little by little since the time of Peter the Great, would not survive the loss of its empire. Once again, there is no special merit in being able to call into question the schemas of the past. We did not invent this approach. It has been taught us by the experience of the workers' movement, and especially by its main fighters: Marx, Engels, Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin...
Finally, understanding the upheavals at the end of the 80s meant placing it within a general analysis of the present stage of capitalism's decadence.
This is the work that we began in 1986, with the idea that we had entered a new phase in capitalist decadence: the system's decomposition. This analysis was laid out at the beginning of 1989 in the following terms:
"Up to now, the class combats which have developed in the four corners of the planet have been able to prevent decadent capitalism from providing its own answer to the dead end of its economy: the ultimate form of its barbarity, a new world war. However, the working class is not yet capable of affirming its own perspective through its own revolutionary struggles, nor even of setting before the rest of society the future that it holds within itself.
It is precisely this temporary stalemate, where for the moment neither the bourgeois nor the proletarian alternative can emerge openly, that lies at the origin of capitalism's putrefaction, and which explains the extreme degree of decadent capitalism's barbarity. And this rottenness will get still worse with the inexorable aggravation of the economic crisis" (International Review n°57, "The decomposition of capitalism").
Obviously, as soon as the Eastern bloc's collapse became clear, we placed this event within the framework of decomposition:
"In reality, the present collapse of the Eastern bloc is another sign of the general decomposition of capitalist society, whose origins lie precisely in the bourgeoisie's own inability to give its own answer - imperialist war - to the open crisis of the world economy" (International Review n°60, "Theses...", Point 20).
Similarly, in January 1990, we brought out the implications for the proletariat of the phase of decomposition, and of the new configuration of the imperialist arena:
"Given the world bourgeoisie's loss of control over the situation, it is not certain that its dominant sectors will today be capable of enforcing the discipline and coordination necessary for the reconstitution of military blocs (...) This is why in our analyses, we must clearly highlight the fact that while the proletarian solution - the communist revolution - is alone able to oppose the destruction of humanity (the only answer that the bourgeoisie is capable of giving to the crisis), this destruction need not necessarily be the result of a third World War. It could also come about as a logical and extreme conclusion of the process of decomposition.
(...) the continuing and worsening rot of capitalist society will have still worse effects on class consciousness than during the 1980s. It weighs down the whole of society with a general feeling of despair; the putrid stink of rotting bourgeois ideology poisons the very air that the proletariat breathes. Right up to the pre-revolutionary period, this will sow further difficulties in the way of the development of class consciousness" (International Review n°61, "After the collapse of the Eastern bloc, destabilisation and chaos").
Our analysis of decomposition thus allows us to highlight the extreme gravity of what is at stake in the present historic situation. In particular, it leads us to underline that the proletariat's road towards the communist revolution will be much more difficult that revolutionaries thought in the past. This is another lesson that we must draw from the ICC's experience during the last ten years, and one which recalls Marx's concern last century: that revolutionaries do not have the vocation of consoling the working class, but on the contrary of emphasizing both the absolute necessity and the difficulty of its historic combat. Only with a clear consciousness of this difficulty will the proletariat (and the revolutionaries with it) be able to avoid discouragement in adversity, and find the strength and lucidity to overcome the barriers on the road to the overthrow of this society of exploitation (6).
In this evaluation of the ICC's last ten years, we cannot overlook two important elements of our organisational life.
The first is very positive: it is the extension of the ICC's territorial presence, with the formation in 1989 of a nucleus in India, which publishes Communist Internationalist in Hindi, and of a new section, with its publication Revolucion Mundial, in Mexico, a country of the greatest importance in Latin America.
The second fact is much sadder: it is the death of our comrade Marc, on 20th December 1990. We will not here go back over the vital part he played in the formation of the ICC, and before that in the combat of the left communist fractions during the darkest hours of the counter-revolution. A long article (International Review n°65-66) has already dealt with this. Let us say simply that, while the convulsions of world capitalism since 1989 have been a "test of fire" for the ICC, as for the milieu as a whole, the loss of our comrade has been for us another "test of fire". Many groups of the communist life did not survive the death of their main inspirer. This was the case for the FOR, for example. Some "friends" have also predicted, with deep "concern", that the ICC would not survive without Marc. And yet, the ICC is still there, and it has held its course for four years despite the storms it has encountered.
Here again, we do not ascribe any particular merit to ourselves: the revolutionary organisation does not exist thanks to any one of its militants, however valorous. It is the historic product of the proletariat, and if it fails to survive one of its militants then this is because it has failed to take up correctly the responsibility that the class has given it, and because the militant has himself, in a certain sense, failed. If the ICC has been successful in surmounting the tests it has encountered, this is above all because it has always had the concern to attach itself to the experience of the communist organisations that preceded it, and to see its role as a long term combat rather than one in view of any immediate "success". Since the last century, this has been the approach of the clearest and most solid revolutionary militants: we look back to them, and in large part is our comrade Marc who taught us to do so. He also taught us, by his example, the meaning of militant devotion, without which a revolutionary organisation cannot survive, however clear it may be:
"His greatest pride lay not in the exceptional contribution he made, but in the fact that he had remained faithful in all his being to the combat of the proletariat. This too, is a precious lesson to the new generations of militants who have never had the opportunity to experience the immense devotion to the revolutionary cause of past generations. It is on this level, above all, that we hope to rise to the combat. Though now without his presence, vigilant and clear-sighted, warm and passionate, we are determined to continue" (International Review n°66, "Marc").
Twenty years after the formation of the ICC, we continue the combat.
FM
1) The fact that today we are publishing Interntional Review no 80 shows that it has maintained an unbroken regularity.
2) In the early 80s, the PCI-Programma renamed its publication to Combat. Combat slid rapidly towards leftism. Since then, some elements of the group have renewed the publication of Programma Comunista, which defends classic Bordigist positions.
3) On this subject, see the articles published in International Review n°41 and 45.
4) It should be said that almost all the groups of the proletarian milieu completely failed to understand the events of 1989, as we showed in the articles "The wind from the East and the response of revolutionaries", and "Faced with the upheavals in the East, a vanguard that came late", in International Review n°61-62. The prize goes without any doubt to the EFICC (which had left the ICC on the grounds that the latter was degenerating and incapable of carrying out any theoretical work): the EFICC took TWO YEARS to realise that the Eastern bloc had disappeared (see the article "What use is the EFICC?", in International Review n°70).
5) We have given an account of these events in International Review n°64-65. In particular, even before "Desert Storm", we wrote: "In the new historical period which we have entered, and which the Gulf events have confirmed, the world appears as a vast free-for-all, where the tendency of "every man for himself" will operate to the full, and where the alliances between states will be far from having the stability that characterised the imperialist blocs, but will be dominated by the immediate needs of the moment. A world of bloody chaos, where the American policeman will try to maintain a minimum of order by the increasingly massive and brutal use of military force" ("Militarism and Decomposition", International Review n°64). Similarly, we rejected the idea put about by the leftists, but shared by most of the groups of the proletarian milieu, that the war in the Gulf was a "war for oil" (see "The proletarian political milieu faced with the Gulf war).
6) It is not necessary here to go back over our analysis of decomposition at greater length. It appears in all our texts dealing with the international situation. Let us just add that, through a debate in depth throughout the organisation, this analysis has been made progressively more precise (on this subject, see our texts "Decomposition, the ultimate phase of capitalist decadence", "Militarism and Decomposition", and "Towards the greatest chaos in history", published in International Review n°62, 64, and 68 respectively).
For a quarter of a century, since the end of the 1960s, the scourge of unemployment has continued to extend and intensify throughout the world. This development has been more or less regular, going through more or less violent accelerations and refluxes. But the general upward tendency has been confirmed in recession after recession.
Apparently all the economic statistics are clear: the world economy is finally coming out of the worst recession since the war. Production is increasing, profits are returning. The medicine seems to have worked. And yet no government dares cry victory, all of them are calling for still further sacrifices, all remain extremely prudent, and above all, every one of them says that as far as unemployment is concerned - ie the main issue - there's not a great deal to look forward to[1].
But what kind of recovery is it that doesn't create jobs or only creates precarious ones?
During the last two years, in the Anglo-Saxon countries, which are supposed to be the first to have come out of the open recession which began at the end of the 80s, the 'recovery' has essentially taken the form of an extreme modernization of the productive apparatus in enterprises which survived the disaster. Those who did survive did so at the price of violent restructurations, resulting in massive lay-offs and no less massive expenditure on replacing living labor with dead labor, with machines. The increase in production noted by the statistics in recent months is essentially the result not of an increase in the number of workers reintegrated into employment but of a greater productivity on the part of those who have kept their jobs. This increase in productivity, which for example accounts for 80 % of the rise in production in Canada, one of the countries who have advanced the furthest into the 'recovery', is mainly due to very high investment into the modernization of machinery and communications, into the development of automation - not into the opening of new factories. In the USA it's this investment into equipment, principally computers, which explains the growth of investment in recent years. Investment in non-residential building is virtually stagnant. Which means that existing factories are being modernized but new ones aren't being built.
A Mickey Mouse recovery
In Britain today, while the govermnent never stops singing about the continual fall in unemployment, nearly 6 million people are working an average 14.8 hours a week. It's these kind of precarious and poorly paid jobs which are swelling the employment statistics. The British workers call them "Micky Mouse jobs".
Meanwhile the program of restructuring the big enterprises continues: 1,000 jobs cut in one of Britain's main electricity companies; 2,500 in the second largest telephone company.
In France, the Society Nationale des Chemins de Fer (railways) have announced 4,800 job-cuts for 1995; Renault 1,735, Citroen 1,180. In Germany, the giant Siemens company has announced that it will cut "at least" 12,000 jobs in 1994-5, after the 21,000 already gone in 1993.
The lack of markets
For each enterprise, increasing productivity is a precondition for survival. Globally speaking, this ruthless competition leads to important gains in productivity. But this poses the problem of the existence of sufficient markets to absorb the growing amount of production that the enterprises can ensure with the same number of workers. If the markets are insufficient, job-cuts are inevitable.
"We have to raise productivity by 5 or 6% per year, and as long as the market doesn't progress more quickly, jobs will go". This is how the French car bosses summed up their situation at the end of 1994[2].
Public Debt
How can the market be made to "progress"? In International Review 78 we showed how, in the face of the open recession since the end of the 80s, governments have resorted massively to public debt.
This debt has made it possible to finance the expenditure which helps create 'solvent' markets for an economy which is cruelly lacking in such things because it can't create them spontaneously. The spiraling growth in the debts of the main industrial countries is part of the basis for the re-establishment of profits[3].
Public debt allows 'idle' capital, which finds it harder and harder to find profitable emplacements, to function as state bonds, assured of convenient and reliable returns. The capitalist can extract his surplus value not from his own management of capital, but from the work of the state which levies taxes[4].
The mechanism of the public debt takes the form of a transfer of values from part of the capitalists and workers to the holders of state bonds, a transfer which follows the path of taxes then of interest drawn from the debt. This is what Marx called "fictitious capital" .
The stimulating effects of public debt are risky, but the dangers it accumulates for the future are guaranteed (see 'New financial storms ahead' in International Review no 78). The present 'recovery' will be very expensive tomorrow on the financial level.
For the proletarians, this means that on top of the intensification of exploitation at the workplace, taxation will get heavier and heavier. The state has to levy a growing mass of taxes to reimburse capital and the interests on the debt.
Destroying capital to maintain its profitability
When the capitalist economy is functioning in a healthy manner, the increase or maintenance of profits is the result of the growth in the number of workers exploited and the capacity to extract a greater mass of surplus value from them. When it is suffering from a chronic illness, despite the reinforcement of exploitation and productivity, the lack of markets prevents it from maintaining its profits without reducing the number of workers to exploit, without destroying capital.
Although capitalism draws its profits from the exploitation of labor, it finds itself in the 'absurd' situation of having to pay the unemployed, workers who are not working, as well as having to pay peasants not to produce, to leave their fields lying fallow.
The social costs of ‘maintaining incomes' have reached up to 10% of the annual production of certain industrial countries. From capital's point of this is a mortal sin, an aberration, pure waste, the destruction of capital. With all the sincerity of a convinced capitalist, the new Republican spokesman of the House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich, went on the warpath against all "the government aid to the poor".
But capital's point of view is that of a senile system, which is destroying itself in convulsions that are dragging the world into endless barbarism and despair. The aberration is not that the bourgeois state throws a few crumbs to people who aren't working, but the fact that there are people who can't play a part in the productive process at a time when the cancer of material poverty is spreading all over the planet.
It's capitalism that has become a historical aberration. The current 'recovery' without jobs is further confirmation of this. The only real 'medicine' for the economic organization of society is the destruction of capitalism itself, the inauguration of a society where the objective of production is no longer profit, the return on capital, but the pure and simple satisfaction of human needs.
**********
"It goes without saying that political economy only considers the proletarian as a worker: he is the one who having neither capital nor ground rent, lives solely by his labor, by an abstract and monotonous labor. It can thus affirm that, just like a beast of burden; the proletarian deserves to earn enough to be able to work. When he is no longer working, political economy no longer considers him to lie a human being; it abandons this consideration to criminal justice, to the doctors, to religion, to statistics, to politics, to public charity" (Marx, Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy).
[1] The official predictions of the OECD announce a diminution in the rate of unemployment in 1995 and 1996. But the level of these reductions is miniscule: 0.3% in Italy (unemployment officially stands at 11.3% in 1994; by 1996 it is supposed to go down to 11 %); 0.5% in the USA (from 6.1 % in 94 to 5.6 % in
96); 0.7% in Western Europe generally (from 11.6% to 10.9%). In Japan no reduction is in sight.
[2] Liberation, 16.12.94
[3] Between 1989 and 1994, the public debt, measured as a percentage of gross national production, went from 53 to 65 % in the USA, from 57 to 73 % in Europe; in 1994, this percentage reached 123 in Italy, 142 in Belgium.
[4] This evolution of the ruling class into a parasitic body that lives off its state is typical of decadent societies. In the late Roman Empire as in decadent feudalism this phenomenon was one of the main factors in the massive development of corruption.
The anarchy and chaos which today characterizes the relations between fractions of the bourgeoisie, in particular at the international level, is not only the product of the earthquake represented by the collapse of the eastern bloc. This collapse, which is still taking its course as can be seen by the present events in the Caucasus, is itself the manifestation of a deeper reality, the same reality that explains the war in ex-Yugoslavia, or the fact that 900,000 Rwandans are rotting in refugee camps in Zaire: the advanced decadence of capitalism, its decomposition as a social system.
When a social system enters into its phase of decadence, that is to say when the social relations of production which characterize it become obsolete, no longer adapted to the possibilities and necessities of society, the very basis for the profits and privileges of the ruling class is reduced, made more fragile. The cohesion of the ruling class then tends to disintegrate into an infinite number of conflicting interests. Like hungry beasts who can only survive at the expense of others, more and more fractions of the class in power start tearing each other apart, devastating the civilization they once helped to build. Just as the numerous armies of decadent Rome ruined what was left of a decomposing Empire with their incessant conflicts, just as the feudal lords of the late Middle Ages destroyed whole harvests with their permanent local conflicts, so the imperialist powers of our century have made humanity go through the worst destructions in its history. The means and dimensions of the drama have changed. Catapults made of wood and animal skins have given way to guided missiles, and the battlefield has assumed the dimensions of the entire planet. But the nature of the phenomenon is the same. Society is destroying itself in an indescribable chaos, the prisoner of economic and social relations that have become too narrow ... Today, however, the very survival of humanity is at stake.
The forces of disintegration at work
To measure the reality of the chaos that now dominates international relations, we can distinguish two points of departure. On the one hand there is the general, 'ordinary', omnipresent chaos which is spreading everywhere; on the other hand, within all this, there are more important antagonisms, expressing the tendency towards the reconstitution of blocs or alliances and indicating the most decisive lines of force: this is the case with the antagonism between the former bloc leader, the USA, and a reunified Germany which is the candidate for the role of leader of a new bloc.
Ordinary chaos
The more the governments organize international meetings and summits between the statesmen of the big powers, the more the divisions between them break out into the open. The international organizations, whether it's the UN, NATO, the Western European Union or others, appear more and more as grotesque and impotent masquerades where the only thing that outdoes hypocrisy is cynicism. The media lament the 'misunderstandings' between the member countries, the 'differences in method' which are paralyzing these temples to the 'concert of nations'. But the reality of international relations is the reign of each against all. Each country is constantly caught between the necessity to defend its interests against those of others, which implies a proliferation of antagonisms with other countries, and, at the same time, the necessity for alliances that will enable it to survive in an ever more irrational and ruthless war. The fact that millions of victims pay for these antagonisms every year, all over the planet, does not halt this game of massacre between national capitals, and above all between the great powers.
The last months of 1994 have been rich in new manifestations of this frenetic chaos in which alliances are made and unmade against a background of ever-increasing instability.
The most tangible sign of the depth and importance of this instability today is the current evolution of the relations between the USA and Britain. What was once an unchanging point of reference in international relations is now going through its most difficult moments since the Suez crisis of 1956. The Economist, in its annual supplement, has talked of a "fading friendship". A report by the Pentagon goes along the same lines, accusing France of fuelling the war in Yugoslavia in order to poison relations between the USA and Britain.
During an ordinary summit at Chartres, in October 1994, Britain and France decided to set up a "group of combined aerial forces" and to work together towards an inter-African intervention force that would serve to "keep the peace" in English and French speaking Africa. The British no longer see the Western European Union as a "French submarine within NATO", and the journalists insist on the strength represented by this alliance between the only two nuclear powers in Europe.
Thus, Britain is moving further and further away from the USA; in order to defend its own interests, it is tending to adopt policies that are openly opposed to the USA, as we can see in Africa and above all in the Balkans.
The American-Russian alliance, that other pillar of the construction of the "new world order" has also been put to a
severe test. The question of the enlarging of NATO towards countries that were once part of the USSR's bloc (what Russia calls its "nearby abroad"), in particular Poland and the Czech republic, has more and more become a major bone of contention between the two powers. "No third country can dictate the conditions for enlarging NATO", as an American official dryly declared in the face of Russian protests.
The Franco-German axis, the spinal column of the European Union, has also been put into question: "We are light years from the German position" declared a French official, summarizing France's opposition to any "communitarianisation" of the foreign and security policies of the European Union. France fears that Europe will become a "German super-state". At the same time, Germany is nervous about a Franco-British alliance in 1995 against the prospect of a German-dominated federal Europe, an alliance that would have the sole purpose of countering Bonn's hegemonic ambitions.
Today the cohesion of the great blocs of the cold war seems like a distant memory of unity and order; the 'concert of nations' has become a barbaric cacophony. A cacophony whose face is that of the 500,000 victims of genocide in Rwanda, of the millions of corpses bloodying the planet from Cambodia to Angola, from Mexico to Afghanistan.
In this same process of disintegration, the break-up of the ex-USSR has not yet run its course. The Russian Federation, which sought to be the last bulwark against the centrifugal forces that had carried off the old empire, finds itself confronted with these same forces within itself, as well as in Moldova, Tadjikstan, Georgia, Abkhazia, Tatarstan ... the massive intervention of the Russian army in Chechnya[1] expresses the will of a part of the Russian ruling class to put an end to these tendencies which are continuing to dislocate what was, five years ago, the most
extensive imperialist power on the planet.
But decomposition has reached such a level in the ex-USSR that this operation aimed at 'restoring order' is turning into a new source of internal chaos.
On the ground, the resistance to Russian intervention has been more violent and 'popular' than was foreseen. In an atmosphere of nationalist and anti-Russian hysteria within the population, the president of Chechnya, Dudayev, launched an appeal in the face of the Russian army advance, declaring that "the earth under their feet must bum! It's a war to the death!". The president of the Russian republic of Ingushia, another Caucasian
republic close to Chechnya, announced the threat of the extension of the conflict, proclaiming that "the war for the Caucasus has begun!"
From the start, the Russians met with fierce resistance which cost them dear in men and materials.
But this operation has also led to new fractures within the Russian ruling class itself, which is already well-rotted. At the battle front, right at the beginning, one of the Russian generals (Ivan Babichev) refused to advance on the capital Grozny and fraternized with the Chechen population: "It is not our fault that we are here. This operation contradicts the Constitution. It is forbidden to use the army against the people". At the time of writing, several other generals on the ground have rallied to this protest.
In Moscow the divisions are also dramatic. "In Russia today there are two Chechen conflicts, one in the Caucasus, and another, more dangerous one in Moscow" declared Emile Paine, one of Yeltsin's advisers. A number of 'celebrated' military figures have stood against the intervention, as well as Yeltsin's former prime minister, Egor Gaidar, and Gorbachev ...
For President Clinton the crisis in Chechnya is an "internal problem" and for Willy Claes, the general secretary of NATO, it's an "inside business". "It's not in the interest of the USA and certainly not of the Russians to have a Russia that is going towards disintegration" declared Warren Christopher on TV, on 14 December, showing the profound disquiet of the American bourgeoisie towards the problems of its ally.
But the problem is not so "internal" as one might be led to believe. On the one hand because Chechnya has a certain sympathy from foreign forces, in particular neighboring Turkey and, probably, from Germany. On the other hand because this situation is only a spectacular expression of a world-wide process.
This dramatic putrefaction of the situation in Russia is not simply, as liberal speechmakers would have it, the consequence of the damage done by Stalinism (fraudulently identified with communism); it is not a specificity of Eastern Europe. Russia is just one of the places where the generalized decomposition of world capitalism is most advanced.
The tendencies towards the reconstitution of blocs
A universe of imperialist brigands cannot exist without there being a tendency towards the constitution of gangs and gang leaders. The multiple conflicts between capitalist nations inevitably tend to structure themselves in line with the antagonisms between the most powerful ones. And, among these, the one between the two main bosses stamps its imprint on all the others: the opposition between the USA and a reunified Germany, between the former chief of the western bloc and the only serious pretender to the leadership of a new bloc. This conflict runs
through the political life of numerous countries.
For example: the summit of the Islamic Conference held in Casablanca in December 1994 could not avoid becoming a clash between the Islamic countries allied to the USA and those allied to Europe. From the beginning, the camp led by Hassan II of Morocco (the recognized spearhead of American diplomacy) and Egypt's Mubarak (the country in the world which, next to Israel, receives the most aid from America) made an attack on " certain Islamic states" which support terrorists and which have "sold their souls to the Devil" , ie to Iran and Sudan, whose links with European powers are well-known.
In Turkey, at the end of November 94, the minister of foreign affairs, the social-democrat Soysal, who is somewhat pro-European and anti-American, resigned from the government.
In Mexico, in the state of Chiapas where the Zapatistas are to be found, there are two governors: one from the PRI, the government party since 1929 which has always worked as a solid ally of the 'Yankee' big brother despite using an 'anti-imperialist' rhetoric; the other, Avendano, the governor allied to the Zapatistas, who refuses to recognize the election of the PRI candidate due to frauds, and who controls a third of the province's municipalities. The latter has declared that only Europe can give him the necessary support for him to triumph.
In Europe itself, the question of the choice between the American option and the Germano-European one has rent the ruling classes. In Britain, within the party in power, there's been a set-to illustrated recently by the fact that the 'Euro-skeptics' practically put Major in a minority in the House of Commons on the question of contributions to the European Union. Major even envisaged the possibility of a referendum on the question.
In Italy, a country that was long considered to be "America's aircraft carrier in Europe", but also as one of the pillars of the European Union, the war between the two camps has torn the political class apart, even if what's really at stake is usually kept hidden. However, Carlo de Benedetti, one of the main figures amongst the national bosses, did not hesitate to attack the pro-American Berlusconi government in explicit terms: "Italy is distancing itself from Europe and entering into a spiral of destruction". It's this basic antagonism which is at the root of the
country's current governmental instability.
In France's political class, now in the midst of a presidential election campaign, there are also profound divisions over this question, particularly in the parties of the governmental majority.
Because they are not faced with a choice of this kind, only the German and American bourgeoisies seem to be somewhat coherent at the level of their international policy, even if this is not without its difficulties.
*****
Since the collapse of the USSR, Germany has made many advances on the international level: apart from its reunification, it has developed with some assurance its spheres of influence among the countries of central Europe, former members of the eastern bloc; it has intensified its links with countries as strategically important as Turkey, Iran or Malaysia; it has carried on building and enlarging the European Union, integrating new countries that are particularly close to it, such as Austria; in ex-Yugoslavia, it has imposed the international recognition of
its allies Slovenia and Croatia, which has opened up its access to the Mediterranean. The new reunified Germany has thus unequivocally affirmed that it is the only credible candidate for forming a new bloc opposed to that of the USA.
America's international policy has consisted of an offensive which has two main objectives: on the one hand, to preserve the dominant position of American capital; on the other hand, to systematically destroy the positions of its new European rivals.
The USA has been reaffirming its position as number one power by resorting to spectacular military operations, which often compel its former allies to line up behind it (Gulf war of 91, intervention in Somalia, invasion of Haiti, new operation in the Gulf in 94, etc); by keeping alive the international organisms formed at the end of the second world war to ensure its control over its allies, such as NATO, although the main targets of this tactic have not been taken in ("More than ever, the USA wants to make NATO an appendage of the State department and of Washington ". as a French diplomat declared recently[2]; by consolidating and fortifying its closest spheres of influence by creating 'free trade areas' such as NAFTA, which regroups the USA, Canada and Mexico, or the plan for areas regrouping the whole Pacific zone or the entire American continent (during December 94 Clinton convened two spectacular summits, first in Malaysia then in Miami, to get these projects off the ground).
Parallel to this the USA has been methodically attacking the spheres of influence of its former European 'allies', in particular the former colonial powers and principal military forces on the continent: France, but also Britain. The USA has thus chased France out of Lebanon, Iraq, and Rwanda, while severely threatening its positions in other black or North African countries (especially in Algeria where it has been supporting fractions of the Islamist movement); it has weakened the position of Britain in some of its former hunting grounds, such as South Africa and Kuwait.
If the blocs formed in the heat of the Second World War were for decades factors of relative stability, at least within their own ranks, today the fight for the constitution of new blocs is showing itself to be one of the main factors of instability and chaos.
The decomposition of international relations in decadent capitalism at the end of the 20th century is taking the form of the triumph of 'each against all' and the exacerbation of the law of the strongest.
The war in ex-Yugoslavia is the most significant focus of conflict in this period. 250,000 people killed, a million wounded a few hundred kilometers from the big industrial centers of Europe; fourteen countries militarily present under the flags of the United Nations[3]; five great powers (USA, Russia, Germany, France, Britain) using the multiple divisions within the local ruling class, exacerbated by the collapse of the USSR, to turn the country into a battlefield where the cannon-fodder is drawn essentially from the local inhabitants. From the grand hights of their 'Contact Group', these powers are pulling the strings that determine the evolution or the balance of forces on
the ground.
Who is behind who in ex-Yugoslavia?
"I know that the work of UNPROFOR was debatable. But the idea of the UN as an organization for peace above the nations pleased me a lot. J was rather naive. Now, J have the impression that, for five months, I have been helping the Serbs. I have the strong conviction that France is on the side of the Serbs, that France thinks that the mess in the Balkans will be lessened by a Serb-imposed stability"[4].
These words by a French bluehelmet aged 25[5] are a good summary of the contrast between the illusions of those who believed in the speeches of their governments about Yugoslavia and the sordid reality they discovered on the ground.
Since classes have existed, in order to mobilize the exploited into the butchery of war, the ruling classes have always had recourse to lies and mystifications. Religions and priests have always been the indispensable complement to the soldiers and the politicians. In our day, it is the totalitarianism of the media, the indoctrination of the masses, scientifically organized whether in the 'dictatorial' manner or in the more sophisticated forms used by 'democracy', which plays the role of recruiting cannon fodder and justifying massacres. The war in ex-Yugoslavia is no exception to this rule. But rarely has a war been covered up by such a quantity of lies and hypocrisy.
The powers involved all declare that they want peace and UNPROFOR claims to be "an organization for peace above the nations". But all of them are supporting and arming the parties involved in the conflict, without saying openly, even publicly declaring their hostility to a camp that they are secretly supporting.
In reality, behind the humanitarian and pacifist speeches each power is fuelling the war, if only to block alliances and advances made by its rivals. Thus, for example, the Pentagon has published a report which says that France is trying to keep up the conflict in ex-Yugoslavia in order to exacerbate antagonisms between the USA and Britain, which is certainly true; the USA and Britain also have an interest in the war carrying on in order to sharpen the opposition between France and Germany; Russia wants its status as a great power to be recognized and to this end
is playing on the rivalries between the western powers; as for Germany, which by supporting the independence of Slovenia and Croatia set a match to the powder, it only wants peace once the positions of its local allies have been favorably consolidated.
The veil of humanitarian and pacifist lies has been somewhat tom recently by the big confrontations over the Bihac enclave. This enclave, in the north of Bosnia, has a strategically crucial place in the heart of Krajina, that part of Croatia which is controlled by the Serbs. It is important for the Bosnians and the Serbs, but above all for the Croatians[6]. The importance of the stakes made it clearer than usual how the international powers
are participating in the war.
The USA overtly encouraged the Bosnian army to march on Bihac by unilaterally lifting the arms embargo to this country. This gave rise to a clamor of protest from the other powers, even though they have known for a long time that Washington has been secretly arming the Bosnians and even supplying it with "military advisers". The French minister of foreign affairs summarized the general reaction of the members of NATO to the gross liberties taken by the number one boss: "We regret that a permanent member of the Security Council has unilaterally exonerated itself from the application of a resolution which it had voted for and from decisions taken by common agreement within the Alliance "[7].
But the attitude of the French, just like that of their allies for now, the British, is no more in line with the decisions taken at diplomatic conferences. The impression of the French bluehelmet, that he was "helping the Serbs" when he was supposed to have been protecting the civil population against the latter, is not wrong. Two months ago the French government withdrew its bluehelmets from the Bihac enclave (they were replaced by inexperienced Bangladeshi troops), thus opening the door to the confrontations to come. Throughout the Serbian assault, the
troops of UNPROFOR, led by the French and the British, gave proof of a complicit impotence. On 5 December Izbegovic, the president of Bosnia, openly denounced the French and the British as "protectors of the Serbs". The American senator Robert Dole, future chief of the Republican majority in the Senate, declared that since the beginning of the conflict, the UN had done nothing but "help the Serb aggressors". The Croatian government has denounced Yashushi Akashi, the Japanese who is the special representative of the UN general secretary in ex-
Yugoslavia, as being "pro-Serb"[8].
In the face of these accusations, the French and British governments have once again been feigning outrage and threatening to withdraw their troops. The USA, which has always repeated that it could not allow itself to send a single one of its "boys" to Yugoslavia, seemed to do a backflip and declared that if this was the case it would be ready to send in 25,000 troops in order to assist an UNPROFOR retreat. "This is what allies are for", declared an American official[9]. It should be noted that Germany also rushed forward to offer its services, notably in the form of Tornado bombers, to help the French and British depart.
The events around Bihac have once again shown how the Americans are supporting Bosnia and the French and British are behind Serbia. What's more, the USA's declaration, as soon as the Serbs entered the town of Bihac, that" the Serbs have won the war in Bosnia", shows that it has not forgotten Croatia and its German ally. The position of the USA is clear: the Croats must accept the balance of forces imposed by the Serbs, they must make peace with the Serbs of Krajina, ie accept that the Bihac enclave, just like the third of Croatian territory which the Serbs conquered in the first part of the war, stay in Serbian hands. Thus the USA is using the Serbs against Germany. The recent 'private' voyage by Carter to discuss directly with the Serbs in Bosnia is an illustration of this.
There is nothing 'humanitarian' about the intervention of the great powers in ex-Yugoslavia. This is just a war for the most sordid imperialist interests. A war which, contrary to the litanies of the last three years, is far from moving towards a peaceful conclusion: the American offensive has met with strong resistance, and this can only lead to the intensification of conflicts. Furthermore, while Croatia has not carried out its threats to intervene, if it does do so, the conflagration will be even more general.
******
Capitalism in decomposition cannot live without wars, and wars like the one in ex-Yugoslavia cannot be eliminated without destroying capitalism.
It is vital that the proletariat understands the real nature of this new Balkans war. Not so much so that it is initiated into the analysis of imperialist strategies, but so that it is able to fight the feelings of powerlessness which the bourgeoisie tries to instill in the face of this conflict. To understand the decisive role played by the great powers in this war is to understand that the proletariat of the central countries has the possibility of stopping such madness. That it alone can offer a way out of the barbaric dead-end into which the decadence of capitalism has led humanity, and of which the war in ex-Yugoslavia is merely one of the more spectacular expressions.
RV, 27.12.94
[1] This little republic of the Russian Federation (a million and a half inhabitants, 13,000 square kilometers), situated in the Caucasus between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, with a Muslim majority, rich in oil, a traditional route for all kinds of traffic (especially in arms and drugs), to a large extent still organized through family clans which have their extensions into the mafia of Russia's big cities ... declared its independence in 1991. This independence was never recognized either by Russia or any other country. Since the summer of 1994, Russia has been fuelling a civil war, arming and piloting a movement of revolt by the Russian minority against Dudayev's regime.
[2] Liberation, 1.12.94
[3] The UNPROFOR forces in Yugoslavia amount to 23,000 men in Bosnia-Herzegovina, with nearly 8,000 vehicles. The participating countries are Belgium, Canada, Denmark, the USA, Spain, Britain, France, Italy, Holland, Norway and Turkey, who are members of NATO, plus Pakistan, Bangladesh and Ukraine.
[4] Liberation, 13.12.94
[5] This is the testimony of a young man doing his military service, but one who accepted to go "voluntarily into external action", ie he became a mercenary. The bourgeoisie of the main industrial powers cannot yet allow itself to send conscript troops into a military operation. It is not yet ready to make the exploited class, in countries with an old proletarian tradition pay the "blood tax".
[6] The Croatian authorities declared from the beginning of the confrontations over Bihac that they could not accept the fall of the enclave: "We have said that if there is no negotiated solution in Bihac, given its strategic importance, given the number of refugees who would be entering our country, we would be obliged to intervene ... the west has forced us to not intervene up till now ... " (declaration of a high Croatian official, LeMonde, 29.11.94). "The Croatian army is ready for war, but this will take place at the most propitious moment, both internally and internationally" (declaration by the commander in chief of the Croatian army, Liberation, 30.11.94).
[7] Le Monde, 16.11. 94
[8] Akashi already showed this to be the case when the Serbs took Gorazde in April 94, in his refusal to call for air strikes to stop the Serbian offensive.
[9] International Herald Tribune, 9.12.94
It is 80 years since the First World War inaugurated the epoch of capitalism's decadence, "the era of war or revolution" as the Communist International called it. However, while the imperialist war demonstrated the future that decadent capitalism had to offer humanity, the revolutionary wave, that put an end to the war and made the bourgeois order tremble from South Africa to Germany, from Russia to Canada, made clear that there is only one alternative to capitalist barbarity: the workers' world revolution.
This proletarian wave, whose high point was the Russian Revolution (see International Review nos 72, 73 and 75), constitutes an extraordinary fount of lessons for the workers' movement. The 1917-23 wave definitively confirmed, at the level of the world wide class struggle in the decadent period of capitalism, the majority of the positions that revolutionaries defend today (against the unions and "Socialist" Parties, against "national liberation" struggles, the necessity of the generalized organization of the class in Workers' Councils). In the present article we are going to concentrate on four questions:
* How the revolutionary wave turned imperialist war into a civil war between classes
* How it demonstrated Communist historical theses on the international character of the proletarian revolution
* How, despite being the factor that unleashed the revolutionary wave, war does not pose the most favorable conditions for the revolution
* The dominant character of the struggle of the proletariat in the most developed countries of capitalism.
It was the revolutionary wave that put an end to World War I
In International Review no 78 ("Polemic with Programme Comunista, Il") we show how the explosion of the war in 1914 was not directly due to economic causes, but because the bourgeoisie had brought about, due to the domination of reformist ideology in the "Social Democratic" parties, the ideological defeat of the proletariat. At the same time neither did the end of the war depend on, as they say, the bourgeoisie's "balancing the books" and concluding that the butchery had been "sufficient", to swap the "business" of destruction for that of reconstruction. Nor in November 1918 was there a clear military defeat of the central powers by the Entente powers[1]. In reality what forced the Kaiser to ask for an armistice was the necessity to form a front against the revolution which was spreading throughout Germany. If for their part the Entente powers did not take advantage of their enemy's weakness, it was due to the need to close ranks against the common threat, represented by the workers' revolution. In the countries of the Entente the revolution was still maturing. How did the proletarian response to the
war develop?
With the unfolding of the slaughter the proletariat began to shake off the weight of its defeat in August 1914[2]. Already in February 1915, the workers of the Clyde Valley (Great Britain had carried out a wildcat strike (against the advice of the union); this example was followed by workers in the arms industry and by Liverpool engineering workers. In France a strike by textile workers in Vienne and Lagors broke out. A general strike by the workers of Petrograd in 1916 stopped an attempt by the government to militarize workers. In Germany, the Spartacus League called a demonstration of workers and soldiers, under the slogans of "Down 'with the war!", "Down with the government!". "Hunger mutinies" took place in Silesia, Dresden ... It was in this climate of accumulating signs of discontent that news of the February Revolution in Russia arrived.
In April 1917 a wave of strikes broke out in Germany (Halle, Kiel, Berlin, ... ). Near insurrection took place in Leipzig and as in Russia, the first Workers' Councils were formed. On the 1st of May, in the trenches of the Eastern Front, Red Flags were flown in the German trenches and in the Russian. German soldiers passed a leaflet from hand to hand that said:
"Our heroic Russian brothers have thrown off the damned yoke of the butchers of their country ( ... ) Your happiness, your progress, depends on your ability to follow and take further the example of your Russian brothers ... A victorious revolution will not demand as many sacrifices as this savage war ... "
In France, in a climate of workers strikes (that of the Paris engineering workers spread to 100,000 workers in other industries), on the same 1st Maya meeting in solidarity with the Russian workers, proclaimed "The Russian Revolution is the signal for the world revolution". At the front illegal Soldiers' Councils circulated revolutionary propaganda and collected a levy from the soldiers' meager wages in order to help sustain the strikes in the rear.
At the same time in Italy massive rallies took place against the war. In Turin during one of these, a slogan arose that was constantly repeated throughout the country: "we should do as in Russia". In October 1917 soldiers and workers throughout the world looked towards Petrograd and "We should do as in Russia" was turned into a powerful stimulus to mobilize for the definitive end to the imperialist massacre.
Likewise, in Finland (where there had already been an attempted insurrection a few days after that in Petrograd) in January 1918 armed workers occupied public buildings in Helsinki and the South of the country. In Rumania at the same time, the Russian Revolution found an immediate echo. The Black Sea Fleet rebelled forcing an armistice with the Central Powers. In Russia the October revolution put an end to participation in the war, even submitting to the occupation of large areas of Russia by the Central Powers, under the so-called Peace of Brest-Litovsk, in the hope of the explosion of the world revolution.
In January 1918, the workers of Vienna learnt of the draconian "peace" conditions that the Austro- Hungarian government wanted to impose on the Russian Revolution. Confronted with the perspective of the continuation of the war Daimler workers unleashed a strike that within a few days had spread to 700,000 workers throughout the Empire, forming the first Workers' Councils. In Budapest, the strike spread under the slogan of "down with the war!", "Long live the Russian workers!", It was only the insistent calls for calm by the "Socialists", that calmed the strike wave, though not without resistance, and defeated the revolt of the fleet in Cattaro[3]. In Germany at the end of January there were also one million strikers. However, the workers left the running of the struggle in the hands of the "socialists" who agreed with the unions and the Military High Command to put an end to the strikes, sending more than 30,000 of the most prominent workers in the strike to the front. In this same period in the mines of Dombrowa and Lublin the first Workers' Councils in Poland were formed.
The movement against the war and in solidarity with the Russian Revolution was also growing in Britain. The visit of the Soviet Delegate Litvinov coincided in January 1918 with a wave of strikes and provoked such demonstrations in London that the bourgeois newspaper (The Herald) called them the "Workers' ultimatum to the government demanding peace". In France a strike broke out at Renault in May 1918, which rapidly spread to 250,000 workers in Paris. In solidarity the workers of the Loire region went back on strike and controlled the region for ten days.
Nevertheless, the last military offensives caused a momentary paralysis of these struggles. After the fiasco of these offensives the workers were convinced that the only way to stop the war was the class struggle. October saw a struggle by day laborers and a revolt against the dispatch of the most" Red" regiments from Budapest to the front, as well as massive strikes and demonstrations in Austria. On the 4th of November the bourgeoisie of the "double crown" retired from the war.
In Germany, the Kaiser attempted to "democratize" the regime (freeing Liebknecht, incorporating the "Socialists" into the government) in order to demand the "last drop of blood of the German people". However on the 3rd of November the sailors at Kiel refused to obey the officers who wanted to make one last suicidal attempt by the fleet to break out of the port. The Red Flag was hoisted throughout the fleet, and along with the workers of the city, they organized a Workers' Council. Within a few days the insurrection had spread to the main German cities[4]. On the 9th of November when the insurrection reached Berlin the German bourgeois, not wanting to make the same mistake committed by the Provisional government in Russia (prolonging participation in the war, which only served to ferment and radicalize the revolution) called for an armistice. On the 11th of November, the bourgeoisie put an end to the imperialist war in order to confront the class struggle.
The international nature of the working class and its' revolution
Unlike the revolutions of the bourgeoisie that were limited to implementing capitalism in their nation, the proletarian revolution is by necessity worldwide. While the bourgeois revolutions could be spread out over more than a century, the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat tends, by its very nature, to take the form of a gigantic wave which spread throughout the planet. This has always been the historical thesis of revolutionaries. Engels already demonstrated this in the Principles of Communism:
"Question 19 - Will this revolution be made in one country? Answer - No. Major industry in creating the world market has drawn the people of the world so closely together, particularly the most advanced nations, that each nation is dependent on what happens in every other. It has furthermore regimented social development in the advanced countries to the point that, in all countries, the bourgeois and the proletariat have become the two decisive classes in society, and the struggle between these classes has become the major struggle in our epoch. The communist revolution, therefore, will not be a purely national one, it will erupt simultaneously, ie in England, America, France and Germany (...) It is a universal revolution and therefore, it will also develop on a universal terrain".
The revolutionary wave of 1917-23 fully confirmed this. In 1919, the British Prime Minister wrote: "The whole of Europe is filled with the spirit of revolution. There is a deep sense not only of discontent but anger and revolt amongst the workmen against pre-war conditions. The whole existing order in its' political, social and economic aspects is questioned by the masses of the population from one end of Europe to the other" (Quoted in E H Carr's The Bolshevik Revolution. Vo13).
However, the proletariat was unable to transform this formidable wave of struggles into a unified struggle. We will first look at the facts in order to be better able to analyze the obstacles the proletariat ran up against in the generalization of the revolution.
1. From November 1918 to August 1919. The attempted revolutions in the defeated countries ...
When the revolution began in Germany, three important detachments of the central European proletariat (Holland, Switzerland and Austria) had in practice already been neutralized.
In Holland, in October 1918, mutinies broke out in the army (the High Command scuttled its own Fleet before the sailors could seize control of it), while workers in Amsterdam and Rotterdam formed Workers' Councils. However, the "Socialists" "joined" the revolt in order to neutralize it. Their leader, Troelstra recalled much later "If I had not made a revolutionary intervention, the most energetic workers would have taken the road of Bolshevism" (P.J. Troelstra De Revolutie en de SDAP)
Thus, disorganized by their "leaders", separated from the help of the soldiers, the struggle ended with the machine gunning of workers, who on the 13th of November had united in a meeting near Amsterdam. The "Red Week" ended with 5 dead and dozens wounded.
In Switzerland on the same 13th of November, there was a general strike of 400,000 workers in protest against the use of troops against a demonstration celebrating the 1st anniversary of the Russian Revolution. The workers' newspaper "Volksrecht" proclaimed "Resist until the last. We are strengthened by the revolution in Austria and Germany, the workers' action in France, the movement of the proletariat in Holland and, above all, through the revolution in Russia".
But here also the "Socialists" and the unions called for an end to the struggle in order "not to place the unarmed masses under the guns of the enemy". It was precisely the disorientation and division that they created in the proletariat, that opened the doors to the terrible repression that defeated the "great strike". The "pacifist" Swiss government militarized the railways, organized counter-revolutionary guards, flattened workers' centers without any scruples. Hundreds of workers were arrested, and the
death penalty introduced for "Subversives".
In Austria, the Republic was proclaimed on the 12th of November. When the national red and white flag was hoisted, groups of workers tore off the white boarder. Men climbed onto the statue of Pallas Athena in the center of Vienna, and before an assembly of tens of thousands of workers, various speakers called for moving directly to the dictatorship of the proletariat. But the "Socialists" who had been called into government as the only party with any influence on the workers, declared that "The proletariat already has power. The workers' party governs the Republic" and systematically moved to neutralize the revolutionary organs, transforming the Workers' Councils into Councils of Production and the Soldiers' Councils into Army Committees (massively infiltrated by officers). The bourgeoisie's counter-offensive not only paralyzed the Austrian proletariat, but served as an instruction manual for the German bourgeoisie's counter -offensive.
In Germany, the Armistice and the proclamation of the Republic created a naive feeling of "triumph" for which the proletariat paid dearly. While the workers could not unify the different centers of struggle and vacillated about launching into the destruction of the state[5] the counter-offensive was organized and coordinated by the unions, the "Socialist" Party and the military High Command. From December the bourgeoisie went onto the offensive constantly provoking the proletariat of Berlin, in order to isolate their struggle from the rest of the workers in Germany. On the 4th of January 1919, the government sacked the Chief-of-Police Eichhorn, challenging the workers' opinion. On the 6th of January, half a million Berlin workers took to the streets. The following day the "socialist" Noske, commanding the Freicorps (demobilised officers and lower ranks, paid by the government) crushed the Berlin workers. Days later they murdered Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. Although the events in Berlin alerted workers in other cities (above all in Bremen where workers assaulted the union headquarters and distributed their funds to the unemployed), the government was able to fragment this response, in a way which allowed them to begin by concentrating on Bremen, then against the workers of the Rhineland and the Ruhr in order to return once again in March to the revolutionary embers in Berlin in the so-called "Bloody Week" (1,200 workers killed). After this they fell upon the workers of Mansfeld and Leipzig and the Republic of Councils in Magdeburg.
In March the workers in Munich proclaimed the Republic of Bavarian Councils, which along with the October Revolution in Russia and the Hungarian Revolution, constituted the only experiences of the workers taking power. The armed Bavarian workers were able to defeat the counter-revolutionary army sent against them by the deputy president Hoffmann. Nevertheless, as we have seen, the workers in the rest of Germany had suffered severe defeats and could not come to the aid of their brothers, while the bourgeoisie organized an army which from the beginning of May put down the insurrection. Amongst the troops who spread terror in Munich were Himmler, Rudolf Hess, Von Epp ... future Nazi leaders. All them were encouraged in their anti-proletarian fury by a government that called itself "Socialist".
On the 21st of March 1919, after a formidable wave of workers' strikes and mutinies, the workers councils took power in Hungary. In a tragic error, the Communist unified, at this very moment, with the "Socialists" who sabotaged the revolution from within. At the same time the western "democracies" (especially England and France) immediately ordered an economic blockade to which was added military intervention by Rumanian and Czech troops. In May when the Bavarian Workers' Councils fell, the situation for the Hungarian Revolution was also terrible. However, a formidable workers' reaction, in which Hungarian, Austrian, Polish, Russian, but also Czech and Rumanian workers participated, broke the military blockade. In the long run however, the sabotage of the "Socialists" and the revolutions isolation got the better of the workers' resistance and on the 1st of August Rumanian troops took Budapest, installing a union government that liquidated the Workers' Councils. When the unions had finished their work they handed over command to Admiral Horty (another future collaborator with the Nazis) who unleashed a reign of terror against the workers (8,000 executed, 100,000 deportations). In the glow of the Hungarian revolution the miners of Dombrowa (Poland) took control of the region and formed a "Workers' Guard" in order to defend themselves from the bloody repression of that other "Socialist" Pilsudski. When the Hungarian councils fell, the "Red Republic of Dombrowa" crumbled.
The Hungarian Revolution also provoked the last workers' convulsions in Austria and Switzerland in June 1919, the Viennese police drawing the lessons of their German buddies, plotted a provocation (an assault on the headquarters of the Communist Party) in order to precipitate an insurrection when the whole of the proletariat was still weak and disorganized. The workers fell into the trap leaving 30 dead on the streets of Vienne. This also happened in Switzerland after a general strike in Zurich and Basle.
... and among the "victors"
In Great Britain, again in the Clyde region, at the beginning of 1919 more than 100,000 workers were on strike. On the 31st of January ("Red Friday") during a workers' rally in Glasgow, workers confronted troops and artillery sent by the government. Miners were ready to begin a strike, but the unions managed to stop it "Giving a margin of confidence to the government in order that it could study the nationalization of the mines" (Hinton and Hyman: Trade Unions and Revolution).
In Seattle (United States) at the same time a strike of shipyard workers broke out which within a few days had spread to all the workers in the city. Through mass assemblies and an elected and revocable strike committee, the workers controlled the city's food supply and organized self-defense against the troops sent by the government. However, the "Seattle Commune" remained isolated and a month later (after hundreds of arrests) the shipyard workers returned to work. Other strikes broke out, such as that of the miners in Butte (Montana) where a Workers' and Soldiers' Council was formed, and the strike by 400,000 steel workers. Here again, the struggles failed to unify.
In Canada during the Winnipeg General Strike in May 1919, the local Government organized a patriotic meeting in order to try and counteract the pressure from the workers with the chauvinism of victory. But the soldiers "threw away the script" and after recounting the horrors of the war proclaimed the necessity to "transform the imperialist war into class war" which radicalized the movement even more, leading to its spreading to Toronto. Nevertheless, the workers left the direction of the struggle to the unions who lead them to isolation and defeat and the terror of the city's thugs, whom the government called "special commissioners".
But the wave did not remain just in the countries directly effected by the imperialist slaughter. In Spain in 1919, a strike broke out at La Canadiense, and spread rapidly through the industrial belt of Barcelona. While on the walls of the haciendas (the houses of the great landowners) in Andulucia, the semi-literate day labors wrote "Viva los Soviets! Viva Lenin!". The mobilization of the day laborers during 1918-19 has gone down in history as the "Bolshevik two years".
Concentrations of workers outside Europe and North America also took part in the wave.
In Argentina, at the beginning of 1919, in the so-called "Bloody Week" in Buenos Aires a general strike took place in response to the repression inflicted on the workers at the Talleras Vasena factory. After 5 days of street fighting and artillery bombardments of workers' areas, 3,000 were left dead. In Brazil, the strike of200,000 workers in Sao Paulo saw the troops sent by the government fraternizing with the workers. At the end of 1918 a "Workers' Republic" was proclaimed in the favelas (shanty towns) of Rio de Janeiro, which, however, remained isolated and collapsed faced with the state of siege imposed by
the government.
In South Africa, the land of "racial hatred", the workers' struggles made clear the necessity and possibility of the workers struggling together "The working class of South Africa cannot gain its liberation until it overcomes the racial prejudices and hostility towards the workers of other colors within its ranks" (The International, newspaper of the Industrial Workers of Africa). In March 1919 a tram strike spread to all of Johannesburg, with assemblies and meetings in solidarity with the Russian Revolution. While in Japan, in 1918, the so-called "Rice Mutinies" developed against the sending of rice to Japanese troops who were participating in the counter-revolution in Russia.
2. 1919-1921: The late re-awakening of the proletariat in the "victorious" countries and the weight of the defeat in Germany
In this first phase of the revolutionary wave the proletariat played for high stakes. First, the suffocating isolation of the revolutionary bastion in Russia[6] had to be ended. But the very fate of the revolution was being decided. The strongest proletarian detachments - Germany, Austria, Hungary - had entered the combat, and their strength and experience would determine the future of the world revolution. Nonetheless, the first phase of the revolutionary wave ended, as we have seen, with profound defeats for the proletariat, from which it was unable to recover.
In Germany, the workers supported in March 1919 the general strike called by the unions against the "Kapp Putsch", in order to reinstate the "democratic" Scheidemann government. The workers of the Ruhr however, were not willing to return to power those who had already murdered 30,000 workers, and they armed themselves forming the "Red Army of the Ruhr". In some cities (Duisberg) they went as far as arresting the union and socialist leaders. But once again the struggle remained isolated. At the beginning of April the reconstituted German Army smashed the Ruhr revolt.
In 1921, the German bourgeoisie devoted itself to "cleansing" the revolutionary remnants who remained in Central Germany, plotting new provocations (the assault on the Leuna factories in Mansfeld). The Communists of the KPD, completely disorientated, fell into the trap and ordered the "March Actions" in which the workers of Mansfeld, Halle, etc, despite their heroic resistance could not overcome the bourgeoisie, who made good use of the dispersion of the movement, to massacre first the workers of Central Germany and then the workers of Hamburg, Berlin and the Ruhr who showed solidarity with them.
Given that the struggle of the working class is by essence international, what happens in one country has repercussions on what happens in others. Therefore, when after the euphoria caused by "victory" in the war, the proletariats of Britain, France and Italy joined the struggle en masse, the successive defeats suffered by their class brothers in Germany deepened the weight of the most nefarious mystifications: nationalization, "workers' control" of production, trust in the unions, lack of trust in the proletariat.
In Britain a hard-fought rail strike broke out in September 1919. Despite intimidation by the bourgeoisie (warships in the Thames estuary, soldiers patrolling the streets of London) the workers did not give in. What is more the transport workers and workers in electric businesses wanted to call a strike, but the unions stopped them. The same would happen later when the miners called on the solidarity of the rail workers. The kind-hearted union proclaimed: "Why the dangerous adventure of a general strike? Seeing we have within our grasp a much simpler, less costly and undoubtedly less dangerous means. We must show the workers that a much better way forwards is to intelligently use, the power that the most democratic constitution in the world offers them and that will allow them to gain all they desire" (Quoted by EdouardDolleans, Historia del Moviemento Obrero) To immediately prove this to the workers, "the most democratic bourgeoisie in the world" hired thugs, strikebreakers and provocateurs ... and made one million workers unemployed.
Nonetheless, the workers still had confidence in the unions. And they paid a very dear price for this: In April 1921 the miners called for a general strike, but were confronted with the refusal of the unions to back them (April the 15th, will always remain in workers memory as "Black Friday") which left the miners isolated, confused and open to the government's attacks. Once the main workers' detachments were defeated, the bourgeoisie "allowed the workers to gain all they desire" - wage cuts for over
7 million workers.
In France the worsening of the workers' living conditions (above all due to the scarcity of fuel and food) let loose a train of workers' struggles from the beginning of 1920. From February the epicenter of the movement was the rail strike that, despite opposition from the union, spread to and generated workers' solidarity in other sectors. Faced with this the CGT union decided to place itself at the head of the strike and to "support" it through the tactic of "waves of assault", or rather on one day the miners would strike, on another engineering workers ... and in this way workers solidarity did not tend to draw together, but to disperse and die. By the 22nd of May the rail workers were isolated and defeated (18,000 disciplinary sackings). It is true that the unions were "discredited" in front of the workers (membership fell by 60%) but their work of sabotaging the workers struggles had born fruit for the bourgeoisie: the French proletariat was defeated and left open to the punitive expeditions of the "Civic Leagues".
In Italy, where throughout 1917-19 formidable workers' struggles had broken out against the imperialist war and the sending of supplies to the troops fighting against the Russian Revolution[7], the proletariat was, however, unable to launch an assault against the bourgeois state. In the summer of 1920, due to the collapse of numerous businesses, a fever of "factory occupations" broke out, which were supported by the unions since, in reality, they diverted the proletariat away from the confrontation with the bourgeois state, and channeled them into the "control of production" instead. Suffice it to say that the government of Giolitti told businessmen that "we are not going to use military force to dislodge the workers, since this would move the struggle from the factory to the street" (Quoted in M Ferrare, Conversando con Togliatti). The workers' combativity was wasted in these factory occupations. The defeat of this movement, although in 1921 there were new and isolated strikes in Lombardy and Venice, opened the door to the counter-revolution, which in this case took the form of Fascism.
In the United States, the working class also suffered important defeats (the strikes in the coal mines and in the lignite mines of Alabama, and on the railways) in 1920. The capitalist counter-offensive imposed "open contracts" (the impossibility of collective bargaining), which brought about a 30 % reduction in wages.
3. The last death rattles of the revolutionary wave
From 1921, although there were still heroic expressions of workers' combativity, the revolutionary wave had already entered into its terminal phase. Even more so when the weight of the workers' defeats led the revolutionaries of the Communist International into increasingly serious errors (the application of the policy of the "United Front", support for "national liberation" movements, expulsion of the fractions of the revolutionary left from the International...) that at the same time led to more confusions and important failures which, in a dramatic spiral, led to new defeats.
In Germany the workers' combativity was diverted increasingly towards "anti-fascism" (for example when the ultra-right killed Erzberger, or when a warmonger wanted to "raze" Kiel in November 1918) or towards the nationalist terrain. Faced with the invasion of the Ruhr by French and Belgian troops in 1923, the KPD (Communist Party of Germany) raised the abject flag of "National-Bolshevism", claiming that the proletariat should defend the "German Fatherland", as something progressive, faced with the imperialist aggression represented by the powers of the Entente. In October of the same year, the Communist Party that had joined the governments of Saxony and Thuringia, decided to provoke insurrections beginning on the 20th of October in Hamburg. When the workers of this city rose up in revolt the Communist Party decided to retreat, which left them to face a cruel repression on their own. The exhausted, demoralized, crushed German proletariat had sealed its own defeat. Days later, Hitler led his famous "bierkeller putsch" an attempted Nazi uprising in a beerhall in Munich, which failed for the time being (Hitler came to power by the "parliamentary road" ten years later).
In Poland, the proletariat that in 1920 had closed ranks with its bourgeoisie against the invasion of the Red Army, returned to its class terrain in 1923 with a new wave of strikes. But the international isolation that this struggle suffered allowed the bourgeoisie to keep the initiative in its hands and to mount all kinds of provocations (the burning of the Warsaw Arsenal for which the Communists were accused) in order to confront the workers when they were dispersed. On the 6th of November an insurrection broke out in Krakow against the killing of two workers, but the lies of the "Socialists" (who got the workers to hand in their arms) lead to the disorientation and demoralization of the workers. Despite the wave of solidarity strikes with Krakow that took place in Domdrowa, Gornicza, Tarnow ... within a few days the bourgeoisie had extinguished this workers' uprising. In 1926 the Polish proletariat would be the cannon fodder of the inter-bourgeois struggles between the "Philo-fascist" government and Pilsudski who the "left" supported as the "defender of Liberty".
In Spain the successive waves of struggle were systematically held in check by the "Socialist" Party and the UGT, which allowed General Primo de Rivera to impose his dictatorship in 1923[8].
In Great Britain, after some partial and very isolated struggles (the marches of the unemployed on London in 1921 and 1923 or the all-out strike of construction workers in 1924) the bourgeoisie imposed a final defeat in 1926. After another wave of miners' strikes, the unions organized the "General Strike" which they called off 10 days later, leaving the miners alone to return to work in December having suffered thousands of sackings, After the defeat of this struggle the counter-revolution reigned in Europe.
Also in this phase of the definitive decline of the revolutionary wave, there were defeats of the proletarian movements in the countries of the periphery of capitalism:
In South Africa, the "Red revolt of the Transvaal" in 1922 against the replacing of white workers by black workers on lower wages, spread to workers of both races and other sectors (coalmines, railways ... ) until it took insurrectional forms.
In 1923 Dutch troops and thugs hired by the planters were used against a rail strike that spread from Java to Surabaj and Jemang (Indonesia).
In China, the proletariat had been dragged (following the infamous thesis of the CI which supported "national liberation" movements) into supporting the actions of the nationalist bourgeoisie grouped around the Kuomintang, which however had no hesitation in savagely repressing the workers when they struggled on their class terrain (for example the general strike in Canton in 1925). In February and March 1927 the workers of Shanghai launched insurrections in order to prepare the entry into the city of the nationalist general Chang-Kai-Shek. This "progressive" leader (according to the CI) did not hesitate to take hold of the city, in alliance with the shopkeepers, peasants, intellectuals and especially the lumpen elements, in order to crush with fire and blood the general strike directed by the Shanghai Workers' Council in protest at the prohibition of strikes by the "liberator". Even after two months of terror in the workers' areas of Shanghai the Cl still supported the "Left wing" of the Kuomintang, based in Wuhan. This nationalist "left" did not vacillate in shooting down workers whose strikes "were irritating the foreigners ( .. .) impeding the progress of their commercial interests" (M. N. Roy, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in China). When the proletariat was already completely crushed, the CP decided to "pass over to the insurrection", which did no more than make this defeat even worse: 2,000 workers were killed in the "Canton Commune" of December 1927.
This struggle of the Chinese proletariat marked the dramatic epilogue of the world revolutionary wave, and as the revolutionaries of the Communist Left analyzed, a decisive landmark in the passage of the "Communist" Parties into the camp of the counter-revolution. A counter-revolution that spread over the proletariat of the world, like an immense black night, for 40 years until the resurgence of the struggles of the working class in the middle of the 1960s.
War does not offer the most favorable conditions for revolution
Why did the revolutionary wave fail? Without a doubt the incomprehensions that the proletariat and revolutionaries had about the conditions of the new historical period of decadence, had a decisive weight; but we cannot forget how the objective conditions created by the imperialist war prevented this vast ocean of struggles from being channeled towards a unified combat. In "the historic conditions for the generalization of the struggle of the working class" (International Review no 26) we analyzed: "War is certainty a peak in the crisis of capitalism, but we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that it is also a 'response' by capitalism to the crisis. It is an advanced moment of barbarism which as such does not greatly favor the conditions for the generalization of the revolution".
We can see this from the facts of this revolutionary wave.
i) The war was a blood-letting for the proletariat. As Rosa Luxemburg explained:
"For the advance and victory of Socialism we need a strong, educated, ready proletariat, masses whose strength lies in knowledge as well as in numbers. And these very masses are being decimated all over the world. The flower of our youthful strength, hundreds of thousands whose Socialist education in England, in France, in Belgium, in Germany and in Russia was the product of decades of education and propaganda, other hundreds of thousands who were ready to receive the lessons of Socialism, have fallen, and are rotting upon the battlefields. The fruit of the sacrifices and the toil of generations is destroyed in a few short weeks, the choicest troops of the international proletariat are torn out by the roots" (The Junius Pamphlet).
A high percentage of the 70 million soldiers were proletarians who were replaced in the factories by women, or by workers recently brought from the colonies, with much less experience of struggle. Furthermore in the army the workers were diluted in an interclassist mass along with peasants, lumpens .... Thus the actions of the soldiers (desertions, insubordination...) though not benefiting the bourgeoisie, did not represent a terrain for genuinely proletarian struggle. For example, the desertions in the Austro-Hungarian army were in great part motivated by the refusal of Czechs, Hungarians.... to struggle for the Emperor in Vienna. The mutinies in the French army in 1917 did not question the war but "how to carry out the war" (the "inefficiency" of certain military actions ... ). The radical nature and, consciousness of some of the soldiers actions (fraternizing with the soldiers on the "other side", refusal to repress workers' struggles...) were in reality the consequence of the mobilization in the rear... And when after the armistice, the question was posed of destroying capitalism to put an end to war, the soldiers represented the most vacillating and backward sector. This is why the German bourgeoisie, for example, deliberately overstated the weight of the Soldiers' Councils compared to that of the Workers' Councils.
ii) The proletariat did not "control" the war. The unleashing of war requires the defeat of the proletariat. This included the impact of the reformist ideology that was part of this defeat, also the cessation of struggles in 1914: for example in Russia a growing wave of struggles that had developed during 1912-13 came to an abrupt end.
But besides, during the course of the war, the class struggle was pushed into the background by the din of military operations. While military reverses accentuated discontent (for example, the failure of the Russian Army's offensive in June 1917 brought about the "July days"), it is also certain that the offensives of the rival imperialisms and the success of their own, pushed the proletariat into the arms of the "interests of the fatherland". Thus the spring of 1918, at a significant moment for the world revolution (only months after the October insurrection in Russia), produced the last German military offensives that:
- paralyzed the wave of strikes which from January had broken out in Germany and Austria, with the "success" of the conquests in Russia and the Ukraine, which military propaganda called "the peace of bread".
- lead to French soldiers, who had been fraternizing with the workers of the Loire, closing ranks with their bourgeoisie. In the summer these same soldiers put down the strikes.
And what is more important, when the bourgeoisie saw that its domination was really threatened by the proletariat, it could put an end to the war, separating the revolution from its main stimulus. This question was not understood by the Russian bourgeoisie, but it was by the more prepared German bourgeoisie (and with them the rest of the world bourgeoisie). No matter how strong the imperialist antagonisms are between the different national capitals, the class solidarity of the different sections of the bourgeoisie is much stronger faced with the necessity to confront the proletariat.
In fact, the feeling of relief that the armistice generated in the workers weakened their struggle (as we saw in Germany) while, on the other hand, it reinforced the weight of bourgeois mystification. The bourgeoisie presented the imperialist war as an "anomaly" in the functioning of capitalism (the "Great War" was going to be "the war to end war ) trying to convince the working class that the revolution was not necessary because "everything would be as it was before". The sensation of a "return to normality" strengthened the tools of the counter-revolution: the "Socialist" parties and their" gradual passage to Socialism", the unions and their mystifications ("workers control of production", nationalizations, ... ).
iii) Finally the imperialist war broke the generalization of the revolution by fragmenting the workers' response between those of the victorious and defeated countries. Though the governments were weakened by military defeat, the crumbling of the regime did not necessarily mean the strengthening of the proletariat. Thus after the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the proletariat of the "oppressed nationalities" was dragged into the struggle for the "independence" of Czechoslovakia, Hungary, or Yugoslavia[9]. The Hungarian workers who in October took Budapest, and the general strike in Slovakia in November 1920 ... were diverted onto the rotten terrain of "national liberation". In Galicia (then in Austria) what for years had been a movement against the war, was allowed to become demonstrations "for Polish independence and military victory over Germany!". In its insurrectional attempt of November 1918, the proletariat in Vienna was to struggle practically alone.
In the defeated countries, the revolt was more rapid but also more desperate and therefore dispersed and disorganized. The anger of the workers of the defeated countries, when it remained isolated from the struggle of the workers of the victorious ones, could finally be diverted towards "revanchism", as was seen in Germany in 1923, after the invasion of the Ruhr by Franco-Belgian troops.
In the victorious countries, on the other hand, the workers' combativity was delayed by the chauvinist euphoria of victory[10]. The workers' struggle recovered slowly, as if the workers had been waiting for the "dividends of Victory"[11]. Only once these illusions had been shattered by the brutality of post-war conditions (especially after 1920, when capitalism entered into a phase of economic crisis) did the workers of France, Britain, and Italy enter massively into struggle. However, by then the workers of the defeated countries had suffered decisive defeats. The fragmentation of the workers' response between the victorious and defeated countries, moreover, allowed the world bourgeoisie to jointly coordinate their forces, in support of those fractions that at different times found themselves in the front line of the war against the proletariat. After the defeat of the Paris Commune, Marx had already denounced "The unprecedented fact that in the most terrible war of modern times, the victorious and defeated armies united faced with the common threat of the proletariat (...) Class domination cannot hid the fact that under the national uniform, all national governments are as one only against the proletariat" (Marx, The Civil War in France):
* Even before the end of the war, the Entente powers had turned a blind eye when German troops in March 1918 crushed the workers' revolution in Finland or the revolt of the Hungarian Army at Vladai in September 1918.
* Faced with the German revolution, it was President Wilson (of the USA) who demanded that the Kaiser integrate the "socialists" into the government as the only force capable of confronting the revolution. A little later, the Entente gave the German government 5,000 machine guns with which to massacre the workers' revolt. And in March 1919, Noske's army would move, with the full consent of Clemenceau, into the Ruhr "demilitarized zone", in order to smash one revolutionary focus after another...
* From the end of 1918, Vienna served as the coordination center of the counter-revolution, commanded by the sinister English colonel Cuningham who coordinated, for example, the counter-revolutionary actions of Czech and Rumanian troops in Hungary. When the army of the Hungarian Workers' Councils attempted in July 1919 to carry out a military action on the Rumanian front, the troops of this country were waiting for them, since the Hungarian "socialists" had already informed the
Vienna "anti-Bolshevik center" about this operation.
* Along with military collaboration, came the blackmail of "humanitarian aid" which arrived from the Entente (especially from the USA), a condition of which was that the proletariat had to accept without protest exploitation and misery. When in March 1919, the Hungarian Councils called on the Austrian workers to enter into a common struggle with them, the "revolutionary" Frederik Adler answered them "You call on us to follow your example. We want to do this with all our hearts and will, but sadly we cannot. In our country there is no more food. We have been turned into complete slaves of the Entente" (Arbeiter-Zeitung, 23/3/1919)
In conclusion we can affirm that, contrary to what many other revolutionaries think[12], war does not create favorable conditions for the generalization of the revolution. This in no way means we are "pacifists" as some Bordigist groups claim. On the contrary, we defend as Lenin did that "the struggle for
peace without revolutionary action is an empty and lying phrase". It is precisely our responsibility as the vanguard in this revolutionary struggle, that demands that we draw the lessons of the workers' experience, and affirm[13] that the movement against the economic crisis of capitalism that began at the end of the 60's, although apparently less "radical", more tortuous and contradictory, will establish a much firmer material base for the proletarian world revolution:
* The economic crisis affects all countries without exception. Independently of the level of devastation that the crisis can cause in the different countries, it is certain that there are neither "victors", "vanquished", nor "neutrals".
* Unlike imperialist war, which the bourgeoisie could bring to an end faced with the threat of the workers' revolution, world capitalism cannot stop the economic crisis, nor can it avoid the increasingly brutal attacks on the workers.
It is significant that the very groups that accuse us of being "pacifists" tend to under-estimate the workers struggles against the economic crisis.
The decisive role of the main proletarian concentrations
When the proletariat took power in Russia, the Mensheviks along with all the "socialists" and centrists, denounced the "adventurism" of the Bolsheviks, because the "backwardness" of Russia meant that it was not mature enough for the Socialist revolution. It was precisely the justified defense of the proletarian nature of the October revolution that led the Bolsheviks to explain the "paradox" of the world revolution arising from the struggle of a "backward" proletariat as in Russia[14], by means of the erroneous thesis which sees the chain of world imperialism being broken at its weakest link[15]. Nevertheless, an analysis of the revolutionary wave permits the refutation from a Marxist viewpoint, both of the idea that the workers of the Third World will not be prepared for the socialist revolution, and of this idea's apparent "antithesis", that it will be easier for them.
1. The First World War represented the historic landmark of capitalism's entry into its decadent phase. Which is to say that the preconditions for revolution (sufficient development of the productive forces and also of a revolutionary class. Within a moribund society) had been established at a worldwide level.
The fact that the revolutionary wave spread to every comer of the planet and that, in all countries, the workers' struggles were confronted by the counter-revolutionary action of all the fractions of the bourgeoisie, made it clear that the proletariat (independently of the level of development the different countries had achieved) does not have different tasks in Europe or the so-called Third World. Thus, there is not a proletariat that is "prepared" for socialism (in the advanced countries) and a proletariat that is "too immature for revolution" that has to go through the "democratic-bourgeois phase".
The revolutionary wave that we have been analyzing, demonstrated how the workers of backward Norway could discover that "The workers' demands cannot be satisfied by parliamentary means, but only by the revolutionary actions of all workers" (Manifesto of the Cristiania Workers' Council March 1918); how the Indonesia plantation workers or those of the Rio favelas formed Workers' Councils, how Berber workers united with workers of European origin against the "nationalists" during the general strike in the Algerian ports in 1923...
To proclaim today, as some in the revolutionary milieu do, that the proletariat of these backward countries, unlike those of the advanced countries, must form unions, or support the "national" revolution of the "progressive" fractions of the bourgeoisie, is equivalent to throwing overboard the lessons of the bloody defeats suffered by these proletariats at the hands of the alliance of all the bourgeois fractions ("progressive" and reactionary) or of the unions (including the most radical ones, such as the anarchist ones in Argentina) who in the center and on the peripheries of capitalism demonstrated how they had been converted into agents of the capitalist state.
2. However, although the whole of capitalism and therefore the world proletariat, is "mature" for revolution, this does not mean that the world revolution could begin in any country or that the struggle of the workers of the most backward countries has the same responsibilities, the same determinant character, as the struggles of the proletariat of the most advanced countries. The revolutionary wave of 1917 -23 constantly demonstrated that the revolution can only start from the proletariats of the most developed capitalisms, that is to say those detachments of the working class which by the weight they have in society, by their accumulated historical experience gained through years of combat against the capitalist state and its mystifications, play a central and decisive role in the worldwide confrontation between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie:
The example of the struggle of the workers of the most developed countries, encouraged workers to form Workers' Councils from Turkey (where in 1920 there existed a Spartacist group) and Greece to Indonesia and Brazil. In Ireland (a, proletariat that Lenin erroneously believed should struggle for "national liberation"), the influence of the revolutionary wave opened up an interval, when the workers instead of struggling alongside the Irish bourgeoisie for their "independence" from Great Britain, struggled on the terrain of the international proletariat. In the summer of 1920 the Limerick Workers Council was formed and in the West of the country a revolt of farm laborers broke out which was put down, as much by the IRA (when the workers occupied fauns owned by Irish landlords) as by the British troops.
When the bourgeoisie had defeated the decisive workers battalions in Germany, France, Britain, Italy ... the world working class was decisively weakened, and the struggles of the workers in the countries on the periphery of capitalism could not change the course of the defeat of the world proletariat. The enormous demonstrations of courage and combativity given by the workers of America, Asia... separated from the contribution of the central battalions of the working class, were lost in serious confusions (as for example the revolution in China) which inevitably led them to defeat. In the countries were the proletariat is weakest, due to its scarce forces and experience, they were confronted, however, by the combined action of the bourgeoisies who have more experience in their class struggle against the proletariat[16].
Therefore the central link where the future of the revolutionary wave was decided was Germany, whose proletariat was a real beacon for the proletariat of the world. However, in Germany the most developed and conscious proletariat was confronted by a bourgeoisie that had accumulated a vast experience of confronting the proletariat. It is enough to see the "power" of the specific anti-worker apparatus of the German capitalist state: a "socialist" party and unions which maintained their organization and coordination at all moments in order to sabotage the revolution.
Therefore, in order to make the worldwide unification of the proletariat possible, it is necessary to overcome the most refined mystifications of the class enemy, the most powerful anti-worker apparatus... It is essential to defeat the strongest fraction of the world bourgeoisie and this can only be done by the world's most developed and experienced working class.
Hence, the thesis that the revolution must necessarily follow from war, as with the "weakest link", was an error of the revolutionaries of that period due to their desire to defend the proletarian world revolution. These errors, were however, converted into dogma by the triumphant counter-revolution after the defeat of the revolutionary wave, and today unfortunately form part of the Bordigist groups "doctrine".
The defeat of the revolutionary wave of the proletariat of 1917 -23 does not mean that the proletarian revolution is impossible. On the contrary, almost 80 years later capitalism demonstrates, in war after war, barbarity after barbarity that it cannot escape from the historic morass of its decadence. And despite its limitations, the world proletariat has emerged from the night of counter-revolution to set a new course towards decisive class confrontations, towards a new revolutionary attempt. To triumph in this new world assault on capitalism, the working class will have to draw the on lessons of what constitutes its main historical experience. It is the responsibility of revolutionaries to abandon dogmatism and sectarianism, in order to be able to discuss and clarify the necessary balance sheet of this experience.
Etsoem
[1] The German retreat from its French and Belgian position, between August and November, cost Britain 378,000 men and France 750,000.
[2] The defeat of the proletariat in 1914 was only ideological and not physical, hence the immediate return of strikes, assemblies, solidarity"" Whereas in 1939, the defeat was complete, both physical (after the crushing of the revolutionary wave) and ideological (anti-fascism).
[3] See "From Austro-marxism to Austro-fascisrn" in International Review no 10.
[4] See "70 years since the Revolution in Germany" in International Review No 55 & 56.
[5] Vacillations which were also shared by revolutionaries. See the book The German-Dutch Communist Left.
[6] See "Isolation is the death of Revolution" in International Review no 75.
[7] See "Revolution and Counter-revolution in Italy" in International Review no 2 & 3.
[8] The Spanish proletariat was not however defeated: hence its formidable struggles in the 30's. See our pamphlet Franco y La Republica masacran al proletariado (available only in Spanish).
[9] See "Balance of 70 years of 'national1iberation'" in International Review no 66.
[10] Only in the "defeated" part of France (Alsace-Lorraine), were there important strikes (rail, mines) and Soldiers' Councils in November 1918.
[11] The weakest capitalism that lost the war was also the one that initiated it, which permitted the bourgeois to reinforce chauvinism with campaigns about "war reparations".
[12] Including groups that laid out very serious and lucid balance sheets of the revolutionary wave, as was the case with our predecessors of the French Communist Left, who were wrong on this question, which lead them to hope for a new revolutionary wave after World War II.
[13] See the article quoted from International Review no 26.
[14] In our pamphlet The Russian Revolution, beginning of the World Revolution, we demonstrated that Russia was not backward (it was the world's 5th industrial power). Its advance in respect to the rest of the proletariat cannot be attributed to the supposed "backwardness" of Russian capitalism, but to the fact that the revolution arose from the war and that the world bourgeoisie was unable to come to the aid of the Russian bourgeoisie (as it was also unable to do during the "civil war" of 191 8-1 920) as well as to the absence of social shock absorbers (unions, democracy...) under Tsarism.
[15] We have expressed our critique of this "theory of the weak link" in "The proletariat of Western Europe at the center of the class struggle" and in "On the critique of the theory of the weak link" (International Review no 31 & 37 respectively).
[16] As we have already seen in the Russian Revolution (see the article in International Review no 75), when the French, British and North American bourgeoisies undertook coordinated counter-revolutionary action. Also in China the Western "democracies" at first supported the "warlords" financially and militarily and then the leaders of the Kuomintang.
On the eve of World War I, when revolutionaries like Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg declared the internationalist position characteristic of capitalism's new historic phase - "There is no longer any such thing as defensive or offensive wars" (Congress of Basel, 1912) - they did so with reference to the Balkan War. In capitalism's "decadent", "imperialist" phase, all wars between powers are equally reactionary. Contrary to what happened in the 19th century, when the bourgeoisie could still lead wars against feudalism, the proletarians could no longer choose between either camp in these wars. The only possible response to capitalism's militaristic barbarism is the destruction for capitalism itself. These positions, ultra-minority ones in 1914 when the First World War broke out, where nonetheless to form the basis for the great revolutionary movements of this century: the 1917 Russian Revolution, and the German Revolution of 1919, which put an end to the bloodbath begun in 1914.
For the first time since World War II, war has broken out again in Europe, and again it has broken out in the Balkans. It is vital that we reappropriate the experience of revolutionaries' struggle against war. This is why we are publishing this article which sums up a crucial aspect of revolutionaries' action against one of capitalism's most terrible scourges.
Bilan no 21, July August 1936
It would be falsifying history to say that the 1st and 2nd Internationals never considered the problem of war, and that they did not try to resolve it in the interests of the working class. We could even say that the problem of war was on the agenda right from the birth of the 1st International (the war that opposed
Austria to France and the Piedmont in 1859, the 1864 conflict between Denmark and the Austro-Prussian alliance, the war between Prussia and Italy on one side and Austria and South Germany on the other in 1866, the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, not to mention American Civil War of 1861-65, and the insurrection of Bosnia-Herzegovina against Austrian annexation in 1878, all of which provoked the liveliest interest among internationalists at the time).
If we consider the number of wars that arose during this period, we can say that the problem was more a "burning" one in the time of the 1st International than of the 2nd, which was marked above all by the colonial wars for the division of Africa. With the exception of the brief conflict between Turkey and Greece in 1897, wars did not break out in Europe until the Balkan wars, and that between Italy and Turkey for the possession of Libya, which prefigured the world conflagration of 1914.
All this explains - and we are speaking from experience - that we, the generation which entered the struggle before 1914, perhaps considered the problem of war as an ideological struggle rather than a real and imminent danger: the termination, without recourse to arms, of serious crises such as the Fashoda or Agadir incidents tended to make us believe, wrongly, that economic "interdependence", in other words the increasing number of close ties between countries, constituted a secure defense against the outbreak of war among the European powers, and that their increasing military preparations rather than leading inevitably to war, only confirmed the principle "si vis pacem para bellum" ("if you want peace, prepare for war").
When the 1st International was founded, the universal panacea for preventing war was the suppression of standing armies, and their replacement by militia on the Swiss model. This position was put forward by the International's 2nd Congress at Lausanne in 1867, aimed in particular at a bourgeois pacifist movement which had formed a League for Peace that held congresses from time to time. The International decided to take part (in the Congress held in Geneva, where Garibaldi made his pathetically theatrical intervention with the famous declaration that "only the slave has die right to make war on tyrants"), and its delegates insisted that "it is not enough to do away with standing armies to put an end to war, but that a transformation of the entire social order is also necessary").
At the International's 3rd Congress, held in Brussels in 1868, a resolution was voted on the workers' attitude in the case of a conflict between the great European powers, where they were called to prevent a war of one people against another, and to cease work in the event of war. Two years later, in July 1870, the International found itself faced with the outbreak of war between France and Prussia.
The International's first manifesto was innocuous enough: "on the ruins that will be left by the two armies, socialism will remain the only real power. Then will be the moment for the International to decide what to do. Until then, let us remain calm and vigilant" (!!!).
The fact that the war was conducted by Napoleon "the Small" (ie Napoleon III) determined the somewhat defeatist attitude of large sections of the French population, amongst whom the internationalists opposition to the war found an echo.
Moreover, the fact that Germany was generally considered as having been "unjustly" attacked by "Bonaparte", provided a certain justification (since this was a "defensive" war) to the German workers' position of national defense.
The fall of the French Empire, after the catastrophic defeat at Sedan, overturned these positions.
"We repeat what we declared in 1793 to the European coalition" wrote the French internationalists in their manifesto to the German people: "the French people will not make peace with an enemy occupying our territory. Only on the banks of the contested river [the Rhine] will the workers reach out their hands to create the United States of Europe, the Universal Republic".
The patriotic fever intensified, and indeed presided over the birth of the glorious Paris Commune itself.
On the other side, for the German proletariat it was now a war conducted by the monarchy and Prussian militarism against the "French Republic" and the "French people". Hence the slogan of "an honorable peace without annexations", which motivated Liebknecht's and Bebel's protest in the Reichstag against the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine and their consequent condemnation for "high treason".
Another point remains to be clarified on the subject of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, and the attitude of the workers' movement to it.
In fact, at the time, Marx envisaged the possibility of "progressive wars" - above all the war against Tsarist Russia - in an epoch where the cycle of bourgeois revolutions was not yet closed, just as he envisaged a possible conjunction of the bourgeois revolutionary movement with the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat, where the latter would intervene, even in time of war, to hasten its final triumph.
"The war of 1870", wrote Lenin in his pamphlet on Zimmerwald, "was a "progressive war" like those of the French revolution, which while they undoubtedly brought with them all the elements of pillage and conquest, had the historic function of destroying or shaking feudalism and absolutism throughout the old Europe still founded on serfdom".
But while such a perspective was still admissible in Marx's day, even though it had already been overtaken by events, in capitalism's final, imperialist phase, to talk about "progressive", "national", or "just" wars is nothing but a deception and a betrayal. In effect, as Lenin wrote, unity with the national bourgeoisie of one's own country is unity against the unity of the revolutionary international proletariat, in a word it is unity with the bourgeoisie, against the proletariat, the betrayal of the revolution and of socialism.
Moreover, we should not forget other problems which influenced Marx in 1870, and which he emphasized in a letter to Engels (20th July 1870). The concentration of state power following the Prussian victory could only be useful to the concentration of the German working class, favorable to its class struggle, and, Marx wrote "the German preponderance will transport the center of gravity of the European workers' movement from France to Germany, and consequently ensure the definitive triumph of scientific socialism over Proudhonism and utopian socialism".
To finish with the 1st International, we will point out that, curiously, the 1871 London Conference did not deal with these problems despite their topicality, any more than did the Hague Congress in September 1872 where Marx gave a presentation in German of the events since 1869, the date of the International's previous Congress. In fact, the events of the time were treated very superficially, and the Congress limited itself to expressing its admiration for the heroic champions who had fallen in the Commune, and its fraternal greetings to the victims of bourgeois reaction.
The first Congress of the reconstituted International, held in Paris in 1889, restated the old slogan of the "replacement of standing armies by popular militias", and the next Congress, held in Brussels in 1891, adopted a resolution calling on workers to protest, by constant agitation, against all attempts at war, adding by way of consolation that the responsibility for war would in all events fall on the shoulders of the ruling classes ...
The 1869 London Congress - which saw the definitive split with the anarchists - declared in a general programmatic resolution on the question of war, that "the working class in all countries must oppose the violence provoked by war".
In 1900, in Paris, following the growth in political strength of the socialist parties, a principle was set forward which was to become axiomatic for all agitation against war: "the socialist deputies to Parliament in all countries are required to vote against all military and naval expenditure, and against colonial expeditions".
But the fullest debates on the question of war took place at Stuttgart in 1907.
Alongside the grandiloquent phrase mongering of the histrionic Herve on the duty of "answering war by the general strike and insurrection", Bebel presented a resolution essentially in agreement with Guesde, which although theoretically correct was inadequate with regard to the role and tasks of the proletariat.
At this Congress, in order to "prevent Bebel's orthodox deductions being read through opportunist spectacles" (Lenin) Rosa Luxemburg, in agreement with the Russian Bolsheviks, added to the resolution amendments which emphasized that the problem consisted not only in the struggle against the eventuality of war, but also and above all in using the crisis caused by the war to accelerate the fall of the bourgeoisie: "to profit in every way from the economic and political crisis to raise the people and so
to precipitate the fall of capitalist rule" .
In Copenhagen in 1910, the previous resolution was confirmed, especially with regard to the strict duty of socialist deputies to refuse all war credits.
Finally, as we know, during the Balkan war, and faced with the imminent danger of a world conflagration exploding in the powder-keg of Europe - today the powder-kegs have been multiplied to infinity - a special Congress was held in Basel in November 1912, to draw up the famous manifesto, which repeated all the declarations of Stuttgart and Copenhagen, denounced the future European war as "criminal" and "reactionary" for all governments, and declared that it could only "hasten the fall of capitalism by unfailingly provoking the proletarian revolution".
But while the manifesto declared that the looming war would be a war of pillage, an imperialist war for all the belligerents, and that it could only lead to a proletarian revolution, it tried above all to demonstrate that this imminent war could not be justified by a shadow of national interest. This implied an admission that, under a capitalist regime, and in the midst of imperialist expansion, cases could exist where participation by the exploited class in a war of "national defense" could be justified.
Two years later, the imperialist war broke out, and with it the IInd International collapsed. This debacle was the direct result of the insurmountable contradictions and ambiguities contained in all these resolutions. In particular, the ban on voting war credits did not resolve the problem of the "defense of the country" against the attack of an "aggressor nation". This is the breach through which the pack of social-chavinists and opportunists poured. The "Sacred Union" was sealed with the collapse of the international class solidarity of the workers.
As we have seen, if we look superficially at the language of its resolutions the IInd International not only adopted a principled class position against war, it also provided itself with the practical means to oppose it, to the point of formulating more or less explicitly the principle of transforming the imperialist war into a proletarian revolution. But if we go to the bottom of things, we can see that while the IInd International posed the problem of war, it resolved it in a formal and simplistic manner. It denounced war above all for its horrors and atrocities, because the proletariat provided the cannon fodder for the ruling class. The Ilnd International's anti-militarism was purely negative, and left almost exclusively to the socialist youth, in some countries against the clear hostility of the party itself.
With the exception of the Bolsheviks during the 1904-05 Russian Revolution, no party envisaged so much as the possibility of systematic illegal work in the army. The parties limited themselves to manifestoes or papers against war, which were posted on the walls or distributed at schools, calling on workers to remember that under the soldier's uniform they remained proletarians. Faced with the inadequacy and sterility of this work, Herve had an easy time of it, especially in Latin countries with his wordy demagoguery of "burying the flag in the dung-heap", and his encouragement of desertion, the rejection of armies, and his famous slogan "shoot your officers".
In Italy - where in October 1912 the socialist patty gave the only example in the Ilnd International of calling a 24-hour strike against the Tripolitanian colonial expedition - a young worker in Bologna, Masetti, followed Herve's suggestions and shot his colonel during a military exercise. This was the only positive event to come out of the entire Herve comedy.
Less than a month later, on the 4th August, temporarily ignored by the mass of workers engulfed in the carnage of World War I, the manifesto of the Bolshevik Central Committee raised the flag of the continuity of the workers' struggle with its historic call for the transformation of the present imperialist war into a civil war.
The October Revolution was on the march.
Gatto Mamone
Guy Debord committed suicide on 30th November, 1994. All the press in France, where he lived, has written about his death, for despite his limited public appearances, Debord was a well-known personality. His fame was due, not to the "works" produced in what the media called his profession - film producer - whose audience was always a small one, but to his writing (The Society of the Spectacle, 1967), and above all to his activity as founding member and one of the main inspirations behind the Situationist International. As a revolutionary organization, it is this last aspect of Debord's life that interests us, for although it dissolved more than 20 years ago, in its time the Situationist International had a certain influence on the groups and elements that were moving towards class positions.
We do not propose here to produce a history of the SI, nor an exegesis of the 12 issues of its review published between 1958 and 1969. Suffice it to say that the SI was born, not as a political movement properly speaking, but as a cultural movement that brought together a number of artists (painters, architects, etc) from various tendencies (the Lettrist International, the Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus, the London Psycho geographical Committee, etc) , which proposed to make a "revolutionary" critique of art as it exists in society today. Thus the first issue of the SI's review (June 1958) published an address distributed to a meeting of international art critics, which said: "Scatter, pieces of art criticism, criticism of artistic fragments. Today, the unitary artistic activity of the future is being organized in the Situationist International. You have nothing more to say. The Situationist International will leave you no room. We will reduce you to famine".
It should be noted that although the SI called for a radical revolution, it still considered that it was possible to organize "the unitary artistic activity of the future" within capitalist society. Moreover, this activity was seen as a sort of stepping-stone to revolution, since "The elements of a new life must already be forming among us - in the field of culture - and it is up to us to bring passion to the debate" (SI no 1, page 23, "Les situationnistes et I'automation", by Asger Jorn). The author of these lines was a fairly well-known Danish painter.
The kind of concerns that interested the SI's founders showed that this was not an organization expressing an effort by the working class to develop its consciousness, but an expression of the radicalized intellectual petty bourgeoisie. This is why the SI's political positions, while they claimed to be based on Marxism, against stalinism and trotskyism, were extremely confused. An appendix to the first issue of the review took position on the coup d'état of 13th May 1958, when the army based in Algeria rebelled against the power of the French government: it speaks of the "French people", and of the trades unions and left-wing parties as "workers' organizations", etc. Two years later, we can still find "Third-Worldist" overtones in the fourth issue: "In the emancipation of the colonized and under-developed peoples, carried out by themselves, we salute the possibility of skipping the intermediate stages that others passed through, both in industrialization and in culture and the use of a life liberated from all constraint" ("La chute de Paris", SI no 4, page 9). A few months later, Debord was one of the 121 signatories (mostly artists and intellectuals) of the "Declaration on the right to desertion in the Algerian war", which includes the following: "The cause of the Algerian people, which is contributing decisively to the ruin of the colonial system, is the cause of all free men". SI no 5 takes up this gesture collectively, without the slightest criticism of the concessions to democratic ideology contained in the "Declaration".
Our aim here is not to heap denunciations on the SI. But it is important, especially for those who may have been influenced by this organization's positions, that the reputation for "radicalism" that surrounded it, its intransigence and its refusal to compromise, has been much exaggerated. The SI had great difficulty in disengaging itself from the political aberrations of its origins, especially its concessions to leftist or anarchist ideas. Only gradually did the SI approach the positions of the left communists - in fact of the councilisrs - just as the pages of its review gave an increasing space to political questions rather than artistic vagaries. For a while, Debord was closely linked with the group that published Socialisme ou Barbarie, and it was he who instigated the SI's evolution. In July 1960, he published a document titled "Preliminaries for a definition of a united revolutionary program" with P. Canjuers, a member of SouB. However, although for a time Socialisme ou Barbarie inspired the SI's political evolution, it was itself an extremely confused group. It came from a late split (1949) within the trotskyist "4th International", but was never able to break the umbilical cord tying it to trotskyism in order to join the positions of the communist left. After a number of splits, which produced the GLAT (Groupe de Liaison pour l' Action des Travailleurs), ICO (Information et Correspondance Ouvrieres) and the Pouvoir Ouvrier group, SouB ended its career under the aegis of Cornelius Castoriadis (who was to give his support, at the beginning of the 1980s, to Reagan's campaigns on the supposed military superiority of the USSR) as a coterie of intellectuals who explicitly rejected marxism.
We find another example of the extreme confusion of the SI's positions in 1966, when it tried to take position on Boumedienne's military coup d'état in Algeria, and could find nothing better than to make a "radical" defense of self-management (in other words, the old anarchist recipe, derived from Proudhon, which leads workers to take part in their own exploitation):
"The only program of Algerian socialist elements is the defense of the self-managed sector, not only as it is, but as it must become ... Only a maintained and radicalized self-management can be the starting-point for a revolutionary assault on the existing regime ... Self-management must become the sole solution to the mysteries of power in Algeria, and must know that it is this solution" (SI no 10, page 21, March 1966). Even in 1967, the issue no 11 of the SI's review, which contains its clearest political positions, continues to cultivate a certain ambiguity on a number of points, especially on the so-called "national liberation struggles". Alongside a vigorous denunciation of the "Third-Worldism" promoted by the leftist groups, the SI ends up making concessions to "Third-Worldism" itself:
"It is obviously impossible, today, to hope for a revolutionary solution to the Vietnamese war. Above all, we must put an end to American aggression, to allow the real social struggle develop naturally in Vietnam, on other words to allow the Vietnamese workers to rediscover their internal enemies: the Northern bureaucracy and all the possessing and ruling strata in the South (...) Only a resolutely anti-state and internationalist revolutionary Arab movement can both dissolve the Israeli state and gain the support of the mass of the exploited. By the same process, it alone will be able to dissolve all the Arab states and create Arab unification by the power of the Workers' Councils" (SI no 11, "Deux Guerres Locales", pp21-22).
In fact these ambiguities, which the SI never got rid of, explain in part its success at a time when "Third-Worldist" illusions were particularly strong within the working class, and above all in the student and intellectual milieu. This is not to say that the SI recruited on the basis of its concessions to "Third- Worldism", but rather that had the SI been perfectly clear on the question of the so-called "national liberation struggles", it is likely that many of its supporters at the time would have turned away from it[1].
Another reason for the SI's success in the student and intellectual milieu obviously lies in the priority it gave to its critique of capitalism's ideological and cultural aspects. For the SI, we are living today in the "society of the spectacle" (which was a new term for state capitalism), in other words within a phenomenon already analyzed by revolutionaries as specific to capitalism's decadent phase: the omnipresence of the capitalist state throughout society, including in the cultural sphere. Similarly, while the SI was very clear in declaring that the proletariat is the only revolutionary force in this society, its definition of the proletariat allowed the intellectual petty bourgeoisie to include itself within the working class, and so to consider itself as a "subversive force":
"Given the reality which is emerging today, we may consider as proletarians people who have no possibility of modifying the social space-time which society allocates for their consumption ... " (SI no 8, ‘Domination de la nature, ideologie et classes'). And the SI's typically petty-bourgeois vision of this question is confirmed by its analysis, similar to Bakunin's, of the lumpen-proletariat, which would be called to constitute a revolutionary force since "... the new proletariat tends to be defined negatively as a "Front against forced labor" which unites all those who resist recuperation by the state" ("Banalites de Base" in SI no 8, page 42).
The elements in revolt of the intelligentsia particularly liked the SI's propaganda methods: the spectacular sabotage of cultural and artistic events or the "subversion" of comic strips and photo-novels (for example, the nude pin-up shown speaking the famous slogan of the workers' movement: "The emancipation of the workers will be the task of the workers themselves "). Similarly, situationist slogans encountered a great success in this social stratum: "Live without dead time. Pleasure unrestrained", "Demand the impossible", "Take your desires for reality". The idea of immediately putting into practice the situationist ideas of the "critique of daily life", in fact only expresses the immediatism of the petty bourgeoisie, a social class without any future. Finally, a pamphlet written by a situationist in 1967 (De la misere en milieu etudiant) presenting students as the most contemptible creatures in the world, alongside priests and the military, contributed to the SI's notoriety within a stratum of the population whose masochism is a measure of its lack of any role on the social and historical scene.
France was the country where the SI encountered the greatest echo, and the events of May 68 marked its apogee. Situationist slogans were on every wall, for the media the word" situationist" was synonymous with" radical revolutionary". The first Sorbonne Occupation Committee was composed largely of SI members and sympathizers. There is nothing surprising about this. The events of 68 marked at one and the same time the last gasp of the student revolts which began in California in 1964, and the historic recovery of the proletariat after four decades of counter-revolution. The simultaneity of these two phenomena, and the fact that state repression of the student revolt was the trigger for the massive strike movement which had been ripening with the first effects of the economic crisis, allowed the situationists to express the most radical aspects of this revolt, while still having a certain impact on certain sectors of the working class which were beginning to reject the bourgeois structures of control
constituted by the unions and the left parties.
However, the recovery in the class struggle, which caused the appearance and flourishing of a whole series of revolutionary groups including our own organization, was the death knell for the Situationist International. It proved incapable of understanding the real significance of the struggles of 1968. In particular, because it was convinced that the workers had risen against the "spectacle", not against the first effects of an insurmountable economic crisis the SI wrote idiotically: "The revolutionary eruption did not come from an economic crisis ... the frontal attack of May was on a capitalist economy working well" (Enrages et Situationnistes dans Ie mouvement des occupations, a book written by the Situationist Rene Viennet, page 209)[2]. With this view of things as their point of departure, it is hardly surprising that the SI succumbed to complete megalomania: "The agitation begun in January 68 at Nanterre by the four or five revolutionaries who were to form the "enrages" group [influenced by the Situationists' ideas] was to lead, only five months later, to the quasi-liquidation of the state" (ibid, page 25). From then on, the SI entered into a crisis which was to end in its dissolution in 1972.
In fact, it was only "by default" that the SI had an impact, before and during the events of 1968, on elements coming towards class positions, as a result of the disappearance or sclerosis in the period of counter-revolution of the communist currents of the past. Once the student revolt died, and organizations were formed in the wake of the 68 events that took up the experience of those currents, there was no longer any room for the SI. Its self-dissolution was the logical conclusion of its bankruptcy, of the trajectory of a movement which could have no future, because it refused to attach itself firmly to the communist fractions of the past. Guy Debord's suicide[3] probably followed the same logic.
Fabienne
[1] The best proof of the Sl's lack of rigor (to say the least) on this question is its designation of Mustapha Khayati to set out its theses on the subject (see "Contributions servant a rectifier I'opinion du public sur la revolution dans les pays sous-developpes", in SI no 11, pp38-40). Shortly afterwards, Khayati joined the Democratic Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, without this causing his immediate exclusion from the SI; in the end, it was Khayati who resigned. At its Venice conference in 1969, the SI simply accepted the resignation with the argument that it did not accept "dual memberships". In short, whether Khayati joined a group like ICO, or enrolled in a bourgeois army (why not the police, it all comes to the same thing?) made no difference to the SI.
[2] In a polemic against our French press, the SI wrote: "As for the debris of the old non-trotskyist ultra-leftism, they needed at least a major economic crisis. They subordinated any revolutionary movement to its return, and so saw nothing coming. Now that they have recognized a revolutionary crisis in May, they have to prove that this "invisible" economic crisis was there in the spring of 68. Without any fear of being ridiculed, they are working at it now, producing schemas on the rise in unemployment and inflation. So for them, the economic crisis is no longer that terribly visible objective reality that was lived so hardly in 1929, but a son of eucharistic presence that supports their religion" (SI no 12, page 6). This crisis may have been "invisible" for the SI, but not for our current since our press in Venezuela (the only one in existence at the time) devoted an article to it in January 1968.
[3] Always assuming that he did commit suicide ... Another hypothesis is always possible: Debord's friend Gerard Lebovici was murdered in 1984.
It's not for fun that the capitalists refuse to exploit a growing number of workers or to carryon exploiting the old ones. They get their profit from living labor as it is devoured by the machinery of the wages system. The work of others is, for capital, the goose that lays the golden eggs. As such, capital doesn't have an interest in killing it. But capital's only religion is profit. A capitalist who doesn't make a profit is doomed to disappear. Capital doesn't give out jobs out of humanism, but because that's the way it works. And if profits are insufficient, it lays off, it cuts jobs. Profit is the alpha and omega of the capitalist bible.
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/1/225/history-icc
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/economic-crisis
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/unemployment
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/186/imperialism
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/revolutionary-wave
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/first-international
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/second-international
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/135/internationalism
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/general-and-theoretical-questions/war
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/guy-debord
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/situationist-international