World events in the recent period strikingly illustrate the fundamental historic choices facing humanity today. On the one hand, the capitalist system has provided yet more proofs of the barbaric impasse into which it has led the whole of society. On the other, we see a confirmation of the development of the struggles and consciousness of the proletariat, the only force in society that can offer a future.

This alternative is not yet perceptible to the whole of the working class, or even to the sectors who have recently entered into struggle. In a society where “the dominant ideas are those of the dominant class” (Marx) only small communist minorities may, for the moment, be conscious of the real stakes that are contained in the present condition of human society. That’s why it is up to revolutionaries to reveal these stakes by denouncing all the attempts of the dominant class to conceal them.

Capitalist barbarism can only get worse

It is a long time since the world’s most powerful leader, President George Bush Snr, announced the end of the Cold War and, after the Gulf War of 1991, the opening of a period of “peace and prosperity”. Each new day presents us with a new military atrocity. Africa continues to be the theatre of bloody conflicts and terrible slaughters not only from weapons but also from the epidemics and famines that they provoke. When war seems to stop in one place it flares up even more fiercely in another, as we can see now in Somalia where the “Islamic Courts” are leading an offensive against the war lords (Alliance for the restoration of peace and against terrorism – ARPCT) allied to the United States. The US intervention in Somalia at the beginning of the 1990s only further destabilised the situation, and ended in 1993 with a bitter reverse for the United States. Although today the “Islamic Tribunes” seem ready to collaborate with American power it is clear that in Somalia, as in many other countries, the return to peace will be short-lived. Is it not the intention of the American administration to make “the struggle against terrorism one of the pillars of American policy towards the Horn of Africa” (declaration of the under-secretary of State for African Affairs, Mme Jendayi Frazer, 29 June) an indication of the impossibility of any future stabilisation of this region?

In fact a good proportion of the wars developing, if not beginning today are justified by this so-called “war against terrorism”. This is the case of the two major conflicts in the Middle East: the war in Iraq and that between Israel and the armed cliques in Palestine.

In Iraq the population has already suffered tens of thousands of deaths since the “end of the war” was proclaimed on May1st 2003 by George W Bush on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln. The number of deaths of young American soldiers is also counted in the thousands (more than 2500) killed there since their government sent them to “keep the peace”. In fact not a day goes by without real bloodbaths in Baghdad and other Iraqi towns. This violence is not aimed, in the main, at the occupation troops but principally at the civil population to whom the victory of democracy is synonymous with permanent terror and poverty – worse than that suffered under Saddam Hussein. Iraq was invaded, following the outrage of 11 September 2001, in the name of the struggle against two threats:

• the threat of Al Qaeda terrorism allegedly linked to Saddam Hussein’s regime;
• that of “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD) allegedly at the disposal of the Iraqi dictator.

It has been established that the only WMD present in Iraq were those of the “coalition” forces led by the United States. As for the struggle against terrorism, which has become the new official crusade of the world superpower, it has been totally ineffective. The presence of American troops in Iraq has been the best means to stimulate suicide bombing among despairing young people fantasised by Islamic preachers. That is true not only in this country but pretty much everywhere in the world including in the most developed countries. The outrage on the London Underground, exactly a year ago, confirms the existence and development within the great capitalist cities of terrorist groups waging “Holy War”.[1] [1]

The other major conflict of the Middle East, the Palestinian conflict, continues to languish in a military impasse that has belied the hopes of “peace” proclaimed by the dominant sectors of the world bourgeoisie following the Oslo Accords of 1992. On the one side, there is the apparatus of a rump state, the Palestinian Authority which daily displays its divisions openly in the street, settling scores between different armed cliques (like Hamas and Fatah). As a result it cannot keep order faced with the minor terrorist groups, showing therefore its incapacity to offer the least perspective to populations crushed by poverty, unemployment and terror. On the other side, a state armed to the teeth, Israel, whose essential policy as we see today is to unleash its military power against these terrorist actions, a military power whose victims are not so much the groups at the origin of these actions, but the civil populations; this in turn can only give new inspiration to the Jihad and to suicide bombings. In fact the State of Israel practices, on a smaller scale, a similar policy to that of its American big brother, a policy that far from re-establishing peace can only throw oil on the fire. [2] [2]

Since the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the USSR at the end of the 1980s, which provoked the inevitable disappearance of the Western bloc, the United States has assumed the role of world cop to keep “order” and “peace”. This was the aim of George Bush Snr in his war against Iraq in 1991. This is how we analysed it on the eve of the war:

“The war in the Gulf shows that, faced with the tendency towards generalised chaos which is specific to decomposition and which has been considerably accelerated by the Eastern bloc’s collapse, capitalism has no other way out in its attempt to hold its different components together than to impose the iron strait-jacket of military force. In this sense the methods it uses to try to contain an increasingly bloody state of chaos are themselves a factor in the aggravation of military barbarism into which capitalism is plunging.’ (“Militarism and decomposition”, International Review n°64, 1st Quarter 1991).

“In the new historical period 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.” (Ibid)

However there is a big gap between the world leaders’ speeches (even when they are sincere) to the reality of a system that obstinately refuses to bend to their will:

“In the present period, (…) the barbarity of war will, far more than in previous decades, become a permanent and omnipresent element of the world situation (whether Bush and Mitterand with their prophecies of a ‘new order of peace’ like it or not) involving more and more the developed countries.”  (Ibid).

The world situation over the past 15 years has tragically confirmed this prediction. Military confrontations continue to overwhelm the populations of many parts of the world. The instability and tensions in the relations between countries have known no respite and tend to worsen still further today. The ambitions of states like Iran and North Korea follow in the footsteps of countries like India and Pakistan by trying to acquire atomic weapons and the means to launch them on a distant enemy. The firing of several “Taepodong” missiles on the 4th July by North Korea, and the impotent reaction of the “international community” to this veritable provocation underlines the growing instability of the world situation. Obviously North Korea is not a real threat to American power, even if its missiles can reach the Alaskan coast. But these provocations are eloquent of the incapacity of the American cop, stuck in the Iraqi quagmire, to maintain its “order”.

The military plans of North Korea appear as a real absurdity: a consequence of the “mental illness” of its supreme leader Kim Jong-Il who condemns his population to famine while he squanders the meagre resources of the country in mad and ultimately suicidal military programs. In reality the policy led by North Korea is only a caricature of that led by all the world’s states, beginning with the most powerful of them, America. The US Iraqi adventure has also been attributed to the stupidity of George W Bush jnr, his father’s son like Kim Jong-Il. In reality if certain political leaders are crazy, paranoid or megalomaniac (this was true for Hitler or “Emperor” Bokassa of Central Africa, although it seems not to be the case of George W, even if he is not a politician of high calibre) the “crazy” policies that they may carry out are only the expression of the convulsions of a system which itself has gone insane because of the insurmountable contradictions at the economic base.

Here is the world, the future, that the bourgeoisie offers us: insecurity, war, massacres, famines and as a bonus, the promise of an irreversible degradation of the environment whose consequences have begun to manifest themselves with climatic change whose effects risk being still more catastrophic than those of today (storms, hurricanes, deadly floods, etc). And one of the most revolting things is that all the sectors of the dominant class have the nerve to present the crimes for which they are responsible as animated by the love of great human principles: prosperity, liberty, security, solidarity, the struggle against oppression…

It is in the name of “prosperity” and “well being” that the capitalist economy whose sole motor is the search for profit, plunges millions of human beings into poverty, unemployment and despair at the same time as it systematically destroys the environment. It is in the name of “liberty” and “security” that American power and many others launch their military adventures. It is in the name of solidarity between civilisations or “national solidarity” faced with terrorist or other threats that it reinforces the ideological clothing of these projects. It is in the name of the struggle against the “American Satan” and his accomplices that the terrorist cliques carry out their actions preferably against totally innocent civilians.

In fact it is not the ruling class and its terrorist clones that will do anything to defend these values, but only the exploited class par excellence, the proletariat.

Workers’ struggles herald and prepare the future

In the middle of all this bloody barbarism which characterises today’s world, the only ray of hope for humanity resides in the resurgence of working class struggles on the world scale, seen especially over the past year. Because the economic crisis develops on a world scale and spares no country or region the proletarian struggle against capitalism tends to develop more and more at the planetary level. It embodies the future perspective of the overthrow of capitalism. In this sense the simultaneous nature of class combats of recent months, in the most industrialised states as much as in the countries of the “Third World”, are significant of the present recovery of the class struggle. After the strikes which paralysed Heathrow Airport in London and New York public transport in 2005, it was the SEAT workers in Barcelona, then the students in France, followed immediately by the steel workers in Vigo, Spain, who have entered massively into struggle since the spring. At the same moment in the Arab Emirates in Dubai a wave of struggles exploded among immigrant labourers working on the construction sites.

Faced with repression the airport workers in Dubai went spontaneously on strike at the end of May in solidarity with the construction workers. In Bangladesh nearly 2 million textile workers in the Dhaka region went on a series of massive wildcat strikes at the end of May and the beginning of June protesting against miserable wages and the unbearable conditions of life that capitalism makes them suffer. [3] [3]

Everywhere, whether in the more developed countries like the US, Great Britain, France, and earlier Germany and Sweden, or in less developed countries like Bangladesh the working class is in the process of raising its head to develop its struggles. The enormous militancy that characterises the recent struggles reveals that everywhere the exploited class today refuses to submit to the unacceptable and barbaric logic of capitalist exploitation.

On the world scene, faced with the development of “every man for himself” and of the war of “all against all” amongst bourgeois cliques, the working class is in the process of opposing its own perspective: that of unity and solidarity against the incessant attacks of capitalism. It is this solidarity which has particularly marked all the workers’ struggles over the last year and shows a considerable advance in the class consciousness of the proletariat. Faced with the impasse of capitalism, of unemployment, redundancies and “no future” that this system promises to the workers and especially to its new generations, the exploited class is in the process of understanding that its sole strength resides in its capacity to oppose a massive unified front to the capitalist Moloch.

Thus two worlds confront each other. The first, after incarnating human progress against feudalism, has become the official defender of all the barbarism, brutality and despair which overwhelms the human race. For its part, even if it is not yet conscious of it, the working class represents the future, a future which will finally get rid of poverty and war. A future in which one of the most precious principles of the human species, solidarity, will become the universal rule. A solidarity which the recent workers’ struggles show has not been definitively buried by a society in decline, but which represents a future of combat.

Fabienne 8th July 2006

This text is now available in leaflet form to download and distribute here:
files/en/mideast_leaflet.pdf [8]

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Once again the Middle East is in flames. Israeli planes and warships are systematically bombing Beirut and other targets in southern and northern Lebanon. Hundreds of civilians have been killed or maimed and vital infrastructure destroyed. Refugees are fleeing the bombed areas in growing numbers. At the time of writing there are preparations for some kind of ground invasion by the Israeli army. To the south, in Gaza, only a few months after the withdrawal of Israeli forces, the entire area has again become a battleground between Israeli troops and armed Palestinian organisations. The Israeli military blockade of both regions is strangling the economy and causing untold hardship to the local populations. But the Israeli population is also becoming increasingly fearful:  Hizbollah rockets had already claimed several lives further north when 8 people were killed by a missile landing on a railway depot in Haifa.

 

The stated reason for this major offensive by the Israeli state is the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers by Hamas in the south and Hizbollah in the north. But this is just a pretext: Israel has used the crisis as an opportunity for trying to cripple or liquidate the Hamas regime in the occupied territories, and for demanding that the Lebanese state disarm Hizbollah (something which is completely beyond its means). It is also trying to draw Syria and Iran into the conflict, making threatening noises towards Syria, while claiming that one of the aims of the bombardment of Lebanon is to prevent the kidnapped Israeli soldiers being transferred to Iran, which arms and supports Hizbollah.

 

Threat of regional war

 

The present conflict thus contains the threat of escalating into a regional war. And because the Middle East is such a vital strategic region, every war there involves conflict not just between Israel and the Palestinians or its Arab neighbours, but between the great world powers. In 1948, the Russians and the Americans supported the formation of the State of Israel as a means of breaking the grip of the old colonial powers, Britain and France, that had previously controlled the region. The Suez war of 1956 confirmed that America was now top dog in the region: it humiliated the French and the British by demanding that they end their incursion against Nasser’s Egypt. The wars of 1967, 1973 and 1982 were integrated into the global conflict between the American and the Russian blocs, with the US backing Israel and Russia supporting the PLO and the Arab regimes.

 

With the collapse of the Russian bloc in 1989, the stage was set for a ‘Pax Americana’ in Israel/Palestine. The United States became the broker of the Oslo accords in 1993. It  hoped that settling the Israel/Palestine conflict would allow it to become undisputed master of the region. The huge show of US firepower in Iraq in 1991 had the same aim. 

 

But all the efforts of American imperialism to impose a ‘new order’ in the Middle East have come to nothing. Ever since the Oslo ‘peace’ accords, but especially since the ‘Second Intifada’ of 2000, there has been constant conflict in Israel/Palestine – a never-ending round of murderous suicide bombings, followed by brutal Israeli reprisals, followed by more suicide bombings, and more reprisals. Parallel to this, US efforts to assert its mastery in Afghanistan and Iraq – the ‘War on Terror’ - have blown up in its face, creating two new Vietnams and plunging both countries into total chaos.  As the situation escalates in Lebanon, the Iraqi population is being tormented daily by horrific sectarian massacres,  while in Afghanistan the US/British-backed government  has lost its hold over the majority of he country. Furthermore, the effects of the military quagmire in Iraq and Afghanistan are reverberating back to the Israel/Palestine conflict and vice versa. Israel’s provocative stance towards Iran echoes America’s stand-off with Tehran over its nuclear programme, while the ‘progress’ made by Islamic terrorism in Iraq influences the actions of Hamas and Hizbollah. And the ruthless slaughter by terrorist gangs of civilians in New York, Madrid and London confirms that war in the Middle East has already rebounded to the very centers of the system. The headlong rush into military adventurism is the only means at the disposal of every power or clique, from the greatest to the most insignificant, to defend their imperialist interests against their rivals.

 

In short, the situation throughout the Middle East is demonstrating not America’s control of the situation, but the spread of uncontrollable chaos. This is shown graphically by Israel’s ultra-aggressive attitude.<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[1]<!--[endif]--> [9]

 

The rivals of the US prepare to take advantage

 

As for the other great powers, they are waving peace placards as they did prior to the invasion of Iraq. France and Russia have clearly condemned Israel’s “disproportionate” military operation in Lebanon.  Britain is also adopting  a more independent line: it has issued sharp criticisms of Israel’s “collective punishment” of the Palestinians in Gaza and it has made a great show of sending in the warships to evacuate British nationals from Lebanon. These powers, however, are not interested in peace but in maintaining their own spheres of influence in the region. They will certainly try to profit from America’s weakness, but none of them are in a position to take on its role as the world’s policeman, and their conflicting imperialist interests make it impossible for them to evolve any coherent common policies. This is why at the recent G8 summit, the great powers took a ‘united’ stance on the Lebanon crisis which immediately gave way to mutual recrimination and disagreement.

 

All the states and forces involved in this conflict are busy drawing up military and diplomatic plans which correspond to their own interests. They certainly use the most ‘rational’ methods of calculation to arrive at these plans, but all of them are caught up in a fundamentally irrational process: the inexorable slide of the capitalist system into imperialist war, which today is increasingly taking on the character of a war of each against all. Even the mighty US is being dragged into this abyss. In the past, when civilizations were on their last legs, they became embroiled in endless war. The fact that capitalism has become a system of permanent war is the clearest proof that it too is in a state of profound decay and that its very continuation has become a deadly danger for humanity.

 

Class struggle is the only way out

 

If all of capitalism’s peace plans are doomed to fail, what alternative is there to the imperialist disorder that dooms them? Certainly not the various nationalist/religious gangs which claim to be ‘resisting’ imperialism in Palestine, Iraq or Afghanistan – Hamas, the PLO, Hizbollah, al Qaida… They too are entirely caught up in the logic of imperialism, whether striking out on their own or lining up directly with existing capitalist states. Their aims – whether the establishment of new national states or the dream of a pan-Middle East Islamic Caliphate – can only come about through imperialist war; and their methods – which always involve the indiscriminate massacre of the civilian population – are precisely those of the states they claim to be opposing.

 

The only opposition to imperialism is the resistance of the working class against exploitation, because this alone can grow into an open struggle against the capitalist system, a struggle to replace this dying system of profit and war with a society geared towards human need. Because the exploited everywhere have the same interests, the class struggle is international and has no interest in allying with one state against another.  Its methods are directly opposed to the aggravation of hatred between ethnic or national groups, because it needs to rally together the proletarians of all nations in a common fight against capital and the state. 

 

In the Middle East the spiral of nationalist conflicts has made class struggle very difficult, but it still exists – in demonstrations of unemployed Palestinian workers against the Palestinian authorities, in strikes by Israeli public sector workers against the government’s austerity budgets. But the most likely source of a breach in the wall of war and  hatred in the Middle East lies outside the region – in the growing struggle of the workers in the central capitalist countries. The best example of class solidarity we can give to the populations suffering the direct horrors of imperialist war in the Middle East is to develop the struggle that has already been launched by the workers-to-be in the French schools and universities , by the metal workers of Vigo in Spain, the postal workers of Belfast or the airport workers of London. 

 

International Communist Current, 17.7.06

 

Seventy years ago, in May 1936, a huge wave of workers’ struggles broke out spontaneously against the increased exploitation provoked by the economic crisis and the development of the war economy. In Spain in July of the same year, the working class immediately began a general strike and took up arms in response to Franco military’s uprising. Many revolutionaries, including some of the best-known like Trotsky, interpreted these events as the beginning of a new international revolutionary wave. In fact they were misled by the enthusiastic support of the crowds, by a superficial understanding of the forces present and by the “radical” nature of some of the speeches.

On the basis of a clear analysis of the balance of forces at an international level, the Italian Communist Left (in its review, Bilan) realised that the Popular Fronts were far from being the expression of a development of the revolutionary movement. On the contrary, they showed that the class was becoming increasingly caught up in nationalist and democratic ideology and was abandoning the struggle against the effects of the historic crisis of capitalism. “The Popular Front has shown itself to be the concrete process of the dissolution of the class consciousness of the proletariat, the weapon intended to keep the workers on the terrain of the preservation of bourgeois society in every aspect of their social and political life.” (Bilan n°31, May-June 1936). With great rapidity, in both France and Spain, the political apparatus of the “socialist” and “communist” left would place itself at the head of these movements. By enclosing the workers in the false alternative of fascism/anti-fascism, they sabotaged the movement from within, oriented it towards the defence of the democratic state and finally enrolled the workers in France and Spain in the second world imperialist slaughter.

Today there is a slow resurgence of the class struggle and new generations are appearing in search of radical alternatives to the more and more manifest failure of capitalism. In this context, “anti-globalisation” movements, such as ATTAC, denounce the unbridled liberalism and the “dictatorship of the market”, that “snatches political power from the hands of states, and therefore of the citizens” and call for the “defence of democracy against financial dictatorship”. This “other world” put forward by the supporters of “anti-globalisation” often takes up measures inspired by the policies of the 1930s, 50s or 70s, when the state supposedly played a much more important role as an immediate economic actor. From this point of view, the policies of the Popular Front governments, with their programmes of state control of the economy, “of the unity of all strata of the working population against the capitalists and the fascist threat”, setting in motion a “social revolution”, are exaggerated in order to support the assertion that “another world”, that other policies, are possible within capitalism.

So it is absolutely essential on the occasion of this 70th anniversary to remember the context and significance of the events in 1936:

• to recall the tragic lessons of these experiences, in particular the fatal trap for the working class of abandoning the terrain of the intransigent defence of its specific interests in order to submit to the needs of one bourgeois camp or another;
• to denounce the lies bandied about by the “left”, that they were the incarnation of the interests of the working class throughout these events, by showing that they were in fact its executioner.

The 1930s were characterised by the defeat of the revolutionary wave of 1917-23 and the triumph of the counter-revolution. They were fundamentally different from the present historic period of the resurgence of struggles and the slow development of consciousness. However, the new generation of proletarians who are trying to escape from counter-revolutionary ideology, continually come up against this same “left”, its traps and ideological manipulations, although it now wears the new clothes of “anti-globalisation”. It is only possible to escape them by reappropriating the lessons, so dearly bought, of the past experience of the proletariat.

Did the Popular Front strengthen the struggle against capitalist exploitation?

The Popular Fronts claimed that they were “unifying the force of the people against the arrogance of the capitalists and the rise of fascism”. But did they really set going a dynamic that strengthened the struggle against capitalist exploitation? Were they really a step towards the development of the revolution? In order to reply to this, a marxist approach cannot base itself exclusively on the radical tone of the speeches and the violence of the social eruptions which shook various Western European countries at the time. It takes as its basis an analysis of the balance of forces between the classes at an international level and for the whole historic period. What was the general context of strengths and weaknesses of the proletariat and of its mortal enemy, the bourgeoisie, in which the events of 1936 took place?

The product of the proletariat's historic defeat

The powerful revolutionary wave forced the bourgeoisie to end the war, brought the working class to power in Russia and shook the foundations of bourgeois power in Germany and throughout Central Europe. Following this, throughout the 1920s the proletariat suffered a series of bloody defeats. The crushing of the German proletariat in 1919 and then in 1923 by the social-democrats of the SPD opened the way for Hitler’s rise to power. The tragic isolation of the revolution in Russia signed the death warrant of the Communist International and left the way open to the triumph of the Stalinist counter-revolution, which annihilated all the old guard of the Bolsheviks and the living force of the proletariat. Finally the last proletarian spark was pitilessly extinguished in China in 1927. The course of history had been reversed. The bourgeoisie had obtained decisive victories over the international proletariat and the course towards world revolution was replaced by an inexorable march towards world war. This meant the most horrible return to capitalist barbarity.

 Nevertheless, in spite of such crushing defeats of the battalions of the world proletariat’s vanguard, there were still episodes of combativeness, sometimes important ones, within the class. This was particularly the case in those countries in which it had not suffered a direct defeat, either physically or ideologically within the context of the revolutionary confrontations of 1917-1927. So, at the high point of the crisis in the 30s, in July 1932, a wildcat strike broke out among the miners in Belgium, which rapidly took on insurrectional dimensions. It took off from a movement against wage reductions in the Borinage mines. When the strikers were sacked, the movement spread throughout the province and there were violent clashes with the police. In Spain from 1931 to 1934, the working class engaged in a number of struggles, which were brutally repressed. In October 1934 all of the mining areas in the Asturias and the industrial belt of Oviedo and Gijon erupted in a suicidal insurrection, which was crushed by the republican government and its army. It ended up in brutal repression. Also in France, although the working class was profoundly demoralised and exhausted by the “leftist” policy of the CP, according to which, right up until 1934 the revolution was forever imminent and it was necessary to “create soviets everywhere”, it still manifested a certain combativeness. During summer 1935, in the face of legislation decreeing large wage cuts for workers in the state sector, impressive demonstrations and violent confrontations with the police took place in the docks of Toulon, Tarbes, Lorient and Brest. In Brest, after a worker was beaten to death by soldiers with their rifle butts, the exasperated workers launched violent demonstrations and riots between 5th and 10th August 1935. These ended in 3 deaths and hundreds of wounded; dozens of workers were jailed.[1] [13]

These expressions of continuing militancy, often marked by rage, desperation and political disorientation, were really “outbursts of desperation” which showed up all the weaknesses of the international situation of defeat and dispersion of the workers. The review Bilan brings this out in relation to Spain: “If the international criteria mean anything we have to say that, given the evidence of a development of the counter-revolution at an international level, the orientation of Spain between 1931 and 1936 can only follow a parallel direction [i.e. to the counterrevolutionary course of events], rather than the opposite course of revolutionary development. The revolution can only evolve in full as a result of a revolutionary situation at an international level.” (Bilan n°35, January 1937).

However, in order to mobilise the workers of those countries where the revolutionary movement had not been crushed, the national bourgeoisies were obliged to have recourse to a particular mystification. In those countries where the proletariat had already been crushed in a direct confrontation between the classes, the ideological mobilisation for war behind fascism or Nazism, or behind the Stalinist ideology of the “defence of the socialist fatherland”, were the specific forms of the development of the counter revolution. In those political regimes that had remained “democratic” the same mobilisation for war was undertaken in the name of anti-fascism. In order to achieve this, the French and Spanish bourgeoisie (and others like the Belgian bourgeoisie, for example) used the arrival of the left in power to mobilise the class behind anti-fascism in defence of the “democratic” state and to establish the war economy.

The position taken by the left towards the proletarian struggles mentioned above shows clearly that the policies of the Popular Front were not developed in order to strengthen the dynamic of the workers’ struggles. During the insurrectional strikes in Belgium in 1932, the Parti Ouvrier Belge and its union commission refused to support the movement. This served to direct the anger of the workers against Social Democracy as well. The strikers attacked the Maison du Peuple at Charleroi and tore up or burned their POB and union membership cards. From the end of ’33 the POB put forward the “Plan de Travail” (“Work Plan”), as a “people’s alternative” to the capitalist crisis, in order to channel the anger and despair of the workers.

Spain is also a particularly clear illustration of what the proletariat can expect from a ”republican” and “left wing” government. From the beginning of its existence, the Spanish Republic showed that it had nothing to learn from the fascist regimes about massacring workers. A large number of struggles in the 1930’s were crushed by republican governments or by the PSOE up until 1933. The PSOE, which was in opposition at the time, incited the suicidal insurrection in the Asturias in October ’34 with “revolutionary” talk. It then isolated the movement completely, in conjunction with its union, the UGT, which prevented any extension of the movement. From this time on, Bilan exposed the character of the “left-wing” democratic regimes very clearly: “In fact, from its foundation in April ’31 to December 1931, the Spanish Republic’s ‘move to the left’ – the formation of the Azana-Caballero-Lerroux government, the amputation of its right-wing represented by Lerroux in December 1931 – does not in any way offer favourable conditions for the development of proletarian class positions or for the formation of organs able to lead the revolutionary struggle. It is by no means a matter of seeing what the republican and radical-socialist government ought to do for the good of the (...) communist revolution. It is a question of analysing the significance of this switch to the left or the extreme left, this unanimous concert from the socialists to the unionists for the defence of the republic. Has it created the conditions for the development of working class conquests and the revolutionary direction of the proletariat? Or was this move to the left dictated by capitalism’s need to drug the workers, who had been carried away by a profound revolutionary outburst, to ensure that they would not follow the way of revolutionary struggle. The path that the bourgeoisie was to tread in October 1934 was too dangerous in 1931 (...)” (Bilan n°12, November 1934).

Finally, it is particularly significant that the violent confrontations in Brest and Toulon in summer 1935 broke out at the very moment that the Popular Front was formed. As these developed spontaneously against the slogans of the political and union leaders of the “left”, the latter did not hesitate to slander as “provocateurs” those who were disturbing “republican order”: “neither the Popular Front, nor the communists who are in the front line, break windows, plunder cafes or rip the national flag” (Humanité editorial, 7th August 1935).

So from the beginning, as Bilan showed in relation to Spain from 1933 onwards, the policies of the Popular Front and the left-wing governments were by no means based on a dynamic towards the strengthening of proletarian struggles. On the contrary, they developed against it, they deliberately collided with those workers’ movements that were on a class terrain in order to suffocate these last bursts of resistance against the “total dissolution of the proletariat within capitalism” (Bilan n°22, August-September 1935): “In France, the Popular Front, faithful to its treacherous tradition, will not fail to call for the murder of those who refuse to bow before the ‘French disarmament’ and who, as in Brest and Toulon, engage in strikes for their own demands, in class battles against capitalism and beyond the grip of the pillars of the Popular Front” (Bilan n°26, December-January 1936).

Anti-fascism ties the workers to the defence of the bourgeois state

Did the Popular Fronts not “unite popular forces against the rise of fascism” at least? When Hitler came to power in Germany at the beginning of 1933, the left used the advance of extreme right-wing or fascist factions in the “democratic” countries to show that it was necessary to defend democracy by means of a broad anti-fascist front. This strategy was put into practice for the first time in France from the beginning of 1934 and was set in motion by a huge manoeuvre. A pretext was given by the violent demonstration of 6th February 1934 in protest at the effects of the crisis and corruption in the governments of the Third Republic. Groups of the extreme right (Croix de Feu, Camelots du Roi) were involved in this demonstration as well as militants of the CP. A few days later there was a complete about turn in the CP’s attitude, due to a change in strategy on the part of Stalin and the Komintern. The latter had decided to substitute the “class against class” tactic with a policy of rapprochement with the socialist parties. From that moment on, February 6th was presented as a “fascist offensive” and an “attempted coup d’etat” in France.

The riot of 6th February 1934 enabled the left to exaggerate the existence of a fascist threat in France and consequently to launch a broad campaign to mobilise the workers in the name of anti-fascism for the defence of “democracy”. The general strike called by both the CP and the SFIO from the 12th crowned anti-fascism with the slogan “Unity! Unity against fascism!”. The French CP rapidly assimilated the new orientation and at the national conference at Ivry in June’34 Thorez declared: “At the present time, fascism is the main danger. It is against this that we must concentrate the entire strength of our mass proletarian action and win over to this action all the working strata of the population”. This perspective resulted in the rapid signing of a bi-lateral agreement between the CP and the SFIO in July 1934.

In this way anti-fascism became the theme around which it was possible to regroup all bourgeois forces that were “enamoured of freedom” behind the flag of the Popular Front. It also enabled the interests of the proletariat to be tied to those of the national capital by forming the “alliance of the working class with the workers of the middle classes” to spare France “the shame and the ills of a fascist dictatorship”, as Thorez put it. As an extension of this, the French PC developed the theme of the “200 families who pillage France and sell off cheaply the national interest”. So everyone, with the exception of these “capitalists”, were suffering because of the crisis and were in solidarity with one another. In this way the working class, and its class interests, were drowned in the people and the nation in opposition to “a handful of parasites”.

On the other hand, fascism was denounced daily and hysterically as the only element leading to war. The Popular Front mobilised the working class in defence of the fatherland against the fascist invader and the German people were identified with Nazism. The slogans of the French CP called for everyone to “buy French!” and glorified national reconciliation. So the left dragged the proletariat behind the ship of state by means of the most outrageous nationalism, the worst expression of chauvinism and xenophobia.

The high point of this intensive campaign was an electoral alliance and the public formation of the Popular Front on 14th July 1935. For the occasion the workers were made to sing the French national anthem under joint portraits of Marx and Robespierre and were made to shout “Long live the French Republic of soviets!”. By focussing all action on the development of the electoral campaign for the “Popular Front for peace and work”, the “left” parties redirected struggles off the class terrain towards that of bourgeois electoral democracy, drowned the proletariat in the formless mass of the “French people” and channelled it towards the defence of national interests. “This was a result of the new positions of 14th July, which were a logical consequence of the policy called anti-fascism. The Republic was not capitalism, it was the realm of freedom, of democracy which is, as we know the platform of anti-fascism. The workers solemnly swore to defend this Republic against internal and external trouble-makers while Stalin told them to approve the arming of French imperialism in the name of the defence of the USSR” (Bilan n°22, August-September 1935).

The same strategy for mobilising the working class on the electoral terrain in defence of democracy was used in various countries. It integrated them into the generality of popular strata and mobilised them for the defence of national interests. In Belgium, the mobilisation of the workers behind the campaign around the “Plan de Travail” used means of psychological propaganda which in no way fell short of Nazi or Stalinist propaganda. It resulted in the POB going into the government in ’35. The anti-fascist hype, led by the left of the POB in particular, reached a climax in 1937 in a dual in Brusselles between Degrelle, the leader of the fascist Rex party, and the prime minister Van Zeeland, who had the support of all the “democratic” forces including the Belgian CP. In the same year Spaak, one of the leaders of the left wing of the POB, stressed the “national character” of the Belgian socialist programme. He also proposed that the party become a people’s party because it defended the common interest and no longer the interests of one class alone!

However, it was in Spain that the French example inspired the policies of the left most clearly. Following the massacre in the Asturias, the PSOE still focussed its propaganda around anti-fascism, the “united front of all democrats” and called for a Popular Front programme against the fascist threat. In January 1935 they signed a “Popular Front” alliance with the UGT union, the republican parties and the Spanish CP, with the critical support of the CNT and the POUM. This “Popular Front” called openly for the substitution of workers’ struggle by struggle on the bourgeois terrain against its fascist faction and in favour of its “anti-fascist” and “democratic” wing. The fight against capitalism was buried in favour of an illusory “programme of reform” of the system, which had to carry out a “democratic revolution”. By mystifying the proletariat through this false anti-fascist and democratic front, the left mobilised it on the electoral terrain and obtained an electoral triumph in February 1936: “This [the republican-socialist coalition in 1931-33] was a conclusive demonstration as to the use of democracy as a means of manoeuvring to maintain the capitalist regime. But following this, in 1936, and in just the same way, it was again possible to push the Spanish proletariat to line up, not behind class interests, but behind the defence of the ‘Republic’, of ‘Socialism’ and of ‘Progress’ against the monarchy, clerical fascism and reaction. This shows the profound disarray of the workers in Spain, where the proletariat has only recently given proof of its combativeness and its spirit of self-sacrifice.” (Bilan n°28, February-March 1936).

In fact, the anti-fascist policy of the left and the formation of “Popular Fronts” managed to atomise the workers, to dilute them within the population, to mobilise them for a democratic transformation of capitalism to the point of imbuing them with chauvinist and nationalist poison. Bilan was proved right when the Popular Front was formed officially on 14th July 1935: “Impressive mass demonstrations signal the dissolution of the French proletariat into the capitalist regime. In spite of the fact that there are thousands and thousands of workers marching through the streets of Paris, there is no longer a working class fighting for its own aims in France, any more than there is in Germany. In this regard 14th July marks a decisive moment in the process of the disintegration of the proletariat and the reconstruction of a sacred unity of the capitalist nation. (...) The workers have borne patiently the national flag, sung the national anthem and even applauded Daladier, Cot and other capitalist ministers who, along with Blum and Cachin, have solemnly sworn ‘to give bread to the workers, work to the young and peace to the world’. This means lead bullets, barracks and imperialist war for everyone.” (Bilan n°21, July-August 1935).

The Popular Front's economic measures: the state in the service of the workers?

But did not the left at least limit the horrors of free competition by “monopoly” capitalism through its measures to strengthen state control of the economy? Did it not therefore protect the living and working conditions of the working class? Once more, it is necessary to place the measures extolled by the left within the general framework of the situation of capitalism.

At the beginning of the 1930s there was total anarchy in capitalist production. The world crisis threw millions of proletarians onto the streets. The economic crisis, produced by the decadence of the capitalist system, manifested itself through a great depression in the 1930’s (the stock exchange crash of 1929, record inflation rates, fall in industrial production and growth, dramatic acceleration in unemployment). This pushed the victorious bourgeoisie inexorably towards imperialist war for the redivision of the over-saturated world market. “Export or die” became the slogan of every national bourgeoisie and was expressed clearly by the Nazi leaders.

Movement towards war and the development of the war economy

Following the First World War, Germany was deprived of its few colonies by the Versailles treaty and was left with crushing war debts and reparations. It was hedged in at the centre of Europe and from that time on there arose the problem that determined the policies of all the European countries during the next two decades. As it reconstructed its economy, Germany was faced with the desperate need to find outlets for its goods and its expansion could only take place within the European framework. Events accelerated when Hitler came to power in 1933. The economic needs that pushed Germany towards war found their political expression in Nazi ideology: the challenging of the Versailles Treaty, the demand for “living space”, that could only be in Europe.

This convinced certain factions of the French bourgeoisie that war was inevitable and that Soviet Russia would be a good ally to block Pan-Germanic aspirations. All the more so as, at an international level, the situation was becoming clearer: as Germany left the United Nations, the USSR joined it. Formerly, the latter had played the German card in order to oppose the continental blockade, imposed upon it by the Western democracies. But then Germany’s relationship with the USA grew closer as the latter invested in the German economy, resuscitated it thanks to the Dawes plan and supported the economic reconstruction of a Western “bastion” against communism. At this point Stalinist Russia re-oriented its foreign policy towards breaking this alliance. In fact, until very late important sections of the bourgeoisie in the Western countries believed it possible to avoid war with Germany by making a few concessions and, above all, by directing Germany’s necessary expansion towards the east. Munich 1938 expressed this continuing incomprehension of the situation and of the coming war.

 The trip to Moscow made by the French minister for foreign affairs, Laval, in May 1935 underlined dramatically this positioning of imperialist pawns on the European chessboard with the Franco-Russian rapprochement. Stalin’s signing of a co-operation treaty, meant his implicit recognition of France’s defence policy and encouraged the French CP to vote for military credits. A few months later, in August 1935, the 7th Congress of the CPSU[2] [14] drew the political consequences for Russia of a possible alliance with the Western countries in order to confront German imperialism. Dimitrov named the new enemy that had to be combatted: fascism. The socialists who had been violently criticised up to then, became a democratic force (among others) with whom it was necessary to ally in order to defeat the fascist enemy. The Stalinist parties in other countries followed the 180° turn of their elder brother, the CPSU, so becoming the most ardent defenders of the imperialist interests of the so-called “socialist fatherland”.

 In short, all the industrial countries felt a powerful need to develop the war economy; not only massive armaments production but also the whole infrastructure necessary for this production. All the great powers, “democratic” as well as “fascist”, developed a similar policy of major public works under the control of the state and an arms industry entirely directed towards the preparation of a second world war. Industry organised itself around them; it imposed a re-organisation of work, of which “Taylorism” was one of the choicest offspring.

The left and state control

One of the main characteristics of the economic policies of the “left” was the strengthening of measures for the state to intervene to support the crisis-ridden economy and state control over various sectors of the economy. It justified such measures as being those “of a ‘controlled economy’, of state Socialism, ripening the conditions that would allow ‘socialists’ to ‘peacefully’ and gradually conquer the main wheels of state” (Bilan n°3, January 1934). Such measures were generally extolled by the whole of European Social Democracy. They were taken up in the economic programme of the Popular Front in France, known as the Jouhaux plan. In Spain the Popular Front’s programme contained a broad policy of agrarian credits and a plan for vast public works in order to re-absorb unemployment, as well as workers’ legislation fixing, for example, a minimum wage. We can see their real significance by examining one of their principle models, the “New Deal”, which was set up in the United States after the 1929 crisis by the Democrats under Roosevelt. Also by analysing one of the most developed theoretical concretisations of this “State Socialism”, the “Plan de Travail” of the Belgian socialist, Henri De Man.

The “New Deal”, set up in the United States from 1932, was a plan for economic reconstruction and “social peace”. Government intervention aimed to re-establish the equilibrium of the banking system and re-float the financial market, to carry out major public works (the construction of dams by the Tennessee Valley Authority dates from this period) and to launch certain social programmes (pension system, unemployment insurance, etc.). The role of the new federal agency, the National Recovery Administration (NRA), was to stabilise prices and wages in co-operation with employers and unions. It created the Public Works Administration (PWA) to run the policy of large public works.

Did the Roosevelt government open the way – without knowing it – for the workers’ parties to conquer the main levers of state power? For Bilan, the opposite was true: “The intensity of the economic crisis, together with the unemployment and misery of millions of people, accumulated the threat of serious social conflicts that American capitalism had to dissipate or stifle by all means in its power” (Bilan n°3, January 1934). So, far from being measures to benefit the workers, the measures for “social peace” were direct attacks against the class autonomy of the proletariat. “Roosevelt aimed, not to direct the working class towards class opposition, but to dissolve it within the capitalist regime, under the control of the capitalist state. So social conflicts could no longer arise from the real (class) struggle between the workers and the bosses and were to be restricted to an opposition between the working class and the NRA, a state capitalist organ. So the workers were to give up any initiative in the struggle and resign their fate to their enemy” (Idem.).

One of the main architects of these measures of state control and the man who was the inspiration behind most of them, was Henri De Man. He was the head of the institute of the POB cadres and was vice president and the leading light of the party from 1933. His measures were put into practice by the Popular Fronts as well as by the fascist regimes (Mussolini was a great admirer of his). For De Man, who had made a detailed study of industrial and social development in the United States and Germany, the “old dogmas” had to be ditched. For him, the basis of the class struggle was the sense of social inferiority of the workers. So rather than orienting socialism around the satisfaction of the material needs of a class (the workers), it should be directed towards universal spiritual values, such as justice, respect for the human personality and a concern for the “general interest”. In this way the unavoidable and irreconcilable contradictions between the working class and the capitalists were eliminated. Not only must revolution be rejected but also the “old reformism”, which becomes inapplicable in periods of crisis. It is no use demanding a larger piece of a cake, which is constantly shrinking. A new and larger cake must be made. This was the aim of what he called the “constructive revolution”. Within this framework, for the POB “Christmas” congress of 1933 he developed his “Plan de Travail”, which envisaged “structural reforms” of capitalism:

• the nationalisation of the banks, which would continue to exist but which would sell some of their shares to a state credit institution and would submit to the orientations of the economic plan;
• this same credit institution would buy some of the shares of the large monopolies in certain basic industrial sectors (such as energy), so that these would become mixed enterprises under the joint ownership of capitalists and of the state;
• besides these “associated” enterprises, a free capitalist sector would continue to exist, stimulated and supported by the state;
• the unions would be directly involved in the co-ordination of this mixed economy by means of “workers’ control”, an orientation that De Man defended on the basis of the experience in the large factories in the US.

In what way did these “structural reforms”, extolled by De Man, lead to the defence of the working class struggle? For Bilan, De Man wanted “to show that the workers’ struggle must restrict itself naturally to national aims in terms of form and content, that socialisation meant progressive nationalisation of the capitalist economy or the mixed economy. Under the pretext of ‘immediate action’, De Man preached national adaptation of the workers within the ‘unique and indivisable nation’ and offered this as the supreme refuge of the workers who had been checked by capitalist reaction”. In conclusion, “The structural reforms of H. De Man aim to put the real struggle of the workers – and this is their only aim – into the domain of the unreal. They exclude any struggle for the defence of the immediate or historic interests of the proletariat in the name of a structural reform that, in terms of its conception and its means, can only help the bourgeoisie to strengthen its class state by reducing the working class to impotence.” (Bilan n°4, February 1934).

But Bilan went further and situated the proposed “Plan de Travail” in the context of the role that the left played in the historic framework of the period. “The advent of fascism in Germany closed a decisive period of workers’ struggles. (...) Social-Democracy, which was an essential element in these defeats, was also an element in the organic reformation of the life of capitalism (...) It used a new language in order to continue its task. It rejected verbal internationalism, as it was no longer necessary, and went over to a frank ideological preparation of the workers for the defence of ‘their nation’. (...) That’s where the real origin of De Man’s plan is to be found. The latter was a concrete attempt to sanction, by means of an adequate mobilisation, the defeat of revolutionary internationalism and the ideological preparation to incorporate the proletariat into the struggle around capitalism towards war. This is why its nationalsocialism has the same role as the national-socialism of the fascists.” (Bilan n°4, February 1934).

The analysis of the New Deal and of De Man’s Plan illustrates well that these measures by no means go in the direction of strengthening the proletarian struggle against capitalism. On the contrary, they aim to reduce the working class to impotence and to make it submit to the needs of national defence. As Bilan says, the De Man plan can in no way be distinguished from the programme of state control of the fascist and Nazi regimes or from Stalinism’s five year plans, which had been implemented in the USSR from 1928 and had in the beginning inspired the Democrats in the USA.

These kinds of measures were generalised because they corresponded to the needs of decadent capitalism. In this period, the general tendency towards state capitalism is one of the dominant characteristics of social life. “In this period each national capital, because it cannot expand in an unfettered way and confronted with acute imperialist rivalries, is forced to organize itself as efficiently as possible, so that externally it can compete economically and militarily with its rivals and internally deal with the increasing aggravation of social contradictions. The only power in society which is capable of fulfilling these tasks is the state. Only the state can:

• take charge of the national economy in an overall centralized manner and mitigate the internal competition which weakens the economy, in order to strengthen its capacity to maintain a united face against the competition on the world market;
• develop the military force necessary for the defence of its interests in the face of growing international conflict;
• finally, owing to an increasingly heavy repressive and bureaucratic apparatus, reinforce the internal cohesion of a society threatened with collapse through the growing decomposition of its economic foundation, (...).” (ICC Platform).

In reality then, all these programmes that aimed at a re-organisation of national production under the control of the state were directed entirely towards economic war and towards the preparation for another world slaughter (the war economy). They correspond perfectly to the need for bourgeois states to survive within capitalism in the decadent period. 

Victory of the Popular Fronts: “social revolution” on the march?

But are these pessimistic analyses not swept away by the massive strikes of May-June 1936 in France and the social measures taken by the Popular Front government, and by the “Spanish revolution” that began in July 1936? Do these events not confirm, on the contrary, in practice, the correctness of the approach of “anti-fascist” or “popular” fronts? When it comes down to it, were these not a concrete expression of the “social revolution” in action? Let us examine the reality of these events.

May-June 1936 in France: the workers mobilised behind the democratic state

The great wave of strikes which followed immediately on the rise to government of the Popular Front after its electoral victory of 5th May 1936 was to confirm the limits of the workers movement, marked as it was by a defeat in the revolutionary wave and bowed under the weight of the counterrevolution.

The “gains” of 1936

On 7th May, a wave of strikes broke out in the aircraft industry, followed by the engineering and automobile industries, accompanied by spontaneous factory occupations. Despite their combativeness, these struggles were a sign of how limited was the workers ability to undertake the combat on their own class terrain. In the first days of the movement, the left succeeded in dressing up as a “workers’ victory” the derailment of workers’ combativeness onto the terrain of the national interest. It is true that this was the first time that factory occupations had taken place in France: it was also the first time that anyone had seen the workers singing the Marseillaise together with the Internationale, or marching behind the red flag together with the national tricolour. The control apparatus of the CP and the unions remained master of the situation and succeeded in keeping the workers closed up in the factories to the soothing sound of the accordion, while their fate was settled at the top, in the negotiations which were to lead to the Matignon agreements. Unity there certainly was, but it was that of the bourgeoisie’s control apparatus over the working class, not of the working class itself. When a few objectors refused to understand that once the agreements had been signed it was time to go back to work, Humanité explained to them that “it is necessary to know how to stop a strike... it is even necessary to know how to agree to a compromise” (Maurice Thorez, speech of June 1936), and that “we must not frighten our Radical friends”.

During the Riom trial, held by the Vichy regime to punish those responsible for the “moral decadence of France”, Léon Blum himself explained just how the factory occupations had been part of the national mobilisation: “the workers were there as guardians, as overseers, and also in a certain sense as co-proprietors. And from the special point of view which concerns you, does not the fact of observing the community of rights and duties towards the national patrimony lead to ensuring and preparing its common and unanimous defence? (...) this is how one creates for the workers, little by little, a joint property in the fatherland; this is how one teaches them to defend the fatherland”.

The left got what it wanted: it led the workers combativeness onto the sterile ground of nationalism, of the national interest. “The bourgeoisie is obliged to have recourse to the Popular Front in order to channel an inevitable explosion of the class struggle to its own benefit, particularly so inasmuch as the Popular Front appears as the emanation of the working class and not as the capitalist force which has dissolved the proletariat in order to mobilise it for war” (Bilan n°32 June-July 1936).

To put an end to any workers' resistance, the Stalinists used their bludgeons on those who “let themselves be provoked into short-sighted actions” (M Thorez, 8th June 1936) and the the Popular Front government called in the police to shoot down the workers in Clichy in 1937. By beating up or killing the last recalcitrant minorities of workers, the bourgeoisie succeeded in dragging the whole of the French proletariat into the defence of the nation.

Fundamentally, there was nothing in the programme of the Popular Front to worry the bourgeoisie. On 16th May, Daladier, the president of the Radical party, was reassuring: “no article of the Popular Front programme contains anything to inconvenience the legitimate interests of any citizen, to worry investors, or to damage any healthy force of French labour. There is no doubt that it has not even been read by many of those who fought it most passionately” (L’Oeuvre, 16th May 1936). Nonetheless, to inculcate its anti-fascist ideology and to remain entirely credible in its role of defender of the fatherland and the capitalist state, the left had to hand out a few crumbs. The Matignon agreements and the pseudo-conquests of 1936 made it possible to present the left in power as “a great workers’ victory”, to win the workers’ confidence in the Popular Front and their defence of the bourgeois state even in wartime.

This famous Matignon agreement, signed on 7th June 1936 and celebrated by the CGT as “a victory over poverty”, and which to this day is still presented as a model of “social reform”, was therefore the carrot used to sell the Popular Front programme to the workers. What exactly did it offer?

Under the appearance of “concessions” to the working class, such as wage increases, the 40 hour week, and paid holidays, the bourgeoisie ensured above all the organisation of production under the leadership of an “impartial” state, as the CGT leader Léon Jouhaux pointed out: “(...) the beginning of a new era (...), the era of direct relations between the two great organised economic forces of the country (...) Decisions have been taken completely independently, under the aegis of the government, the latter playing the role of umpire where necessary, which corresponds to its function as the representative of the general interest” (radio speech of 8th June 1936). The aim was to get the workers to accept unprecedented increases in line speeds through the introduction of new methods of labour organisation designed to increase hourly productivity tenfold especially in the armament industry. This meant the generalisation of Taylorism, of production line working, and the dictatorship of the stopwatch in the factory.

It was Léon Blum in person who stripped away the “social” veil that had hidden the laws of 1936, in his speech at the Riom trial in 1942, which had been intended to lay the blame for the heavy defeat inflicted on the French army by the Nazis in 1940 at the door of the Popular Front and the 40 hour week: “What lies behind hourly productivity? (...) it depends on the good coordination and adaptation of the worker’s movements to his machine; it also depends on the moral and physical condition of the worker.

“There is a whole school of thought in America, the school of Taylor and the Bedeau engineers, who you can see on inspection on the factory line, who have undertaken very thorough studies of the material methods of organisation that maximise the machines hourly productivity, this being precisely their objective. But there is also the Gilbreth school which has studied and researched the data on the physical conditions which will enable the worker to obtain this productivity. The essential point is to limit the fatigue of the worker (…) do you not think that all our social legislation was of a kind to improve this moral and physical condition of the worker: the shorter working day, more leisure, paid holidays, the feeling of having conquered a certain dignity and equality, all these were intended to be elements to maximise the hourly productivity that the worker could extract from the machine.”

This is how and why the “social” measures of the Popular Front government were necessary to adapt and lull the proletariat to the new methods of production aimed at the rapid rearmament of the nation before war broke out. It is noteworthy moreover that paid holidays, in one form or another, were granted at the same time in most of the developed countries heading for war and therefore imposing on their workforce the same increases in production speeds.

In June 1936, inspired by the movements in France, a dockers’ strike broke out in Belgium. After first trying to stop it, the unions recognised the movement and orientated it towards demands similar to those of the Popular Front in France: increased wages, the 40 hour week, and one week’s paid holiday. On 15th June, the movement generalised towards Borinage and the regions of Liège and Limburg: 350,000 workers throughout the country were on strike. The main result of the movement was to refine the system of social consultation through the setting up of the national conference of labour where bosses and unions agreed on the national plan to optimise the competitiveness of Belgian industry.

Once the strikes had been brought to an end, and a lasting increase in hourly productivity achieved, it only remained for the Popular Front government to take back what it had conceded. The wage increases were eaten away by inflation in a matter of months (food prices rose by 54 % between 1936 and 1938), the 40 hour week was called into question by Blum himself one year later, and completely forgotten when Daladier’s Radical government in 1938 accelerated the whole economic machine in preparation for war: abolishing extra payments for the first 250 hours of overtime, putting an end to labour contracts banning piecework, and sanctioning all those who refused overtime in the cause of national defence. “In factories working for national defence, dispensations on the legal 40 hour week were always granted. In most other things, in 1938 I obtained the agreement of the workers organisation’s for a 45 hour week in factories working directly or indirectly for national defence” (Blum at the Riom trial). Finally, with the support of the Blum government and the agreement of the unions, the bosses recovered their paid holidays. Christmas and New Year were incorporated into the paid holiday time, and this was followed by the abolition of all the existing public holidays: the whole added up to 80 hours extra work – which corresponded exactly to the two weeks of paid holidays granted by the Popular Front.

As for the recognition of union delegates and labour contracts, this represented nothing more than the strengthening of the unions grip over the workers by extending their presence in the factories. To that end Léon Jouhaux, the socialist and trade union leader, explained it in these terms: “the workers organisation’s [i.e. the unions] want social peace. First of all so as not to embarrass the Popular Front government, and secondly so as not to hinder rearmament.” When the bourgeoisie prepares for war, the state must control the whole of society to direct all its energy towards this bloody end. And in factories it is the unions which allow the state to police the workforce.

If victory there was, it was the sinister victory of capital preparing its only “solution” to the crisis: imperialist war.

Preparing for war

From the outset of the Popular Front in France, with its slogan “peace, bread, liberty”, its anti-fascism and pacifism, the defence of the French bourgeoisie’s imperialist interests was mingled with democratic illusions. Within this framework the left skilfully exploited preparations for war internationally to demonstrate that the “fascist peril is at our frontier”, organising for example a whole campaign over the Italian aggression in Ethiopia. Still more clearly, the SFIO and the CP played different roles in relation to the Spanish Civil War: whereas the SFIO refused to intervene in Spain in the name of pacifism, the CP urged intervention in the name of the “anti-fascist struggle”.

If there was one thing for which French capital could thank the Popular Front government, it was its preparation for war.

First of all, the left was able to use the enormous mass of workers on strike as a means of pressure against the most retrograde forces of the bourgeoisie, imposing the measures necessary to safeguard the national capital in the face of the crisis, and making the whole thing look like a victory for the working class;

Secondly, the Popular Front launched a rearmament programme via the nationalisation of war industry about which Blum was to declare during the Riom trial: “I proposed a great fiscal project... whose aim was to direct all the forces of the nation towards rearmament and to make this intensive rearmament effort a condition for a definitive industrial and economic recovery. It resolutely left behind the liberal economy, to replace it with a war economy”.

And indeed, the left was aware that war was coming: it was the left which pushed for the Franco-Russian entente, and which denounced most violently the Munich tendencies of the French bourgeoisie. Its “solutions” for the crisis were no different from those in Nazi Germany, New Deal America, or Stalinist Russia: the development of the unproductive sector of the armaments industry. As Bilan pointed out: “it is no accident if these great strikes broke out in engineering industry, starting with the aircraft factories (...) these sectors are working flat out, thanks to the rearmament policy being followed in every country. This fact is felt by the workers, and they were forced to launch their movement to reduce the brutalising rhythm of the production line”.

Finally and above all, the Popular Front led the working class onto the worst terrain possible for it, that of its crushing defeat: nationalism.

Thanks to the patriotic hysteria developed by the left through anti-fascism, the proletariat was led to defend one fraction of the bourgeoisie against another, the democrat against the fascist, and one state against another, France against Germany. The French CP declared: “the time has come to put into practice the general arming of the people, to undertake the fundamental reforms which will increase tenfold the country’s military and technical powers. The army of the people, the army of workers and peasants, well taught and well led by officers faithful to the Republic”. In the name of this “ideal” the “Communists” celebrated the name of Joan of Arc, “the great liberator of France”, and the CP called for a French front with the same slogan as that used by the far right only a few years before: “France for the French!” Under the pretext of defending democratic freedoms threatened by fascism the proletariat was led to accept the sacrifices necessary for the health of French capital, and finally to sacrifice their lives in the slaughter of World War II.

The Popular Front found effective allies in its executioner’s task amongst its left-wing critics: Maurice Pivert’s Parti Socialiste Ouvrier et Paysan (“Socialist workers’ and peasants’ party”, PSOP), the Trotskyists and the anarchists. All played the part of touts amongst the most combative elements of the class and were constantly posing as the “most radical”, though the only thing radical about them was the mystification they peddled. The Jeunesses Socialistes de la Seine (“Socialist youth of the Seine”), or Trotskyists like Craipeau and Roux, practiced entryism, and were the first to argue in favour of and organise the anti-fascist militia; Pivert’s friends within the PSOP were the most virulent in criticising the “cowardice” of Munich. All were unanimous in defence of the Spanish Republic alongside the anti-fascists and all would take part later in the inter-imperialist bloodbath as part of the Resistance. All did their bit in defence of the national capital, they have all deserved well of the fatherland!

Spain, July 1936: the proletariat sent to the abattoir

Thanks to the formation of the Popular Front (Frente Popular), and its victory in the elections of February 1936, the bourgeoisie injected the working class with the poison of the “democratic revolution” and succeeded in binding the workers to the defence of the “democratic” bourgeois state. In fact when a new wave of strikes broke out immediately after the elections, it was held back and sabotaged by the left and the anarchists because “the strikes are playing into the hands of the bosses and the right”. This was to find a concrete and tragic expression during the military Pronunciamento of 19th July 1936. The workers reacted immediately to the coup d’etat by going on strike, occupying barracks and disarming the soldiers, against the orders of the government which called for calm. Wherever the government’s appeals were respected (“the government commands the Popular Front obeys”), the military took control and a bloody repression followed.

“The armed struggle on the imperialist front is the proletariat’s grave” (Bilan n°34)

However, the illusion of the “Spanish revolution” was strengthened by the supposed disappearance of the Republican capitalist state and the non-existence of the bourgeoisie, all of them hiding behind the pseudo-”workers government” and even more left-wing organisations like the “Central Committee of Anti-Fascist Militia” or the “Central Council of the Economy” which kept up the illusion of dual power. In the name of this “revolutionary change”, so easily won, the bourgeoisie demanded and obtained from the workers national unity around the sole objective of beating Franco. However, “The alternative is not between Azaña and Franco, but between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat; whichever of the two partners is beaten the real loser will be the proletariat which will pay the price of a victory of either Azaña or Franco” (Bilan n°33, July-August 1936).

Very quickly, the Republican government of the Popular Front with help of the CNT and the POUM, turned the workers reaction to the Francoist coup d’etat into an anti-fascist struggle and manoeuvred to replace the social, economic and political battle against all the forces of the bourgeoisie with a military confrontation in the trenches against Franco alone, while the workers were allowed to take arms solely to get themselves killed on the military front of the “civil war” far from their class terrain. “We might suppose that the arming of the workers had a congenital virtue from the political point of view and the once they were materially armed, the workers could get rid of their treacherous leaders and give their struggle a superior form. Nothing could be further from the truth. The workers that the Popular Front is succeeded in incorporating into the bourgeoisie, since they are fighting under the leadership and for the victory of a bourgeois fraction, are thus prevented from even the possibility of evolving towards class positions” (Bilan n°33, July-August 1936).

Moreover, there was nothing “civil” about this war. It rapidly became a pure inter-imperialist conflict, and a prelude to World War II, as the democracies and Russia took the side of the Republicans while Italy and Germany took the side of the Falangists. “Class frontiers, which alone could have dismantled Franco’s regiments and renewed the confidence of the peasants terrorised by the right, have been replaced by other specifically capitalist frontiers. National unity has been achieved for the imperialist slaughter, region against region, town against town in Spain and by extension, state against state in the two democratic and fascist blocs. Whether or not the world war has yet started, the mobilisation of the Spanish and international proletariat is now ready for mutual slaughter under the imperialist flags of fascism and anti-fascism” (Bilan n°34, August-September 1936).

The illusions of a “social revolution”

The war in Spain has developed yet another myth. By substituting the war between “democracy” and “fascism” for the class war of the proletariat against capitalism, the Popular Front disfigured the very content of the revolution: its central objective is no longer the destruction of the bourgeois state through the seizure of political power by the proletariat but the supposed measures of socialisation and workers’ management in factories. It is above all the anarchists and certain tendencies which identify with councilism which have exalted this myth, even going so far as to claim that in this Republican, anti-fascist, and Stalinist Spain, the conquest of socialist positions went much further them was possible in the October revolution in Russia.

Without developing this question here, it must be said that these measures, even if they had been more radical than they were in reality, would have changed nothing of the fundamentally counterrevolutionary nature of the events in Spain. For both the bourgeoisie and for the proletariat, the central point of the revolution cannot be anything other than the destruction or the preservation of the capitalist state.

Not only can capitalism perfectly well put up temporarily with measures of self-management or the so-called socialisation of the land (the creation of cooperatives) while it waits for the chance to restore order when the time is right, it can even encourage them itself as means of mystification, channelling the proletariat’s energy into illusory conquests and away from the central objective which is at stake in the revolution: the destruction of capitalist power, and its state.

Exaltation of the so-called social measures as the high point of the revolution is nothing but verbal radicalism, which turns the proletariat away from its revolutionary struggle against the state and camouflages its mobilisation as cannon fodder in the service of the bourgeoisie. Having abandoned its class terrain, the proletariat was not only to be enrolled in the anarchists’ and POUMists’ anti-fascist militias and sent to the slaughter on the front, it was also to be subjected to an increasingly brutal exploitation and ever more sacrifices in the name of war production and the anti-fascist war economy: wage reductions, inflation, rationing, the militarisation of labour, and the lengthening of the working day. And when the proletariat rose up in desperation, in Barcelona in May 1937, the Popular Front with the Generalitat of Barcelona, and with the active participation of the anarchists, openly suppressed the working class of the city, while the Francoists interrupted hostilities until the left had crushed the workers’ uprising.

From the Social Democrats to the leftists, and even including certain fractions of the right, everyone agrees that the rise of the left to government in 1936 in France and Spain (but also, though no doubt less spectacularly, in other countries like Sweden and Belgium) was a great victory for the working class and a sign of its militancy and strength during the 1930s. Against these ideological manipulations, today’s revolutionaries, like their predecessors of Bilan, must state loud and clear that the Popular Fronts and their so-called “social revolutions” were nothing but a mystification. The arrival of the left in power in this period on the contrary expressed the depth of the defeat of the world proletariat and made it possible to enrol the working class in France and Spain in the imperialist war of the whole bourgeoisie was preparing, by enrolling them en masse under the banners of anti-fascist ideology.

“And I thought above all that this was a great achievement and a great service that I had performed, to have brought these masses and this elite of the working class back to their feelings of love and duty towards the fatherland” (declaration by Blum at the Riom trial).

For the working class, 1936 marks one of the blackest periods of the counterrevolution when the worst defeats of the working class were presented to it as victories; when the bourgeoisie could, almost without opposition, impose on the proletariat still reeling from the defeat of the revolutionary wave begun in 1917, its own “solution” to the crisis: war.

Jos

One of the most terrible effects of the counterrevolution which drowned the revolution of October 1917 in blood, was the complete isolation of the handful of revolutionaries in the USSR who survived the gulag and the raids of the GPU and the KGB (which also managed to bury the theoretical contributions of the Russian Communist Left). When the disintegration of the USSR began to raise the iron curtain imposed by the Stalinist bourgeoisie, it was important that revolutionaries in the West and in the countries of the ex-USSR should try to rebuild their contacts, exchange their experience and their ideas, so that the revolutionaries in these countries can return to their place in the international movement of the proletariat. This is why the ICC has taken part, since 1996, in the conferences organised by the Praxis group in Moscow (and in Kiev in 2005), and conducts a regular correspondence with several groups and contacts in Russia and the Ukraine. We have already published several articles from this correspondence on our Russian language web site. We have also begun the publication of a Russian language print publication, Интернационализм (Internationalism), in order to improve the exchange of ideas with comrades who do not have access to the Internet.

We know that this work requires enormous patience on all sides. The language barrier and translation is already a major difficulty; the ideas of the Communist Left from which the ICC draws its heritage are little known in the ex-USSR; similarly, the ideas developed by the comrades in these countries are often strongly marked by the specific experience there and are unfamiliar to readers in the West. The two articles that we are publishing here are the fruit of this long-term work: the first, is an extract from our correspondence with a comrade from Voronezh (a town on the river Don to the south of Moscow) and contains our response to his arguments in favour of self-management; the second, is an article by a comrade from the Ukraine on the presidential elections in 2004 which overthrew the regime of Leonid Kuchma.

Contrary to the boasts made by western leaders at the time, the collapse of the imperialist bloc led by the USSR has not brought anything like prosperity to the world economy or to Russia itself. Nevertheless, since the disappearance of Stalinism, revolutionaries in the west have been able to make contact with internationalists in Russia and the Ukraine. At the same time the latter have been able to get to know the principles and analyses developed by the Communist Left in the West from the 1920s onwards. The Communist Left in Russia also participated in the elaboration of these principles, before they disappeared into the Stalinist gulags.[1] [18] Following our interventions in the conferences organised in Moscow[2] [19] and last year in Kiev, as well as the publication in Russian of some of our pamphlets, the ICC has begun to correspond with Russian comrades on various aspects of the principles of the Communist Left. In particular the question of self-management has been the theme of much correspondence with various comrades. We have decided to publish in the International Review, the following reply to a comrade in the Voronezh region (a town situated on the Don to the south of Moscow).[3] [20] This is because we think that the questions raised deserve the attention generally of internationalists in Russia and elsewhere. The argumentation of the Russian comrade is very serious, even if we do not agree with all his conclusions.

---

Dear comrade,

We have received your last letter and we welcome once more your contribution on the law of value and self-management. We want to continue the discussion on these two questions. This is part of the discussion between communists that is indispensable if we are to define the programme for the proletarian revolution with maximum rigour.

You approach the problem in the following way:

“In your book, The Decadence of Capitalism, you say that under socialism commodity production will be eliminated. But it is impossible to eliminate commodity production without abolishing the law of value. According to Marx’s theory, under socialism the produce of labour will be exchanged according to the amount of labour time necessary (according to the work). That is, it is in conformity with the law of value.”

“In your pamphlet Platform and Manifesto, point 11 is entitled ‘Self-management: workers’ self-exploitation’. What does self-exploitation mean? Exploitation is the appropriation of the produce of another’s labour. If I understand correctly, self-exploitation is the appropriation of the produce of your own labour. If this is so, then Robinson Crusoe exploits himself when he consumes the produce of his own labour. Robinson Crusoe exploits himself.”

We will try to reply to these two questions, showing the connection between them.

The historic and transitory nature of the law of value

In your letter of 26th December 2004, you quote a passage from Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme: “Society gives him (the individual producer) a certificate stating that he has done such and such an amount of work (after the labour done for the communal fund has been deducted), and with this certificate he can withdraw from the social supply of means of consumption as much as costs an equivalent amount of labour. The same amount of labour he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another. Clearly, the same principle is at work here as that which regulates the exchange of commodities as far as this is an exchange of equal values.”[4] [21]

The main idea defended by Marx here is that after the revolution, when the proletariat holds power, it is still necessary for a time to relate workers’ “wages” to labour time. Consequently the labour time contained in products must be calculated in order to find the “exchange value” of goods and this is expressed in terms of “labour time vouchers”. Production for the market, the law of value and therefore the market still exist. We completely agree with him. So we understand your surprise when you read in our book, The Decadence of Capitalism, that in socialism production for the market will disappear. It is a matter of a confusion of terms. In our press we always use the word socialism as a synonym for communism as the final goal of the proletariat. That is, a society without classes and without a state, in which the produce of labour will no longer be goods for the market, in which the law of value will have been abolished. As early as the period in which he wrote The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx was very clear about this; in communism exchange would no longer take place, goods for the market would no longer exist. “In a future society, in which class antagonism will have ceased, in which there will no longer be any classes, use will no longer be determined by the minimum time of production; but the time of production devoted to different articles will be determined by the degree of their social utility.”[5] [22]

At this stage, exchange value will have been abolished. The united human community will decide how much labour time should be devoted to the production of this or that product. It will do so by means of its administrative organs that have the job of planning production in a centralised way. But it will no longer be necessary “to do the rounds” of exchange as happens in capitalism because what matters is the social usefulness of the goods. This will be a society of abundance in which not only the most elementary needs of human beings are satisfied but in which needs in themselves undergo a great development. In such a society, work itself will change its very nature. The time devoted to creating what is necessary for subsistence will be reduced to a minimum, for the first time ever work will become a truly free activity. Distribution, as well as production, will be different in kind. It will no longer matter how much time the individual contributes to social production, the principle that counts is “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!”

The identification and defence of this final goal of the proletarian struggle – a society without classes, with no state or national boundaries, without market production, flowed through all the works of Marx and Engels and of the revolutionaries of subsequent generations. It is important to remember this because this goal fundamentally determines the movement that leads to it and the means used to work towards it.

After the experience of the Russian revolution and then the Stalinist counter-revolution, we think it is politically clearer to talk of a “period of transition from capitalism to socialism” rather than “socialism” or of a “lower stage of communism”. Obviously this is not just a matter of terminology. In fact the dictatorship of the proletariat cannot be envisaged as a stable society or as a specific mode of production. It is a society that is evolving and in which the dynamic towards the future is vital. It is a period in which social upheavals maintain their political envelope, in which the old relations of production are under attack and weaken while new ones appear and gain in strength. Just before the passage in the “Critique of the Gotha Programme” quoted at the beginning of this text, Marx states that: “We are dealing here with a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but on the contrary (our emphasis), just as it emerges from capitalist society. In every respect, economically, morally, intellectually, it is thus still stamped with the birth-marks of the old society from whose womb it has emerged.”[6] [23] A few pages later, he says clearly : “Between capitalist and communist society lies a period of revolutionary transformation from one to the other. There is a corresponding period of transition in the political sphere and in this period the state can only take the form of a revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.”

Our last letter seems to have made it possible to clear up this misunderstanding and your reply expresses a basic agreement: “In my understanding of marxism, this period of transition is called socialism. I am not talking about market communism but of market socialism. (...) With the development of the productive forces, distribution on the basis of labour becomes distribution according to needs, bit by bit socialism becomes communism and in time the market will disappear.”

In your letter of 26th December 2004, you stress that there are only three forms of distribution of goods based on the socially necessary labour time contained in them:

• by the medium of money (M), in which case the exchange of goods (G) takes place in the form of G-M-G;
• by the medium of the work token (T) that Marx talks about: G-T-G;
• directly in the form of barter: G-G.

You go on to say that in all three cases there is an exchange of goods and therefore a market, that is a society which uses a general equivalent – money – to express labour time. This is so even though in the case of barter, money exists only potentially. As you say: “Money and tokens are almost the same thing because they measure the same thing – labour time. The difference between them is like that between a ruler marked out in centimetres and another marked out in inches.” We agree with you that this is the economic situation that the proletariat must face after it takes power and that to ignore this would be a regression from marxism. This is all the more so as the international civil war between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie will have given rise to a lot of destruction, so causing a drop in production. Communists must fight constantly against the illusion that there can be a rapid and problem-free elimination of the law of value. The way in which the proletariat will eliminate exchange and create the conditions for the state to wither away, means that the period of transition will be a period of revolutionary upheaval such as humanity has never known.

In spite of these particular points, it is clear that a disagreement still exists. You write, for example, in the same letter: “Under socialism, the product of labour will be exchanged according to the amount of labour time socially necessary. As long as the product of labour is exchanged according to the amount of labour time, the market and production for the market continue to exist. Therefore, in order to abolish production for the market, distribution based on labour time must be abolished. So, if you want to abolish production for the market, you have to abolish socialism. If you consider yourselves to be marxists, you must recognise that socialism is essentially based on the market. Otherwise off to the anarchists!”

From the passage above, we suppose that by “socialism” you mean the period of transition from capitalism to communism. By its very nature, this period is unstable: either the proletariat is victorious and the “transitional economy” is transformed in the direction of communism, that is towards the abolition of the market economy. Or else the proletariat loses ground, the laws of the market strengthen and there is the danger that the way will be open to the counter-revolution.

The ignorance of the anarchists

In the same letter you write that we find the same ignorance among the anarchists. In fact, for them, the emancipation of humanity depends exclusively on an effort of will and consequently communism can come about in any historical period. At the same time, they reject a scientific analysis of social development and are unable to understand what role the class struggle and human will can really play. In his Preface to Capital, Marx replied, without actually naming them, to the anarchists, who denied the inevitability of the transition period: “even when a society has got upon the right track for the discovery of the natural laws of its movement – and it is the ultimate aim of this work, to lay bare the economic law of motion of modern society – it can neither clear by bold leaps, nor remove by legal enactments, the obstacles offered by the successive phases of its normal development. But it can shorten and lessen the birth pangs.”[7] [24]

According to Marx and Engels, the need for the dictatorship of the proletariat, that is a period of transition between the two “stable” modes of production, capitalism and communism, is based on two factors:

• communism cannot flourish within capitalism (unlike capitalism which developed within feudalism);
• the development of the productive forces brought about by capitalism, although dramatic, is nevertheless insufficient for the complete satisfaction of human needs, which is a characteristic of communism.

Not only are the anarchists clearly unable to understand this but what’s more, their “vision of communism” in no way transcends the narrow bourgeois horizon. This can already be seen in Proudhon’s works. For him, political economy is the supreme science and he sets out to identify the good and the bad side of every capitalist economic category. The good side of exchange is that it opposes two equal values. The good side of competition is emulation. Inevitably, he also finds a good side to private property: “But it is clear that, although inequality is one of the characteristics of property, that is not all that it is. What makes property delightful, in the words of some philosopher whose name I no longer remember, is that you can dispose at will, not only of the value of the goods, but also of its specific character. You can exploit it as you please, reinforce it or conclude and make what use of it as is suggested by your interest, passion and whim”.[8] [25]

The reign of freedom is proclaimed but the limited and petty dreams of the small producer are dragged on board. For the anarchists, the ideal society is just an idealised capitalism whose masters are exchange and the law of value, in other words, the conditions for the exploitation of man by man. Marxism, on the contrary, is a radical critique of capitalism, which defends the perspective of a real emancipation of the proletariat and of the whole of humanity at the same time. Marx and Engels always fought against vulgar communism which restricts the revolution to the sphere of distribution and which ends up simply sharing out misery. They opposed the idea that there would be a spurt in the productive forces once they were freed from the constraints of capitalism. They called not only for the satisfaction of the elementary needs of human beings but also for the development of these needs, the transcending of the separation between the individual and the community, the development of all of the individual’s abilities, which are now stifled by the tentacles of the division of labour. “In a more advanced phase of communist society, when the enslaving subjugation of individuals to the division of labour, and thereby the antithesis between intellectual and physical labour, have disappeared, when labour is no longer just a means of keeping alive but has itself become a vital need; when the all-round development of individuals has also increased their productive powers and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can society wholly cross the narrow horizon of bourgeois right and inscribe on its banner : From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!”[9] [26]

Marxism does not give in to the windy phrases of petty bourgeois radicalism and utopianism. It knows that the only way to escape from capitalism is to eliminate wages and exchange. These encapsulate all the contradictions of capitalism and are the basic causes of the wars, crises and poverty that ravage society. The political economy to be established by the dictatorship of the proletariat is entirely directed towards this aim. According to this conception there is not a spontaneous transformation but rather the destruction of capitalist social relations.

In recalling this, we can see the extreme confusion with which the anarchists claim to overcome the separation of the worker from the product of his labour. From their point of view, by becoming the owners of the factory where they work, the workers automatically become the owners of the product of their labour. They dominate them, they even manage to enjoy them in full. The result is that property becomes eternal and sacred. What we have here is a federalist kind of regime that is heir to the pre-capitalist mode of production. Lassalle follows the same trajectory. He learnt from Marx that exploitation entails the extraction of surplus value. So the problem is to be solved by demanding for the worker the entire produce of his labour. By doing so, as Engels says in Anti-Duhring: “The most important progressive function of society, accumulation, is taken from society and put into the hands, placed at the arbitrary discretion, of individuals.”[10] [27] According to the works of Marx these confusions about labour, labour power and the product of labour are completely inadmissible. This theoretical gibberish, shared by Lassalle and the anarchists, is the basis for self-management conceptions. This is not an orientation for the abolition of exchange and towards communism. It rather increases the obstacles in its path. This is how Marx, once more in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, concluded the sharp critique of these conceptions: “If I have dealt at some length with the ‘undiminished proceeds of labour’ on the one hand, and ‘equal right’ and ‘just distribution’ on the other, it is in order to show the criminal nature of what is being attempted: on the one hand, our party is to be forced to re-accept as dogmas ideas which may have made some sense at a particular time but which are now only a load of obsolete verbal rubbish; on the other hand, the realistic outlook instilled in our party at the cost of immense effort, but now firmly rooted in it, is to be perverted by means of ideological, legal and other humbug so common among the democrats and the French socialists.”[11] [28]

From this point of view, it seems to us that you stop half way in your reasoning. You agree with us that during this period, the working class will not be exploited. This is because the proletariat holds power, because there will be a process of collectivisation of the means of production. It is also because excess labour no longer takes the form of surplus value to be used for the accumulation of capital but is to be used increasingly to satisfy the needs of society (once the reserve fund and the sum destined for unproductive members of society is deducted). You say, quite rightly: “The difference between socialism (the period of transition) and capitalism is that under socialism the work force is no longer a commodity” (letter of 23rd January 2005). But in your next letter you say: “The law of value remains operative in its entirety, not partially”. This gives force to your expression “market socialism”. You see quite well the need to attack the wage but not the need to attack market exchange. However, the two are tightly linked.

The law of value expounded by Marx does not just elucidate the origin of market value, it solves the enigma of the enlarged reproduction of capital. Even if the proletariat receives a wage that corresponds to the real value of its labour power, it still creates much greater value by means of the productive process. The exploitation that allows this surplus value to be extracted from the proletariat’s labour already existed in simple market production, from which capitalism was born and developed. It is therefore impossible to eliminate the exploitation of the proletariat without attacking market exchange. Engels explains this clearly in The origin of the Family, Private Property and the State: “When the producers no longer directly consumed their product, but let it go out of their hands in the course of exchange, they lost control over it. They no longer knew what became of it, and the possibility arose that the product might some day be turned against the producers, used as a means of exploiting and oppressing them, Hence, no society can for any length of time remain master of its own production and continue to control the social effects of its process of production, unless it abolishes exchange between individuals.”[12] [29]

If the law of value remains “operative in its entirety”, as you say, then the proletariat remains an exploited class. If exploitation is to cease during the period of transition it is not enough to expropriate the bourgeoisie. It is also necessary that the means of production cease to exist as capital. The capitalist principle of dead labour, of accumulated labour that dominates living labour in order to produce surplus value must be replaced. Its place must be taken by the principle of living labour that dominates accumulated labour in order to produce for the satisfaction of the needs of the members of society. The dictatorship of the proletariat will have to combat the absurd and catastrophic productivism of capitalism. As is stated in the French Communist Left,  “at the beginning, the amount of surplus labour the proletariat has to perform will be as great as it was under capitalism. Thus the socialist economic principle will not, in its immediate application, be able to be measured quantitatively in the relation between paid and unpaid labour. Only the trajectory, the tendency towards altering this relationship can serve as an indication of which way the economy is going, as a barometer of the class nature of production.”[13] [30]

Self-management, a fatal trap for the proletariat

The second question under discussion is dealt with in point 11 of our platform: “Self-management: workers’ self-exploitation”. Here you express a clear disagreement with our position. It seems inconceivable to you that workers can exploit themselves. “But I do not at all understand”, you write, “how it is possible to exploit oneself. It’s like stealing from oneself.” Since the big workers’ struggles at the end of the 1960s, most of our sections have been confronted concretely with the question of the self-management by the workers of “their” enterprise within the framework of capitalist society. So they have been able to verify in practice that behind the self-management mask lurks the trap of isolation laid by the unions. There are numerous examples: the watchmaker Lip in France in 1973, Quaregnon and Salik in Belgium in 1978-79, Triumph in England in the same period and recently in the Welsh mining industry at Tower Colliery. The scenario is always the same: the threat of bankruptcy provokes workers’ struggle, the unions organise the isolation of the struggle and in the end manage to defeat it by inviting workers and management into buying out the factory, at the cost, if necessary, of redundancy pay or several months’ wages in order to increase the capital of the enterprise. In 1979, the Lip factory, which in the meantime had become a workers’ co-operative, went out of business under the pressure of its competitors. During the last general assembly, a worker gave vent to his rage and despair at the union representatives, who had become the real bosses of the factory: “You’re vile! Now it’s you who chuck us out the door... You lied to us! “[14] [31] The slogan of self-management serves to get workers to accept the sacrifices imposed by the economic crisis and strangle at birth their struggle to resist them.

This principle is entirely in accordance with marxism. We should point out that we are not the first to use the idea of the self-exploitation of the workers. This is what Rosa Luxemburg wrote in 1898: “But in capitalist economy exchange dominates production (...) As a result of competition, the complete domination of the process of production by the interests of capital – that is, pitiless exploitation – becomes a condition for the survival of each enterprise. The domination of capital over the process of production expresses itself in the following ways. Labour is intensified. The work day is lengthened or shortened, according to the situation of the market. And, depending on the requirements of the market, labour is either employed or thrown back into the street. In other words, use is made of all methods that enable an enterprise to stand up against its competitors in the market. The workers forming a co-operative in the field of production are thus faced with the contradictory necessity of governing themselves with the utmost absolutism. They are obliged to take to themselves the role of capitalist entrepreneur – a contradiction that accounts for the usual failure of production co-operatives which either become pure capitalist enterprises or, if the workers’ interests continue to predominate, end by dissolving.”[15] [32]

It is because the workers “take to themselves the role of capitalist entrepreneur” that we call it self-exploitation. Your defence of self-management is based on the experience of the workers’ co-operatives in the 19th century and you quote in particular the “Resolution on the work of the co-operatives” adopted at the first congress of the IWA. In fact, on several occasions Marx and Engels encouraged the co-operative movement, essentially the co-operatives of production. This was not so much for their practical results but rather because they confirmed the idea that the workers were perfectly able to do without the capitalists. This is why they were keen to stress their limits and the permanent risk of their coming more or less directly under the control of the bourgeoisie. They were concerned to prevent the co-operatives from diverting the workers from the revolutionary perspective, from the need for them to seize power over the whole of society. This resolution stipulates:

“a) We recognise the co-operative movement as one of the forces for transformation in the present society, which is founded on class antagonisms. Its great merit is that it shows practically that the present system of the subordination of labour to capital, which is despotic and creates pauperisation, can be supplanted by the republican system of association between free and equal producers.

b) But the co-operative system is limited to minute examples coming out of the individual efforts of wage slaves. It is powerless in itself to transform capitalist society. In order to transform social production into a large and harmonious system of co-operative labour, general change is indispensable. Such change will never be obtained without the organised force of society. Therefore, state power must be torn from the hands of the capitalists and landed property owners and wielded by the producers themselves.”[16] [33]

You quote the first part of this passage but not the second, which offers an essential clarification and which reflects much more faithfully Marx’s real thinking. We know that Marx had to form the First International from various confused socialist schools, which he hoped to help evolve. Through the development of its consciousness the workers’ movement rid itself of “doctrinaire recipes” and Marx actively contributed to this. The co-operative associations belonged to this type of doctrine and tended to take the place of the class struggle, of workers’ protection, of the union struggle and even of the overthrow of capitalist society. For Marx it was indispensable that the working class rises to the level of a theoretical understanding of what it must do in practice. For this reason the formula, “ a large and harmonious system of co-operative labour” undoubtedly means communist society and not a federation of workers’ co-operatives.

For you the first part of the resolution means that the struggle for reforms is not in contradiction with the overthrow of capitalism, that it is in fact complimentary. But it could be so only in the period in which capitalism was progressive, when the bourgeoisie could still play a revolutionary role in relation to the vestiges of feudalism. This was the period in which the workers could participate in parliamentary and union struggles for the recognition of democratic rights, for the realisation of significant social reforms in order to hasten the maturation of the conditions for the communist revolution. Today on the other hand we are in the midst of the period of capitalist decadence. With the outbreak of the First World War, with the emergence of a new capitalist period, that of imperialism, of decadence, reforms have become impossible. If we fail to take account of this historic evolution in a marxist way, we end up forgetting Lenin’s warning in The Proletarian revolution and the renegade Kautsky: “One of the most pernicious methods of opportunism is to reiterate a position that was valid in the past”.

You say that, according to Marx, “socialism is born out of the old and dying bourgeois society.” If we open the Communist Manifesto, for example, we find no such idea. In it Marx and Engels explain that the bourgeoisie gradually developed new relations of production within feudalism and that its political revolution completed the economic domination that it had already acquired. They showed that for the proletariat, the process is the opposite: “All the preceding classes that got the upper hand, sought to fortify their already acquired status by subjecting society at large to their conditions of appropriation. The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive forces of society, except by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation, and thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation. They have nothing of their own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous securities for, and insurances of, individual property.” (Manifesto of the Communist Party, “Bourgeois and Proletarians”). The political revolution of the proletariat is the indispensable condition for the emergence of new relations of production. What arises within bourgeois society are the conditions for socialism, not socialism itself.

The cruel laws of competition

To support your argument you develop the idea that “Decadence means economic stagnation, the flowering of delinquency, the increase of misery and unemployment. State power is weak and unstable (striking examples are the military empires of ancient Rome, which lasted only a few months). The class struggle becomes more acute. The most important thing, which you do not mention in your book, Decadence of Capitalism, is the appearance of new class relations within the old dying society. In the Roman Empire it was the colonists, the slaves used for agricultural work, serfs in essence. In the period of the destruction of bourgeois society it is self-managed enterprises, the co-operatives to be exact.” It is true that, in decadent capitalism, bourgeois society is marked by a high degree of instability. The bourgeoisie must confront unprecedented economic debility, it is ravaged by a crisis of over-production because there are not enough soluble markets at the international level. Imperialist rivalries intensify and erupt into world war. The bourgeoisie responds to this situation by strengthening the state. This is analogous to what happened with the decadence of the Roman Empire and with the absolutism of the monarchy in the case of feudalism. There is an increase of competition, the need for the intensification of the exploitation of the proletariat, the appearance of mass unemployment, a totalitarian state that reaches its tentacles into all aspects of civil society (and not a “weak and unstable” state). This is precisely what makes it impossible for workers co-operatives to survive today.

We completely agree with you that it is “the Left Communists who are right on this question (state capitalism) and not Lenin.” They understood intuitively that capitalism was strengthening in Russia even in the absence of a private bourgeoisie and that the power of the working class was in danger. In fact, under the pressure of the isolation of the revolution, the workers councils lost power to the state, with which the Bolshevik party had identified itself completely. But we do not at all agree with the remedies proposed by Kollontai’s Workers’ Opposition. Demanding that the management of the factories and the exchange of goods should be given into the hands of the workers of each factory would only have exacerbated the problem and made it even more complicated. Not only would the workers have obtained no more than symbolic power but they would also have lost their class unity, that had been so magnificently realised when the workers’ councils arose. They would also have lost the influence of a real vanguard party in their midst, the Bolshevik party.

On the contrary, you think that “It is much easier and more comfortable for the workers to control production at the level of the factories. (...) After October 1917 the economy was managed in a centralised way. Finally socialism degenerated into state capitalism against the will of the Bolsheviks. (...) So, under socialism, the workers’ councils will not have the job of managing the economy, they will not plan either the production or the distribution of goods. If these tasks are given to the workers’ councils, socialism will inevitably develop towards state capitalism.” For our part, we are convinced that centralisation is fundamental for workers’ power. If you remove the centralisation of socialism, you get the autonomous communities of the anarchists and a regression of the productive forces. What happened in Russia is that a centralised force, the state, supplanted another centralised force, the workers’ councils. Where did the bureaucracy and then the Stalinist bourgeoisie come from? It came from the state, not from the workers’ councils, which themselves underwent a process of decline that led to their death. It was not centralisation that led to the degeneration of the Russian revolution. If the workers’ councils were weakened at this point, if the Bolsheviks allowed themselves to become embroiled in the state, it is because the revolution was isolated. The machine guns that cut down the German proletariat also overcame the Russian proletariat, as if by ricochet. It was not long before the latter became no more than a wounded giant, weakened and bled dry. This confirms an important lesson of the Russian revolution: socialism is impossible in one country!

In conclusion, we will return to your conception of the self-management of factories under capitalism.[17] [34]

In these co-operatives the workers decide on the division of the profits collectively. Wages no longer exist, “the workers receive the use value and not the exchange value of their labour power” To start with, we think that there is a confusion here between “exchange value” and “use value”. The latter expresses the usefulness of what is produced, the use that can be made of it. One of the fundamental specificities of the productive process operated by the modern proletariat, in comparison with other historical periods, is that the use values it produces can only be appropriated by society as a whole. Unlike the shoes, for example, produced by the artisan cobbler the hundreds of thousands of microchips produced by the workers of Intel or AMD have no “use value” in themselves. They have use value only as parts of other machines produced by other workers in other factories and which themselves are part of the production chain of still other factories. This is also true of the modern “cobblers”: the workers of Jinjiang in China, who produce 700,000 shoes per year. It is hard to imagine that they could wear all of them! By the same token, it is difficult to imagine one self-managed factory paying the workers in combine-harvesters, which are by definition indivisible, and another one in ball-point pens.

However, let’s suppose that, as you said, the workers do receive the equivalent of the variable capital and the surplus value produced. They still cannot consume the entire profit of the factory but only a relatively small part. The rest must be transformed into new means of production. The laws of competition (and we are in a competitive situation) are such that every business must expand and increase its productivity if it does not want to go under. So part of the profit is accumulated and converted into capital. Of necessity, the proportion will be more or less the same as in a factory that is not self-managed. Otherwise the self-managed business would not expand as fast as the others and would go under in the end. The cost price of the self-managed factory would have to be at least no higher than those of the rest of the capitalist economy. Otherwise it would not find buyers for its goods. This inevitably means that the workers of self-managed factories would have to align their wages and their work rhythm with those of the workers employed in capitalist enterprises. In other words, they would have to exploit themselves.

Moreover, we find ourselves in the same conditions of exploitation as in all the other enterprises because the workforce is still under submission, alienated from dead labour, from accumulated labour, from capital. At most they can take back that fraction of the profit that in traditional capitalist enterprises is set aside for the personal consumption of the boss or which constitutes the dividends of the shareholders. The workers who rejoiced at having obtained a supplement to their wages would soon change their tune. The bosses that they elected in all confidence would quickly convince them to hand back this supplement and even to agree to wage reductions.

“But the transformation, either into joint-stock companies, or into state ownership, (or the transformation into self-managed enterprises, we could add) does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces”, Engels says in Anti-Dühring. Changing the legal status of an enterprise in no way changes its capitalist nature. This is because capital is not a form of property; it is a social relationship. Only the political revolution of the proletariat can eliminate capital by giving a new orientation to social production. It cannot do this by going backwards in terms of the level of international socialisation attained under capitalism. On the contrary, it must complete this socialisation by breaking through the national framework, the factory framework and the division of labour. Then the slogan of the Communist Manifesto will take on the full force of its meaning: “Workers of the world unite!”.

We await your reply. Accept our fraternal and communist greetings.

ICC, 22nd November 2005

In the first part of this summary of the second volume (International Review 125) we looked at how the communist programme was enriched by the huge advances made by the working class movement during the world-wide revolutionary upsurge provoked by the First World War. In this second part, we consider how revolutionaries struggled to understand the retreat and defeat of the revolutionary wave, while showing that this too was a source of invaluable lessons for the revolutions of the future. 

1. 1918: the revolution criticises its mistakes - (International Review n°99)

If the Russian revolution was, in Rosa Luxemburg’s words, “the very first experiment in proletarian dictatorship in world history” (The Russian Revolution), then it follows that any attempt to illuminate the path that a future revolution must follow must draw on the lessons of that experiment. Since the proletarian movement can only be harmed by any attempt to run away from reality, the effort to understand these lessons go back to the very earliest days of the revolution itself, even if it took many years of painful experience and equally painful reflection to fully understand the legacy that that the Russian revolution has left us.

The model for analysing the mistakes of the revolution is provided by Rosa Luxemburg’s pamphlet The Russian Revolution, written from prison in 1918. Luxemburg’s starting point is one of fundamental solidarity with the soviet power and the Bolshevik party, recognising that the difficulties they faced were first and foremost the result of the isolation of the Russian fortress, and could only be overcome if the world – and especially the German – proletariat assumed its responsibilities and carried out history’s execution order on capitalism.

Within this framework Luxemburg criticises the Bolsheviks on three counts:

• the land question. While recognising that the Bolshevik slogan of “land to the peasant” had been tactically necessary to win the peasant masses to the cause of the revolution, Rosa felt that the Bolsheviks were piling up difficulties against themselves by formalising the parcelling out of the land. But while Luxemburg correctly foresaw that this process would eventually create a conservative stratum of small landowners, it was also the case that the collectivisation of the land was in itself no guarantee of a march towards socialism if the revolution remained isolated;
• on the national question, Luxemburg’s criticisms of the slogan of national self-determination (which were echoed by certain elements within the Bolshevik party, such as Piatakov) were amply confirmed by experience. In reality “national self-determination” can only mean “self-determination” for the bourgeoisie; but in the epoch of imperialism and proletarian revolution, the countries (ie the bourgeoisies) granted “national independence” by the soviet power everywhere took the decision to subordinate themselves to the great imperialist powers against the Russian revolution. The proletariat could not ignore the national sensitivities of workers in “oppressed” nations, but they could only be won to the revolutionary cause by appealing to their class needs, not to their nationalist illusions;
• on “democracy” and “dictatorship”, there are profoundly contradictory elements in Luxemburg’s views. On the one hand, she saw the Bolsheviks’ suppression of the Constituent Assembly as negative for the life of the revolution, revealing a curious nostalgia for the outmoded forms of bourgeois democracy. On the other hand, the Spartacus programme written shortly afterwards called for the replacement of the old parliamentary assemblies by congresses of workers’ councils, which indicates that Luxemburg’s views on this point had evolved quite rapidly. But Luxemburg’s criticisms of the Bolsheviks’ tendency to clamp down on free speech within the worker’s movement was well-founded: the measures taken against other working class groups and parties, and the transformation of the soviets into rubber stamps for the Bolshevik party-state, were indeed negative for the survival and integrity of the proletarian dictatorship.

Within Russia itself, the first reactions against the danger of the party going off course also date to 1918, and their principal focus (at least from within the current of revolutionary marxism) was the Left Communist tendency in the Bolshevik party.  This tendency is principally remembered for its opposition to the Brest-Litovsk treaty, which it feared would result in surrendering not only land but the principles of the revolution itself. In fact, at the level of principle, there is no comparison between Brest Litovsk and the Rapallo treaty only four years later: the first was conducted openly, with no attempt to hide its brutal consequences; the latter was drawn up in secret and involved a de facto alliance between German imperialism and the soviet state. On the other hand, the position put forward by Bukharin and other Left Communists in favour of a “revolutionary war” was, as Bilan later pointed out, founded on a serious confusion: the notion that the revolution could be extended primarily through military means in one form or another, whereas in fact it can only win the workers of the world to its banners through essentially political means (such as the formation of the Communist International in 1919).

More fruitful for understanding the lesson of the revolution were the first debates on state capitalism between Lenin and the Lefts. Lenin had argued for accepting German peace terms on the grounds that the soviet power needed a “breathing space” in which to reconstruct the minimum of social and economic life. The disagreements arose around two issues:

• the methods used in this process. Lenin, preoccupied by the fight for productivity and efficiency against the enormous weight of Russian backwardness, advocated stern measures such as the adoption of the Taylor system and one-man management in the factories, while the Lefts insisted that such methods could be harmful to the self-education and self-activity of the proletariat. Similar debates raged about the degree to which the principles of the Commune could be applied in the Red Army;
• the danger of state capitalism. For Lenin, precisely because of the fragmented and semi-mediaeval state of the Russian economy, state capitalism was a step forward. This was in line with his view that the huge strides taken by state capitalism in the developed countries during the war had been in some sense a preparation for the socialist transformation. The Lefts, on the other hand, tended to see state capitalism as an imminent threat to the power of the soviets, and warned of the danger of the party getting caught up in the process of bureaucratic state control, and eventually of opposing itself to the interests of the proletariat.

The Lefts’ critique of state capitalism was certainly embryonic and contained many confusions: it tended to see the main danger emanating from the petty bourgeoisie and were less clear that the state bureaucracy itself could take on the role of a new bourgeoisie; they also harboured illusions in the possibility of authentic socialist transformations within the confines of Russia. But Lenin was mistaken to see state capitalism as anything but the negation of communism; and in ringing the alarm bells about its development in Russia, the Lefts were proved to have been prophetic.                  

2. “1921: The proletariat and the transitional state” - (International Review n°100)

Despite the important differences within the Bolshevik party about the direction the revolution was taking, and in particular about the direction being followed by the soviet state, the necessity for unity faced with the immediate threat of the counter-revolution tended to keep these divergences within certain bounds. The same can be said for the tensions within Russian society as a whole: despite the frightful conditions endured by the workers and peasants during the civil war period, the nascent conflict between their material interests and the political and economic demands of the new state machine were kept in check through the struggle against the Whites. With victory in the civil war, however, the lid was off. And with the continuing isolation of the revolution due to a series of crucial defeats for the proletariat in Europe, this conflict now came to the fore as a central contradiction of the “transitional” regime.

Within the party, the fundamental problems facing the revolution were mediated through the debate on the trade union question, which came to a head at the 10th Congress of the Party, in March 1921. This debate was conducted through essentially three different positions, although there were many shades of opinion between and around them:

• the position of Trotsky. Having led the Red Army to victory against the Whites, often in the face of overwhelming odds, Trotsky had now become an avid partisan of military methods, and wanted them to be applied in all spheres of society, particularly in the field of labour. Since the state applying these methods was now a “workers” state”, he argued that there could be no conflict of interests between the working class and the demands of this state. He even went so far as to theorise about the historically progressive possibilities of forced labour. In this context, he recommended that the trade unions should operate openly as organs of labour discipline on behalf of the workers’ state. At the same time, Trotsky began to develop an explicit theoretical justification for the notion of the dictatorship of the communist party, and for the Red Terror;
• the position of the Workers’ Opposition around Kollontai, Shliapnikov and others. For Kollontai, the soviet state had a heterogeneous character, and was highly vulnerable to the influence of non-proletarian forces such as the bureaucrats and the peasantry. It was thus necessary for the creative work involved in the reconstruction of the Russian economy to be led by specific class organs of the workers, which for the Workers’ Opposition meant the industrial unions. Through the industrial unions, it felt, the working class could maintain control of production and make decisive strides towards communism. This current expressed a proletarian reaction to the growing bureaucratisation of the soviet state, but it also suffered from serious weaknesses: its advocacy of industrial unions as the best expression of working class interests signified a regression in understanding about the role of the workers’ soviets, which had emerged in the new revolutionary epoch as the proletariat’s instruments for managing not only economic but also political life. And at the same time, the Opposition’s illusions in the possibility of building new communist relations in Russia profoundly underestimated the negative effects of the isolation of the revolution, which was almost complete in 1921;
• the position of Lenin: Lenin was firmly opposed to the excesses of Trotsky in this debate. He argued against the sophism that since the state was a workers’ state, there could be no divergence of interest between it and the working class on the immediate level. In fact, Lenin reasoned at one point that the soviet state was really a “workers and peasants” state”; but in any case, it was a state with a very marked bureaucratic deformation, and in such a situation, the working class would still need to defend its material interests, if necessary against the state. The trade unions should therefore not be seen merely as organs of labour discipline, but should be able to act as organs of proletarian self-defence. At the same time Lenin rejected the position of the Workers’ Opposition as a concession to anarcho-syndicalism.

With the benefit of hindsight, it is obvious that there were deep flaws in the premises of this debate. To begin with, it was not accidental that the trade unions had lent themselves so readily to becoming organs of labour discipline for the state: that was a direction dictated by the new conditions of decadent capitalism. It was not the trade unions, but the organs created by the class in response to this new period – factory committees, councils, etc – which had the task of defending the autonomy of the working class. And at the same time, all the currents engaged in the debate were wedded to a greater or lesser extent to the idea that the dictatorship of the proletariat should be exercised by the communist party.

Nevertheless, the debate expressed an attempt to understand, in a situation of immense confusion, the problem posed when the state power created by the revolution begins to escape the control of the proletariat and turn against its needs. This problem was to be highlighted even more dramatically by the Kronstadt revolt, which broke out in the middle of the 10th Congress in the wake of a series of workers’ strikes in Petrograd. 

The Bolshevik leadership initially denounced the rebellion as a pure conspiracy of the White Guards; later, the emphasis was on its petty bourgeois character, but the crushing of the revolt was still justified on the grounds that it would have opened the doors, both geographically and politically, to the open counter-revolution. Even so, Lenin in particular was compelled to see that the revolt was a warning that the forced-labour methods of the War Communism phase could not continue and that there would have to be some “normalisation” of capitalist social relations. But there was no compromise on the notion that the sole defence of proletarian power in Russia was the exclusive rule of the Bolshevik party. This view was shared by many of the Russian left communists: at the 10th Congress, members of the opposition groups were among the first to volunteer for the assault on the Kronstadt garrison. Even the KAPD in Germany denied that it supported the rebels. With an equally heavy heart, Victor Serge defended the suppression of the revolt as a lesser evil than the fall of the Bolsheviks and the rise of a new White tyranny.

But there were many voices of dissent within the revolutionary camp. The anarchists of course, who had already made many correct criticisms of the excesses of the Cheka and the suppression of working class organisations. But anarchism offers little in the way of lessons about such an experience, since for them the Bolsheviks’ response to the revolt was inscribed from the beginning in the nature of any marxist party.

But within Kronstadt itself, many Bolsheviks joined the revolt on the basis of supporting the original ideals of October 1917: for soviet power and the world revolution. The left communist Miasnikov refused to join those who had participated in the attack on the garrison and glimpsed the catastrophic results that would flow from the smashing of a workers’ revolt by the “workers” state. At the time, these were only glimpses: it was not until the 1930s and the work of the Italian communist left that the clearest lessons were drawn. Unambiguously identifying the revolt as proletarian in character, the Italian left argued that relations of violence within the proletarian camp had to be rejected on principle; that the working class must retain the means of self-defence in the face of the transitional state, which by its nature runs the risk of becoming a point of attraction to the forces of the counter-revolution; and that the communist party could not become entangled with the state machine but must guard its independence from it. Placing principles above the appearance of expediency, the Italian left was prepared to say that it would have been better to have lost Kronstadt than to have retained power at the cost of undermining the fundamental goals of the revolution.

In 1921 the party was faced with an historic dilemma: retain power and become an agent of the counter-revolution, or go into opposition and militate within the ranks of the working class. In practise the fusion between party and state was already too advanced for the whole party to have taken this road; what was posed in more concrete terms was the work of the left fractions, operating inside or outside the party to counter its slide into degeneration. The banning of fractions within the party after the 10th Congress meant that this work would increasingly have to be pursued outside and ultimately against the existing party.    

3. “1922-3: The communist fractions against the rising counter-revolution” - (International Review n°101)

The concessions to the peasantry – for Lenin, an unavoidable necessity illuminated by the Kronstadt uprising – were encapsulated in the New Economic Policy, seen as a temporary retreat that would enable a war-ravaged proletarian power to reconstruct its shattered economy and thus maintain itself as a bastion of the world revolution. In practice, however, the search to break the isolation of the soviet state led to fundamental concessions on matters of principle: not merely trade with capitalist powers, which in itself was not a breach of principles, but also secret military alliances with them, as in the Rapallo treaty with Germany. And such military alliances were accompanied by unnatural political alliances with the forces of social democracy, formerly denounced as the left wing of the bourgeoisie. This was the policy of the “United Front” adopted at the Third Congress of the Communist International. 

Within Russia, Lenin in 1918 had already claimed that state capitalism was a step forward for such a backward country; in 1922, he continued to argue that state capitalism could be made to work for the proletariat as long as it was directed by the “proletarian state”, which increasingly meant the proletarian party.  And yet at the same time he was forced to admit that, far from directing the state inherited from the revolution, the state was more and more directing them – not towards the horizon they wanted to reach, but towards a bourgeois restoration.

Lenin quickly saw that the communist party was itself being deeply affected by this process of involution. At first he located the problem primarily in the lower strata of uncultured bureaucrats who had begun to flock towards the party. But in his last years he grew painfully aware that the rot had reached the highest echelons of the party: as Trotsky pointed out, Lenin’s last struggle was focused essentially against Stalin and emergent Stalinism. But trapped within the prison of the state, Lenin was unable to offer more than administrative measures to counter this bureaucratic tide. Had he lived longer, he would surely have been pushed further towards an oppositional stance, but now the struggle against the rising counter-revolution had to pass to other hands.

In 1923, the first economic crisis of the NEP broke out. For the working class, this crisis brought wage cuts and job cuts and a wave of spontaneous strikes. Within the party, it provoked conflict and debate, giving rise to new oppositional groupings. The first explicit expression of the latter was the Platform of the 46, involving figures close to Trotsky (now increasingly ostracised by the ruling triumvirate of Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev) and elements from the Democratic Centralism group. The Platform criticised the tendency for the NEP to be seen as the royal road to socialism, calling for more rather than less central planning. More importantly, it warned against the increasing stifling of the party’s internal life.

At the same time the Platform distanced itself from the more radical oppositional groups which were emerging at the time, the most important of which was Miasnikov’s Workers’ Group, which had some presence within the strike movements in the industrial centres. Labelled as an understandable but “morbid” reaction to the rise of bureaucratism, the Manifesto of the Workers Group was in fact an expression of the seriousness of the Russian communist left:

• it clearly located the difficulties facing the soviet regime in its isolation and the failure of the revolution to spread;
• it made a lucid critique of the opportunist policy of the United Front, reaffirming the original analysis of the social democratic parties as parties of capitalism;
• it warned against the danger of the emergence of a new capitalist oligarchy and called for the reinvigoration of the soviets and factory committees;
• at the same time it was extremely cautious in its characterisation of the soviet regime and of the Bolshevik party. Unlike Bogdanov’s Workers Truth group, it had no truck with the idea that the revolution or the Bolshevik party had been bourgeois from the beginning. It saw its task as essentially that of a left fraction, working inside and outside the party for its regeneration.

The left communists were thus the theoretical avant-garde in the struggle against the counter-revolution in Russia. The fact that Trotsky had, by 1923, adopted an openly oppositional stance was of considerable importance given his reputation as a leader of the October insurrection. But compared to the intransigent positions of the Workers Group, Trotsky’s opposition to Stalinism was marked by its hesitant, centrist approach:

Trotsky missed a number of opportunities to lead an overt fight against Stalinism, in particular through his reluctance to use Lenin’s “Testament” to expose Stalin and remove him from the leadership of the party;

he tended to lapse into silence during many of the debates within the Bolshevik central organ.

These failings were partly due to questions of character: Trotsky was not an accomplished intriguer like Stalin and lacked his overwhelming personal ambition. But there were more fundamental political motivations behind Trotsky’s inability to take his criticisms to the radical conclusions reached by the communist left:

Trotsky was never able to understand that Stalin and his faction did not represent a mistaken, centrist tendency within the proletarian camp, but was the spearhead of a bourgeois counter-revolution;         

Trotsky’s own history as a figure at the very centre of the soviet regime made it extremely difficult for him to detach himself from the process of degeneration. An ingrained “patriotism of the party” made it extremely difficult for Trotsky and other oppositionists to fully accept that the party could be wrong.         

4. “1924-28: the triumph of Stalinist state capitalism” (International Review n°102)

By 1927 Trotsky had accepted that there was a danger of bourgeois restoration in Russia – a kind of creeping counter-revolution without a formal overthrow of the Bolshevik regime. But he largely underestimated the degree to which this process was already all but complete:

• because it was hard for him to understand that he himself had already contributed a great deal to the process of degeneration (through such policies as the militarisation of labour, the suppression of Kronstadt, etc);
• because, while understanding that the problems facing the USSR were a product of isolation and the retreat in the international revolution, Trotsky was not able to see the scale of the defeat that had descended on the working class; most important, he was unable to recognise that the USSR had already begun to integrate itself into the world imperialist system;

Trotsky believed that “Thermidor” would come about through the victory of those forces pushing for a return to private ownership (NEPmen, kulaks, the Bukharinist right). Stalinism was defined as a form of centrism, not as the spearhead of a state capitalist counter-revolution.

The economic theories of the left opposition around Trotsky made it extremely difficult to understand that the “soviet state” itself was becoming the direct agent of the counter-revolution, without any return to classical “private” ownership. The significance of Stalin’s declaration of socialism in one country was grasped late, and never in sufficient depth. Emboldened by the death of Lenin and the obvious stagnation of the world revolution, Stalin’s proclamation was an open break with internationalism and a commitment to building Russia into a world imperialist power. This was in complete contrast with the Bolshevism of 1917, which had insisted that socialism could only be the fruit of a victorious world revolution. But the more the Bolsheviks became tangled up in the management of the state and the economy in Russia, the more they began to theorise about the steps towards socialism that they could accomplish even in the context of an isolated and backward country. The debate over the NEP, for example, was largely posed in these terms, with the right arguing that socialism could come through the operation of market forces, and the left insisting on the role of planning and heavy industry. Preobrazhinsky, the main economic theorist of the left opposition, talked about overcoming the capitalist law of value through a monopoly of foreign trade and accumulation in the state sector: this was even termed “primitive socialist accumulation”.

The theory of primitive socialist accumulation falsely identified the growth of industry with the interests of the working class and socialism. In reality, industrial growth in Russia could only come about through the increasing exploitation of the working class. In short, primitive socialist accumulation could only mean the accumulation of capital. This is why the Italian left, for example, warned against any tendency to see industrial growth, or the development of statified industries, as a measure of progress towards socialism.

In fact, the struggle against the theory of socialism in one country was initiated by the Zinovievites after the break up of the ruling triumvirate. This led to the formation of the United Opposition in 1926, which originally included the Democratic Centralists as well. Despite formally adhering to the ban on fractions, the new Opposition was increasingly compelled to take its criticisms of the regime to the lower ranks of the party and even to the workers directly. They were met with threats, abuse, trumped up charges, repression and expulsion. And yet they were still unable to grasp the nature of what they were fighting against. Stalin was able to exploit their desire for reconciliation within the party to force them to back down from any activity described as “fractionalist”. The Zinovievites and some of Trotskyists followers capitulated immediately; and in 1928, when Stalin announced his “left turn” and adopted a policy of rapid industrialisation, many of the Trotskyists, including Preobrazhinsky himself, thought that Stalin was at last adopting their policies.

At the same time, however, elements of the opposition were coming under the increasing influence of the left communists, who were better able to see that the counter-revolution had already arrived. The Democratic Centralists, for example, while still holding out hope for a radical reform of the soviet regime, were much clearer that state industry does not equal socialism; that the fusion of the party with the state was leading to the liquidation of the party; that the soviet regime’s foreign policy was increasingly opposed to the international interests of the working class. Following the mass expulsions of the opposition in 1927 the left communists more and more took the view that the regime and the party were beyond reform. The remaining elements of the Miasnikov group played a key role in this process of radicalisation. But over the next few years, these animated debates about the nature of the regime would be held above all in Stalin’s jails.            

5. “Unravelling the Russian enigma: 1926-36” - (International Review n°105)

Given the scale of the defeat in Russia, the focus for the effort to understand the nature of the Stalinist regime now shifted to Western Europe. As the Communist Parties were “Bolshevised” – i.e., transformed into pliable instruments of Russian foreign policy – a series of oppositional groups emerged within them, but either rapidly split or were excluded.

In Germany, these groupings sometimes comprised thousands of members, although their numbers shrank rapidly. The KAPD still existed and was carrying out consistent work towards these currents. One of the best known was the group around Karl Korsch; and the correspondence in 1926 between him and Bordiga in Italy illuminates many of the problems facing revolutionaries at the time.

One of the characteristics of the German left – and one of the factors which contributed to its organisational demise – was a tendency to draw hasty conclusions about the nature of the new system in Russia.  Able to see its capitalist nature, they were often incapable of answering the key question: how can a proletarian power turn into its own opposite? And very often the response was to deny that it had ever had a proletarian nature – to argue that the October revolution was no more than a bourgeois revolution and the Bolsheviks no more than a party of the intelligentsia.

Bordiga’s response typified the more patient method of the Italian left: opposing any attempt to build organisations in a hurry, without a sound programmatic base, Bordiga argued for the need for an extended and profound discussion about a situation which was throwing up many new questions. This was the only basis for any substantial regroupment. At the same time, he refused to budge on the proletarian character of the October revolution, insisting that the question confronting the revolutionary movement was to understand how a proletarian power isolated in one country could go through a process of inner degeneration.

With the victory of Nazism in Germany, the geographical focus of discussion once again changed – this time to France, where a number of oppositional groups held a conference in Paris in 1933 to discuss the nature of the regime in Russia. This included the “official” followers of Trotsky, but the majority of the groups were located further to the left, and included the exiled Italian left. The conference witnessed numerous theories about the nature of the regime, many of them self-contradictory: that it was a class system of a new type and should no longer be supported, that it was class system of a new type but should still be supported, that it remained a proletarian regime but should not be defended…All this was testimony to the immense difficulty revolutionaries faced in really understanding the direction and significance of events in the Soviet Union. But it also shows that the “orthodox” Trotskyist position – that despite its degeneration, the USSR remains a workers’ state and must be defended against imperialism – was under attack from numerous angles.

It was to a large extent because of these pressures from the left that Trotsky wrote his famous analysis of the Russian revolution in 1936, The Revolution Betrayed.

This book provides evidence that, although increasingly sliding into opportunism, Trotsky remained a marxist.  Thus, he eloquently lambastes the Stalinist claims about the USSR as a paradise for the workers, and, basing himself on Lenin’s statement that the transitional state is “a bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie”, provides valuable insights into the nature of this state and its incipient dangers for the proletariat. Trotsky had also by now concluded that the old Bolshevik party was dead and that the bureaucracy could no longer be reformed but must be forcefully overthrown. Nevertheless, the book is fundamentally flawed: arguing explicitly against the view that the USSR was a form of state capitalism, Trotsky sticks doggedly to the thesis that its nationalised property forms are proof of the proletarian character of the state. While theoretically conceding that there is a tendency towards state capitalism in the period of capitalist decline, he rejects the idea that the Stalinist bureaucracy could be a new ruling class simply because it owns no stocks and shares and cannot pass on property to its heirs, thus reducing capital to a juridical form rather seeing it as an essentially impersonal social relation.

As for the idea that the USSR could still be a workers’ state even though, by his own admission, the working class as such was entirely excluded from political power, this also revealed a profound misunderstanding of the nature of the proletarian revolution. This is the first revolution in history to be the work of a propertyless class, a class that cannot possess its own form of economy, and which can only achieve its emancipation through its ability to use political power as a lever to subject the “spontaneous” laws of the economy to conscious human control.

Most serious of all, Trotsky’s characterisation of the USSR condemned his movement to acting on the world stage as a radical apologist for Stalinism. This was evident in Trotsky’s argument that the rapid industrial growth under Stalin – based on the ferocious exploitation of the working class and part of the build-up of a war economy in preparation for a new imperialist redivision of the globe – proved the superiority of socialism over capitalism. It was evident above all in the Trotskyists’ unwavering defence of Russian foreign policy and the position of unconditional defence of the Soviet Union against imperialist attack – at a time when the Russian state itself had become an active player on the world imperialist arena. This analysis contains the seeds of this current’s final betrayal of internationalism during the Second World War.

Trotsky’s book did leave one door open to the idea that the question of the USSR had not been finally settled and that only decisive historical events such as world war could do so. In his last writings, perhaps aware of the fragility of his “workers’ state” theory, but still reluctant to accept the capitalist nature of the USSR, he began to speculate that, if Stalinism was shown to represent a new form of class society, neither capitalist nor socialist, then marxism would have been discredited. Trotsky himself was killed before he could pronounce on whether the war had indeed elucidated the “Russian enigma”. But only those among his former followers who discovered the trail blazed by the communist left and took up the state capitalist position (such as Stinas in Greece, Munis in Spain, and his own wife Natalia) were able to stay true to proletarian internationalism during and after the second world war.        

6. “The Russian Enigma and the Italian communist left 1933-46” - (International Review n°106)

The communist left found its most advanced expressions among those sections of the world proletariat who raised the greatest challenge to capitalism during the great revolutionary wave. Outside of Russia this was the German and Italian proletariat, and the German and Italian communist lefts were the theoretical avant-garde of the communist left everywhere else.

When it came to trying to understand the nature of the regime that had arisen in the ashes of defeat in Russia, the German left was often extremely precocious in the conclusions it drew. Not only was it able to see that the Stalinist system was a form of state capitalism, it also developed some keen insights into state capitalism as a universal tendency of capitalism in crisis. And yet all too often these insights were combined with a tendency to break solidarity with the October revolution and to declare Bolshevism as the spearhead of a bourgeois revolution – a view that fitted very well with a rush to abandon the very idea of a proletarian party and to profoundly underestimate the role of the revolutionary organisation.

The Italian left, by contrast, took a long time to come to a clear understanding of the nature of the USSR, but it approached the question with more patience and more rigour, beginning from certain fundamental premises:

• there could be no going back on their conviction that October had been a proletarian revolution;
• since world capitalism was a system in decline, the bourgeois revolution was no longer on the agenda in any of its component parts;
• there could above all be no compromise on the principle of proletarian internationalism, which meant a total rejection of the notion of socialism in one country.

And yet despite these solid foundations, the Italian left’s view of the nature of the USSR in the 1930s was extremely contradictory. On the surface, it shared with Trotsky the idea that since the USSR retained its nationalised property forms, it was still a proletarian state: the Stalinist bureaucracy was defined as a parasitic caste rather than an exploiting class in its own right.

But here the profound internationalism of the Italian left set it apart from the Trotskyists, whose position of defence of the degenerated workers’ state led it towards the maws of participation in imperialist war. The theoretical journal of the Italian left, Bilan, began publication in 1933. After some initial hesitations, the events of the ensuing few years (Hitler’s accession to power, support for French rearmament, adhesion to the League of Nations, the war in Spain) convinced it that even if the USSR remained a proletarian state, it was now playing a counter-revolutionary role on a world scale. Consequently the international interests of the working class demanded that revolutionaries refuse any solidarity with this state.

This analysis was linked to Bilan’s recognition that the proletariat had suffered a historic defeat and that the world was heading towards another imperialist war. Bilan predicted with chilling accuracy that the USSR would inevitably align itself with one or other of the blocs forming in preparation for this massacre, rejecting the Trotskyist view that, since the USSR was basically hostile to world capital, the imperialist powers would be forced to unite against it.

On the contrary, Bilan argued, despite the survival of “collectivised” property forms, the working class in the USSR was subject to a ruthless level of capitalist exploitation: the accelerated industrialisation baptised as the “building of socialism” was building no more than a war economy that would allow the USSR to play its part in the next imperialist carve-up. It thus totally rejected Trotsky’s hymns of praise to the industrialisation of the USSR.

Bilan was also aware that there was a growing tendency towards state capitalism in the western countries, whether it took the form of fascism or the democratic “New Deal”. And yet it hesitated to take the final step: to recognise that the Stalinist bureaucracy was indeed a state bourgeoisie, describing it as an “agent of world capital” rather than a new embodiment of the capitalist class

However, as the arguments in favour of the “proletarian state” more and more came into conflict with events in the real world, a minority of comrades in the Fraction began to put the whole theory into question. And it was no accident that this minority was the best equipped to survive the initial disarray that the outbreak of the war brought to the Fraction, which had been led into a blind alley by the revisionist theory of the “war economy”, which had predicted that the world war would not happen.

It had always been axiomatic that the Russian question would be solved one way or the other by the outbreak of the war; and for the clearest elements in the Italian left, the USSR’s participation in a predatory imperialist war provided the final proof. The most coherent arguments in favour of defining the USSR as imperialist and capitalist were developed by the comrades who carried on the work of Bilan in the French Fraction of the Communist Left, and after the war in the Gauche Communiste de France. Integrating some of the best insights of the German left, but without sliding into the councilist denigration of October, this current showed why state capitalism was the essential form adopted by the system in its epoch of decline. With regard to Russia, the last vestiges of a “juridical” definition of capitalism were jettisoned, reaffirming the fundamental marxist view that capital is a social relation which can just as well be administered by a centralised state as by a conglomeration of private capitalists.  And it drew from this the necessary conclusions about the proletarian approach to the transition period: that progress towards communism must be measured not in the growth of the state sector – which actually contains the greatest danger of a return to capitalism – but in the tendency for living labour to dominate dead labour, for the replacement of the production of surplus value by production geared towards the satisfaction of human need.  

7. “The debate on ‘proletarian culture’ in revolutionary Russia” - (International Review n°109)

Against the increasingly superficial approaches to the problem of culture in bourgeois thought, which tend to reduce culture to the most immediate expressions of particular countries or ethnic groups, or even to the status of passing social fashions, marxism situates the question in its broadest and deepest historical context: in the fundamental characteristics of humanity and its emergence from the rest of nature, and within the great cycles of successive modes of production that make up human history.

The proletarian revolution in Russia, so rich in lessons regarding the political and economic goals of the working class, was also accompanied by a brief but powerful explosion of creativity in the sphere of art and culture – in painting, sculpture, architecture, music and literature; in the practical organisation of daily life along more communal lines; in the human sciences such as psychology, and so on. At the same time it posed the general question of mankind’s transition from bourgeois culture to a higher, communist culture.

One of the key issues at debate amongst the Russian revolutionaries was whether this transition would see the development of a specifically proletarian culture. Since previous cultures had been intimately linked to the world-outlook of the ruling class, it seemed to some that the proletariat too, once it had become the ruling class, would construct its own culture opposed to that of the old exploiting class. This was certainly the view of the Proletkult movement which developed a considerable following in the early years of the revolution.

In a resolution submitted to the Proletkult Congress of 1920, Lenin himself seemed to accept this idea of a specifically proletarian culture. At the same time, he criticised certain aspects of the Proletkult movement: its philistine “workerism”, which resulted in glorifying the working class as it is rather than seeing what it must become, and in an iconoclastic rejection of the previous cultural acquisitions of humanity. Lenin was also wary of Proletkult’s tendency to set itself up as a separate party with its own organisational apparatus and programme. Lenin’s resolution thus recommends that the orientation of cultural work in the Soviet regime should be under the direct aegis of the state. However, Lenin’s main interest in the cultural question lay elsewhere. For him, the question of culture was bound up less with the grandiose issue of whether there could be a new proletarian culture in Soviet Russia than with the problem of overcoming the immense cultural backwardness of the Russian masses, where mediaeval custom and superstition still exerted a powerful influence. In particular, Lenin saw the low cultural development of the masses as a breeding ground for the development of the scourge of bureaucracy in the Soviet state. Raising the cultural level of the masses was, for him, a means to combat this scourge and increase the capacity of the masses to maintain political power.

Trotsky, on the other hand, developed a more thorough-going critique of the Proletkult movement. In his view – expounded in a chapter of his book Literature and Revolution – the term proletarian culture itself was a misnomer. The bourgeoisie, as an exploiting class which was able to develop its economic power for a whole period within the framework of the old feudal system, could also develop its own specific culture. This is not the case for the proletariat, which as an exploited class does not have the material basis to develop its own culture within capitalist society. It is true that the proletariat must constitute itself as a ruling class during the transition period to communism, but this is only a temporary political dictatorship, the ultimate aim of which is not to indefinitely preserve the proletariat but to dissolve it into a new human community. The culture of this new community will be the first truly human culture, integrating into itself all the prior cultural advances made by the human species.

Literature and Revolution was written in 1924, and it was in effect an element in Trotsky’s struggle against the rise of Stalinism. Although in its early years Proletkult’s advocacy of proletarian self-initiative had often made it a rallying point for leftwing groups opposing the development of the Soviet bureaucracy, later on its heirs tended to identify with the ideology of socialism in one country, which seemed consistent with the idea that a “new” culture was already being built in the Soviet Union. Trotsky’s writings on culture exposed the hollowness of such claims and also vigorously opposed the transformation of art into state propaganda, advocating an “anarchist” policy in the cultural sphere, which could not be dictated to, either by the party or the state.    

8. “Trotsky and the culture of communism” - (International Review n°111)

Trotsky’s view of the communist culture of the future was contained in the last chapter of Literature and Revolution. Trotsky begins by reiterating his opposition to the term “proletarian culture” to describe the relationship between art and the working class during the period of transition to communism. Instead he offers the distinction between revolutionary art and socialist art. The first is defined essentially by its opposition to existing society; Trotsky even considers that it will tend to be marked by “a spirit of social hatred”. He also posed the question of what “school” of art would be most attuned to a period of revolution, and used the term “realism” to describe it. But this did not mean, for Trotsky, the mind-numbing subordination of art to state propaganda associated with the Stalinist school of “Socialist Realism”. Nor did it mean that Trotsky was blind to the possibility of incorporating the acquisitions of forms of art which were not directly linked to the revolutionary movement, or were even characterised by a desperate flight from reality.

Socialist art, for Trotsky, would be imbued with the higher and more positive emotions that will flourish in a society founded upon solidarity. At the same time Trotsky rejects the idea that, in a society which has abolished class divisions and other sources of oppression and anxiety, art would tend to become sterile. On the contrary, it will tend to suffuse all aspects of daily life with a creative and harmonious energy. And since human beings in a communist society will still be faced with the fundamental questions of human life – above all, love and death – there will still be room for the tragic dimension of art. Here Trotsky is fully in accord with Marx’s approach to art in the Grundrisse, where he explains why the art of previous human epochs does not lose its charm for us; it is because art cannot be reduced to the political aspect of human life, or even to the social relations of a particular epoch of history, but connects to the fundamental needs and aspirations of our human nature.

Nor would the art of the future become monolithic. On the contrary, Trotsky envisages the formation of “parties” arguing for or against particular artistic approaches or projects, in other words, a lively and continual debate amongst the freely-associated producers.

In this society of the future then, art will be integrated into the production of goods, into the building of cities and the shaping of the landscape. No longer the domain of a minority of specialists, it will become part of what Bordiga called “a plan for living for the human species”; it will express man’s capacity to build a world “in accordance with the laws of beauty”, as Marx put it.

In shaping the landscape around him, the man of the future will not be seeking to restore a lost rural idyll. The communist future will be founded upon the most advanced discoveries of science and technology. So too, the city rather than the village will remain the nodal unit of the future. But Trotsky does not turn his back on the marxist vision of new harmony between town and country, and thus of an end to the gargantuan, overcrowded mega-city which has become such a destructive reality in decadent capitalism. This is evident, for example, in Trotsky’s idea that the tiger and the wild forest will be protected and left in peace by future generations.

Finally, Trotsky dared to paint a picture of the human inhabitants of this far communist future. This will be a humanity which is no longer dominated by blind natural and social forces. A humanity no longer ruled by the fear of death, and thus able to give full expression to the instincts for life. The men and women of that future will move with grace and precision, following the laws of beauty in “work, walk and play”.  Their average type will “rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx”.  Even more can be said: in mapping and mastering the depths of the unconscious mind, mankind not only becomes fully human, but also, in a sense, evolves into a new species: “Man will make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness, to make them transparent, to extend the wires of his will into hidden recesses, and thereby to raise himself to a new plane, to create a higher social/ biological type; or, if you prefer, the Surhomme, man beyond man”.

This is certainly one of the boldest ever attempts by a communist revolutionary to describe his vision of man’s possible destiny. Since it firmly based itself on mankind’s real potential, and on the world proletarian revolution as its indispensable precondition, it cannot be dismissed as a regression to utopian socialism; but at the same time it succeeds in planting the most inspired speculations of the old utopians on a more solid ground. This is communism as a sphere of unlimited possibility.        

CDW