IR106, 3rd Quarter 2001
We are publishing below the second part of the correspondence begun in the previous issue of the Review [1], sent to us by one of our contacts in disagreement with our position on the economic explanation for capitalism’s decadence.
Following the letter, we publish the second part of our reply begun in the previous issue, and which is concerned above all with the method for coming to grips with this debate. In fact, we do not deal directly with the questions and criticisms that the comrade addresses to us. We will return to this in a future article, in particular to respond on the question of the post-war reconstruction during the 1950s and 60s. This cannot be explained purely by the devalorisation of constant capital and the increase in variable capital’s share in the organic composition of capital, despite what the comrade and the CWO (Communist Workers Organisation) may think. We agree that this is an important question to discuss and to clarify.
We will also return to the comrade’s view of our vision of the “economic interest” of imperialist war. We are far from rejecting the existence of an economic factor in imperialist wars during capitalist decadence. The question is: at what level does this factor operate? At the immediate level of the conquest of territories and markets, or in more general and historical terms? Above all, what is its role in exacerbating and unleashing imperialist antagonisms? And what is the determining factor in the dynamic of these rivalries? To be more concrete, why is it for example that imperialist and economic rivalries did not match during the period between 1945 and 1989 when the US imperialist bloc – which regrouped the world’s main economic powers and rivals – confronted the Russian imperialist bloc?
Apart from their theoretical aspects, the answers to these questions determine different analyses of the concrete situation, different approaches, and above all different interventions by revolutionaries, as we saw during the wars in Chechnya and Kosovo. Hence the importance of these debates that we present for discussion and criticism.
How Marx’s falling rate of profit analysis explains the reconstruction period was convincingly shown by the CWO in its essay ‘War and Accumulation’ in Revolutionary Perspectives n°16 (Old Series), pp.15-17. (N.B. The CWO’s crisis theory eclectically combines Marx’s analysis of the falling rate of profit with that of Grossmann-Mattick. In this discussion, however, the CWO exclusively follows Marx’s analysis).
“During a war - we speak here of 20th century total wars - the existing mass of capital is devalued simply by being run into the ground and not replaced by new capital; in volume terms the productive apparatus is the same as that prior to the war, but in value terms it is not, due to age and over use. The direction of all production to the war effort ensures this; the production of Department I factories is switched from, e.g. machine tools, to armaments, and ageing machinery which is technically obsolete before all its value C is used up, is run into the ground, at a great saving for capital. In peacetime, capitalists who don’t keep raising this composition of their capital are driven to the wall, but NOT in wartime. State control of the economy and the war effort introduce such a limitation on competition, and such a system of guaranteed orders, that the capitalist has no incentive, and no obligation to constantly re-equip and improve his productive apparatus…
But not only was the existing mass of capital of less value in 1949 than it had been in 1939 (mainly due to devaluation than destruction), but the composition of capital had also fallen in the war years, due to the introduction of the reserve army of labour (unemployed, women) into production, usually on the basis of the widespread introduction of three shift working and the six day week; the composition of capital fell since the same C was utilised by a larger labour force, i.e. V rose…
On the basis of this high rate and mass of profit, the gradual re-equipment of the productive forces took place after World War 2 (…) In a situation where a mass of devalued capital existed, any re-equipment of the productive forces (even with similar machinery of no increased value) would lead to phenomenal increases in productivity. If this rises faster than the composition of capital, then the rate of profit will NOT fall, instead, it will rise (…) Therefore, the bourgeoisie didn’t have the problem of wondering why they should bother to accumulate in the 1950’s; the war had solved that problem for them by re-establishing the basis for profitable production”.
This clear explanation by the CWO demolishes the ICC’s muddled critique of the falling rate of profit as an explanation of capitalist reconstruction.
“The problem is that it’s never been proven that during the recoveries that have followed world wars, the organic composition of capital is lower than what it was before the war. In fact the contrary is the case. If you look at the Second World War, for example, it is clear that, in the countries affected by the destructions of the war, the average productivity of labour and thus the relationship between constant and variable capital very quickly (i.e. by the beginning of the 50’s), reached what it had been in 1939. Indeed, the productive potential that was reconstituted was much more modern than the one that had been destroyed. However, the period of ‘prosperity’ which accompanied the reconstruction went on long after that (in fact up to the mid-60’s), i.e. well after the point where the pre-war productive capacity had been reconstituted, taking the organic composition to its previous level” (“Rejecting the notion of Decadence demobilises the Proletariat in the face of War”, International Review n°77, pp.20.)
The real ‘problem’ is that the ICC, like its mentor Rosa Luxemburg, does not understand Marx’s analysis of falling rate of profit.
The ICC finds itself in a quandary because, on the one hand, it defends the Marxist position that decadence does not mean a total halt to the growth of the productive forces, but on the other, defends a crisis theory whose logical and inescapable conclusion is just this result. (In Rosa Luxemburg’s crisis theory pre-capitalist markets are the sine qua non of capitalist accumulation. Therefore, when these markets are exhausted capitalist accumulation has reached its absolute economic limit. Indeed, the ongoing destruction of pre-capitalist markets means that the total capital not only cannot exceed this limit but also must necessarily diminish.)
The ICC, however, ignores the blatant contradiction between the actual development of capitalism and the logical outcome of her economic analysis that there is a ceiling on capitalist growth, that there is an absolute economic limit to capitalist accumulation. (This is also the logical conclusion to Henryk Grossmann’s analysis.)
This contradiction forces the ICC into a ludicrous conclusion about the nature of imperialist war; it believes that imperialist war does not have an economic function for decadent capitalism [1] [2]. The sheer absurdity of this idea is bewildering, on a par with the Bordigists’ ‘Invariance of the Programme’.
In other words, the ICC is saying that the Marxist position that in decadence capitalism ceases to fulfil a progressive function (economic, or otherwise) for humanity is identical with the position with that imperialist war does not have an economic function for capitalism. The ICC further confuses matters by also equating the latter view with the false notion of the IBRP that every war in decadence has an immediate economic motive [2] [3].
(The view that imperialist war does not have an economic function for capitalism is consistent with the ICC’s Luxemburgist pre-capitalist markets crisis theory. After all, in this theory, once pre-capitalist markets are exhausted, further accumulation at the level of total capital becomes impossible. And if capitalist accumulation has reached its absolute limit, then nothing, not even imperialist war can reverse the situation. Hence imperialist war cannot have an economic function.)
The ICC argues that imperialist war does not have an economic function. But if imperialist war does not have an economic function, what accounts for the reconstruction periods of capital, which the ICC believes happened, and which, in the case of that after World War II, it recognises as having led to an economic expansion that greatly exceeded that of pre-World War II capitalism?
Why is it that the ICC, which has the most coherent political program and practice of all the groups in the Communist Left, which is free of the sectarianism, opportunism and centrism that marks the IBRP and the Bordigists, descends into such profound confusion in the realm of economics? The answer is its Luxemburgist economics. Contrary to the illusions of the ICC, Rosa Luxemburg developed her alternative crisis theory because she misunderstood the method of Capital; in particular, she mistakenly thought that the reproduction schemes in vol. II of Capital were intended as a direct picture of concrete capitalist reality. The apparent contradiction between the schemes and historical reality led her to believe that the schemes were faulty. But what was at fault was the partial empiricism of her viewpoint; for her ‘discovery’ that capitalism could not accumulate without pre-capitalist markets derives from her mistakenly adopting the viewpoint of the individual capitalist. Her concessions to empiricism prevented her from grasping the validity of Marx’s falling rate of profit analysis, and caused her to arrive at a mechanistic, death crisis interpretation of capitalist accumulation.
I regard Rosa Luxemburg’s and Henryk Grossmann’s specific economic explanations of capitalist decadence as revisionist economics because they are based on a flawed understanding of the method of Capital:
“Orthodoxy in questions of Marxism relates rather exclusively to the method. It is only in the sense of its founder that this method can be expanded, extended and deepened. And this conviction rests on the observation that all attempts to overcome or ‘improve’ that method have led, and necessarily so, only to triteness, platitudinizing and eclecticism…”[3] [4].
Of course, despite their revisionist economics there was a class line separating Rosa Luxemburg and Henryk Grossmann: the former was a revolutionary Marxist owing to her political positions; Henryk Grossmann was a Stalinist reactionary.
“There can be no dogmatism where the supreme and sole criterion of a doctrine is its conformity to the actual process of social and economic development” [4] [5].
The ICC refuses to acknowledge that because pre-capitalist markets are the sine qua non of capitalist accumulation in Luxemburg’s economics, this has specific and unavoidable consequences for the development of capitalism were it true. In other words, her crisis theory makes specific predictions about capitalist development. However, the “actual process of social and economic development” has shown unequivocally the falsity of these predictions and thus the falsity of her economics. Yet the ICC continues to defend the validity of these economics. This is DOGMATISM.
Furthermore, what else but dogmatism explains why the ICC continues to treat Henryk Grossmann’s analysis of the falling rate of profit as identical to that of Marx in Capital, when it has long been familiar with the critique of Henryk Grossmann in Anton Pannekoek’s The Theory of the Collapse of Capitalism [5] [6], which clearly shows the fundamental differences between the two. Moreover, this article and the writings of the IBRP, particularly those of the CWO, should have made it clear to the ICC that the IBRP eclectically combines Grossmann’s crisis theory with that of Marx.
The ICC refers to the numerous articles it has written on economic theory as a sign of its commitment to clarity on this issue [6] [7]. However, in practice this has meant that the ICC merely repeats the same faulty arguments over and over again, ignoring and evading the cogent criticisms against its economics by other communist currents. It is true that the ICC responds with criticisms of these currents that are often correct per se, but are irrelevant to the validity of the specific criticisms that these currents raised in the first place. (For example, the ICC correctly observes that the IBRP and especially the Bordigists have a tendency to analyse capitalism from the point of view of each nation taken in isolation.)
That the ICC still defends its manifestly flawed Luxemburgist economics 25 years after its formation suggests that it has an internal political climate that discourages, or at least does not encourage, a theoretical deepening on the economic foundations of decadence. Its one thing to assert, as does the ICC, and rightly so, that differences over economic theory should not be a barrier to political unity and regroupment. However, for the ICC this has meant in practice avoiding maximum clarity on this issue; it has meant theoretical stagnation.
Quite frankly, the ICC, in defending its Luxemburgist economics, displays the same disregard for accuracy and rigour that the IBRP and the Bordigists do to justify their sectarian, centrist and opportunist political practice. Needless to say, the ICC’s impoverished economics lends credence to the attacks on its political program by the IBRP and the Bordigists, as many of the criticisms these currents make against the ICC’s economics are valid.
The ICC’s dogmatic devotion to Rosa Luxemburg’s economics, which I find reminiscent of the Bordigists’ idolatrous attitude to Lenin, blinds the organisation to the disparity between her political insights into imperialism and her revisionist economics [7] [8].
If the ICC wishes to have a coherent Marxist economic foundation for its political program, then it MUST abandon Rosa Luxemburg’s fatally flawed crisis theory and replace it with that of the analysis of the falling rate of profit in Capital.
As the CWO observed on the eclectic approach of the ICC to economics:
“Like Luxemburg, their references to the falling rate of profit are merely to explain away the facts (such as why capitalism sought markets further away from the metropoles during the period of primitive accumulation) or to explain elements of the development of capitalism which a purely markets approach cannot (e.g. why capital concentration preceded the rush for colonies or that the vast bulk of trade was carried on in this period between the advanced capitalist powers)” [8] [9].
However, the IBRP themselves arrive at an eclectic and confused theory as they combine Henryk Grossmann’s crisis theory with that of Marx. Indeed, they believe that Grossmann’s “contribution was to show the significance that the mass of surplus value played in determining the exact nature of the crisis” [9] [10]. The IBRP fails to grasp that this so-called insight of Grossmann is inextricably linked to his mechanistic and one-sided conception of capitalist accumulation. In contrast to Marx, he examines the falling rate of profit solely in terms of the production of surplus value, ignoring the role of the circulation and distribution of surplus value. As a result, he reaches the erroneous conclusion that capital is exported to foreign nations not, as Marx argued, for the maximisation of surplus value, but because of the “lack of investment opportunities at home” [10] [11] (which is the false view that capital is exported “because it absolutely could not be applied at home” [11] [12] that Marx criticised in vol. III of Capital), and thus to his mechanistic conception of a death crisis of capitalism.
The eclectic approach of both currents allows them to pick and choose from their crisis theories as if from a smorgasbord. However plausible this may seem, in reality they are defending two diametrically opposed perspectives: the mechanistic viewpoint of the bourgeoisie and the dialectical viewpoint of the proletariat. (It is true that the ICC and the IBRP criticise certain features of the crisis theories of Rosa Luxemburg and Grossmann-Mattick, respectively. But as they continue to defend the core economic analyses of these theories they therefore continue to defend the mechanistic conceptions on which they are based).
CA.
[1] [13] “The function of imperialist war”, in “The Nature of Imperialist War”, International Review n°82, pp. 21-23.
[2] [14] Ibid.
[3] [15] Georg Lucazs [sic], Geschichte und Klassenbewusstein, quoted in Paul Mattick, The Inevitability of Communism: A Critique of Sidney Hook’s Interpretation of Marx, Polemic Publishers, New York, 1935, p.35.
[4] [16] Lenin, V.I., Collected Works, vol.1, p.298, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1960.
[5] [17] Anton Pannekoek in Capital and Class 1, London (Spring 1977).
[6] [18] For a comprehensive list see International Review n°83.
[7] [19] The ICC assumes that Rosa Luxemburg’s understanding of the political consequences of capitalist decadence, namely that the global nature of imperialism destroys the material basis for national self-determination, guarantees the validity of her specific economic explanation of decadence.
[8] [20] “Imperialism - The Decadent Stage of Capitalism”, Revolutionary Perspectives n°17 (Old Series), p.16.
[9] [21] Private correspondence from CWO to author.
[10] [22] Quoted in Anton Pannekoek, Grossmann versus Marx, ibid., p.73.
[11] [23] Quoted in Anton Pannekoek, ibid.
IR106, 3rd Quarter 2001
Bukharin, Raya Dunayeskavya and other critics of Rosa Luxemburg cited by the comrade, say that she was wrong to look for external reasons for the crisis of capitalism. [1] [28] However, the world market and the pre-capitalist economies are not external to the system: they are the environment for its development and confrontations. To claim that capitalism can realise its accumulation within its own limits, is to say that it is a system without historical limits and that it develops through the simple exchange of commodities alone. In the first volume of Capital and also in The Results of British Rule of India Marx demonstrated exactly the opposite: the genesis of capital, its progressive accumulation, took place by means of the battle to separate the producers from their means of livelihood, transforming them into the principle productive commodity – labour power – and, around this axis, through immeasurable suffering, constructing “peaceful” and “regular” commodity exchange. Using the same method, Rosa Luxemburg asks whether what was true of primitive accumulation is not also true in the later phases of capitalist development. Her critics believe that primitive accumulation is one thing, but that capitalist development is quite another, where there is no longer any role for the “external market” and the “struggle against the natural economy”. However, this is utterly refuted by capitalism’s evolution in the 19th century especially, in its imperialist phase.
“At the time of primitive accumulation, i.e. at the end of the Middle Ages, when the history of capitalism in Europe began, and right into the 19th century, dispossessing the peasants in England and on the Continent was the most striking weapon in the large-scale transformation of means of production and labour power into capital. Yet capital in power performs the same task even today, and on an even more important scale – by modern colonial policy (…) Any hope to restrict the accumulation of capital exclusively to ‘peaceful competition’, i.e. to regular commodity exchange such as takes place between capitalist producer-countries, rests on the pious belief that capital can accumulate without mediation of the productive forces and without the demand of more primitive organisations, and that it can rely upon the slow internal process of a disintegrating natural economy (…) The method of violence, then, is the immediate consequence of the clash between capitalism and the organisations of a natural economy which would restrict accumulation. Their means of production and their labour power no less than their demand for surplus products is necessary for capitalism” (The Accumulation of Capital, pages 369-71, Modern Reader Paperbacks, 1968).
Those within the revolutionary movement who want to explain the historic crisis of capitalism exclusively by the tendency of the rate of profit to fall only see one part - exchange within the already constructed capitalist market - but miss the other, the most dynamic historically and whose progressive limitation from the end of the 19th century has caused the growing chaos and convulsions that humanity has suffered since 1914.
This puts them in a very uncomfortable position faced with that central dogma of capitalist economic ideology – the idea that “production creates its own market”, that all supply eventually encounters a demand – which was criticised so severely by Marx who denounced: “The conception (…) adopted by Ricardo from the tedious Say (…) that over-production is not possible or at least that no general glut of the market is possible, based on the proposition that products are exchanged against products, or as Mill put it, on the ‘metaphysical equilibrium of sellers and buyers’, and this led to [the conclusion] that demand is determined only by production” (Theories of Surplus Value, Vol. 2, page 493).
In the same way he combated the conceptions that limited the disturbances of capitalism to mere disproportions between sectors of production.
If they exclude the pre-capitalist territories from the field of capitalist accumulation, if they think that capitalism can develop from its own social relations, how can the thesis that production creates its own market be avoided? The tendency for the rate of profit to fall is not a sufficient explanation since it operates within such an accumulation of counter-acting factors and over such a long period that it cannot explain the historical events that have unfolded since the last third of the 19th century and accumulated during the 20th: imperialism, world wars, the great depression, state capitalism, the reappearance of the open crisis from the end of the 1960s and the increasingly serious collapse of large parts of the world economy over the last 30 years.
But precisely because the tendential fall operates “in the long term”, is it not necessary to avoid ‘empiricism’ and ‘impatience’ and avoid being ‘misled’ by all these immediate catastrophes? This appears to be the method that the comrade proposes when he stresses the “apparent” coincidence of the “division of the world” with the “world crisis” or when he points out that the great depression appeared to confirm the theses of Grossman and Luxemburg but that these have since been disproved by the large scale growth after World War II or the growth in the 1990s.
We will return to this aspect later. What we want to highlight now is that behind the accusations of “empiricism” levelled at Rosa Luxemburg there is an important question of “method” which we think has escaped the comrade. The Revisionists in the Social Democratic movement began a crusade against Marx’s “underconsumptionism”. Bernstein was the first to put Marx’s analysis of the crisis on the same level as the pathetic Rodbertus. Tugan-Baranowsky calmly returned to Say’s theses about “production creating its own markets”, explaining with “Marxist” reasoning that the crisis arises from disproportions between the two departments of production. The Revisionist critiques of Rosa Luxemburg – Bauer, Eckstein, Hilferding etc – said with all the authority of “Marxist orthodoxy” - that the tables of expanded reproduction explained perfectly that there was not a problem of realisation. Bukharin – in the service of the Stalinisation of the Communist Parties – attacked Luxemburg’s work in order to “demonstrate” that capitalism does not have an “external” problem.
Why did the opportunists have this aversion to Rosa Luxemburg’s analysis? Simply because she put her finger on a tender spot, by showing the global and historical root of capitalism’s entry into its decadence. Fifty years previously the method of analysing the contradiction between the advance of the productivity and the necessity to maximise profit had proved very fruitful. However, now it was the question of the struggle of capitalism against the preceding social order in order to form the world market and the contradictions that arose from this (the growing poverty of the pre-capitalist territories) that provided a clearer and more systematic framework that integrated into a higher synthesis both the original contradiction, and the phenomena of imperialism, world war and the progressive decomposition of the capitalist economy.
Later on, following in the footsteps of the Revisionists but on a frankly bourgeois terrain, a whole gaggle of university “Marxologists” dedicated themselves to developing the idea of the “abstract” Marx. Cleverly separating his reflections on expanded reproduction, the rate of profit, etc., from those on the question of the market and the realisation of surplus value. By means of this fragmentation – in reality an adulteration - of Marx’s thought they conjured up the ghost of his “abstract method”, turning it into a explanatory “model” of the contractual functioning of capitalist economy: the regular exchange of commodities which Rosa Luxemburg talks of. Any attempt to confront this “model” with the realities of capitalism is seen as “empiricism” and expresses a lack of understanding of the fact that it is a question of an “abstract model”, etc. etc.
This enterprise, which turned Marx into an “inoffensive icon” – as Lenin would have said – aimed to eliminate the revolutionary thread of his work and to make it say what he never meant. The most shameless bourgeois economists who don’t adopt a “Marxist” façade also have this “long-term vision”. Are they not forever telling us not to be empiricists or immediatists: that we should look beyond the unemployment, the stock market cataclysms and instead understand the “general tendency” based upon “good fundamentals”. The Marxologists conveniently select and take out of context parts of Capital in order to achieve the same ends.
The comrade holds clearly revolutionary positions and in no way, shape or form shares in this business of confusion. However, in drawing on many of Bukharin’s “arguments”, and on those of various academics, instead of undertaking an examination of Rosa Luxemburg’s positions, [2] [29] he closes his eyes to those aspects of the question we have tried to draw out here.
The comrade says that Rosa Luxemburg poses an “absolute limit” to the development of capitalism. First of all we will look at exactly what she said: “The more ruthlessly capitalism sets about the destruction of non-capitalist strata at home and in the outside world, the more it lowers the standard of living for the workers as a whole, the greater also is the change in the day-to-day history of capital. It becomes a string of political and social disasters and convulsions, and under these conditions, punctuated by periodic economic catastrophes or crises, accumulation can go on no longer. But even before this natural economic impasse of capital’s own creating is properly reached it becomes a necessity for the international working class to revolt against the rule of capital” (op. cit chapter XXXII, page 466-467).
If the comrade is referring to “this natural economic impasse of capital’s own creating”, it is clear that if interpreted literally it does give the impression of an absolute limit. Nevertheless, the same conclusion could be drawn from Marx’s assertion that: “In the way that the development of labour productivity involves a law, in the form of the falling rate of profit, that at a certain point confronts this development itself” (Capital Vol. 3, page 367). This formulation contrasts with others – which we have quoted above - where it is emphasised that this law is only a tendency.
Clearly we have to be careful not to use formulations that can lead to ambiguity or to take isolated phrases out of context. What is important to see is an analysis, dynamic and global orientation. At this level Luxemburg – like Marx – is very clear: what is most important is her assertion that the accumulation of capital “becomes a string of political and social disasters and convulsions”. This does not express an absolute limit but a general tendency that is going to get worse with the rotting of the situation.
In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx says that “Men make their own history, but not of their own free will; not under circumstances they themselves have chosen but under the given and inherited circumstances with which they are directly confronted” (Surveys From Exile, The Pelican Marx Library, page 146, 1977). The method that revolutionaries use consists, in accord with this argument, in understanding and putting forward the fundamental tendencies that mark “the circumstances with which [men] are directly confronted”. In the years before the explosion of war in 1914 Rosa Luxemburg correctly declared that there was a historical tendency that was going to mark - and how! - “men’s actions”
The conclusion to the first edition of The Accumulation of Capital clears up, in our opinion, any doubts about whether she was formulating an “absolute” tendency: “Capitalism is the first mode of economy with the weapon of propaganda, a mode which tends to engulf the entire globe and to stamp out all other economies, tolerating no rival at its side. Yet at the same time it is also the first mode of economy that is unable to live by itself, which needs other economic systems as a medium and soil. Although it strives to become universal, and indeed, on account of this its tendency, it must break down - because it is immanently incapable of becoming a universal form of production. In its living history it is a contradiction in itself, and its movement of accumulation provides a solution to the conflict and aggravates it at the same time. At a certain stage of development there will be no other way out than the application of socialist principles. The aim of socialism is not accumulation but the satisfaction of toiling humanity’s wants by developing the productive forces of the entire globe”.
What is our conception of the decadence of capitalism? Have we ever mentioned a complete blockage in the development of the productive forces, or an absolute limit to capitalist production, a kind of definitive and mortal crisis?
The comrade recognises that we reject the idea formulated by Trotsky concerning an absolute blockage of the productive forces. In the same way, our conception is alien to certain conceptions which arose in the 20’s within tendencies of the KAPD which talked about the “mortal crisis of capitalism”, which they understood to mean an absolute stoppage of production and capitalist growth.
Our pamphlet on decadence responds to Trotsky’s position: “All social changes are the result of the deepening and prolonged collision of the relations of production with the development of the productive forces. If we defended the hypothesis of the definitive and permanent halt in this development, the deepening of this contradiction could only be demonstrated if the other bounds of the existing property relations were ‘absolutely’ receding. However, it happens that the characteristic movement of the different periods of decadence in history (including the capitalist system) tends rather in the direction of expanding these frontiers up to their final limits than towards their restriction.
Under the aegis of the state and under the pressure of economic and social necessities, the system’s carcass swells while casting off everything that proves superfluous to the relations of production, everything not strictly necessary to the system’s survival. The system is reinforced but at its last limits” (page 19-20 in the English edition).
Understanding how capitalism can “manage the crisis” through a policy of survival aimed at reducing its effects on the central countries falls entirely within the Marxist analysis of the decadence of modes of production. Did the Roman Empire not do the same when it withdrew to Byzantium and abandoned vast areas to the pressure of the invading barbarians? Was not the enlightened despotism of the ancien régime monarchies a response to the advancing capitalist relations of production?
“The freeing of the slaves under the Late Roman Empire; the freeing of the serfs at the end of the Middle Ages; the partial liberties which the declining monarchy had to grant to the new bourgeois cities; the reinforcing of the central power of the crown, and the elimination of the ‘nobility of the robe’ completely dominated by the King; and likewise, in the capitalist framework, the attempts at economic planning; the efforts to try to relieve the burden of national, economic frontiers; the tendency to replace bourgeois parasites with efficient salaried ‘managers’ of capital; policies such as the New Deal and the continued manipulation of certain mechanisms of the law of value – all are evidence of this tendency to expand the juridical framework by laying bare the relations of production. There is no halt in the dialectical movement after a society has reached its apogee. This movement is qualitatively transformed but it does not end. The intensification of the contradictions inherent in the old society necessarily continues and for this reason the development of the imprisoned productive forces must continue even if it is at the slowest rate” (idem).
In the period of capitalism’s decadence we have seen an aggravation of its contradictions at all levels. There has been development of the productive forces, there have also been phases of economic growth, but this has taken place within a global framework that has become increasingly contradictory, convulsed and destructive. The tendency towards barbarism has not appeared in a linear procession of catastrophes and unending collapse, but rather disguised by phases of growth, by the increase in the productivity of labour, by greater or smaller periods of growth. State capitalism – especially in the central countries – has all the means at hand in order to control a potentially explosive situation, to attenuate and smooth over the most serious contradictions and, above all else, to maintain the appearance of “healthy functioning” and even “progress”. The system “is being stretched to its very limits”.
Between the 1st and 3rd century AD, the system of slavery was characterised by increasingly serious contradictions. Rome and Byzantium were being filled with the finest monuments in the history of Empire, the most advanced technologies of the time flourished in this period to the point that the principle of electrical energy was discovered during the 2nd century. But these dazzling developments took place within an increasingly degraded framework, the exacerbation of social struggles, the abandoning of territories to barbarian pressure, the massive deterioration of the transport infrastructure. [3] [30]
Are we not witnessing the same evolution today but of even greater magnitude due to the specific characteristics of decadent capitalism? [4] [31]
The comrade says that our theory is refuted by the growth after World War II and the growth that took place in the 1990s. We cannot develop a detailed argument [5] [32] here: however, in relation to the growth between 1945 and 1967, it is necessary to understand, over and above its statistical volume:
- the powerful impact of armaments and the war economy, as the comrade recognises.
- the importance of the Marshall Plan, the most gigantic expansion of debt ever known up to then.
- the consequences that this has had (and the comrade also appears to recognise this): a substantial part of this growth has evaporated in a dramatic process of dismantling – which in the central countries has particularly affected heavy industry – or of implosion as in the case of the Russian bloc.
As for the growth of the 90s: a minuscule level of growth, [6] [33] based on historically unprecedented levels of debt and speculation, was limited to the United States – and a few other countries – within the context of unprecedented setbacks for numerous countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. [7] [34] Moreover, the present collapse of the “New Economy” and the turbulence on the stock markets is revealing the reality of this growth.
When talking about the “growth figures” the comrade should reflect about their nature and composition. [8] [35] Growth that expresses the expansion of the system is not the same thing as growth that reflects a policy of survival and crisis management. Generally, for a Marxist, it is not possible to identify the growth of production with the development of capitalist production. They are two distinct ideas. The practice in Stalinist Russia of using recording breaking statistics for steel, cotton and cement to hide defective or non-existent production, was only the most extreme and grotesque illustration of a general tendency of decadent capitalism, stimulated by state capitalism, to increase the production figures of a system whose bases of reproduction are being slowly and progressively eroded. Rosa Luxemburg reminds us that: “the accumulation of capital is not about piling up increasingly large heaps of commodities, but of turning increasingly large volumes of products into money-capital. Between the accumulation of surplus-value in the form of commodities and the application of surplus-value for the development of production there is a decisive and difficult step, what Marx called the perilous leap of commodity production from the production of commodities to their sale for money. Perhaps this problem only exists for individual capitalists and does not affect the class or society as a whole? Nothing of the kind: ‘In speaking of the social point of view’, Marx said, ‘it is necessary to avoid falling into the habits of bourgeois economists, as imitated by Proudhon, i.e. to avoid looking at things as if a society based on the capitalist mode of production lost its specific historical and economic character when considered en bloc, as a totality. This is not the case at all. What we have to deal with is the collective capitalist’” (Rosa Luxemburg, Anti-critique, the quote from Marx is from Vol. 2 of Capital).
The nature of the growth in production during capitalism’s decadence – and above all during the last 50 years – has been marked by the tendency for it to be mediated through debt and state intervention. An intervention which at times has amassed enormous stores of commodities, only to destroy them years later since the problem is that they are not the products of a real development of the capitalist relations of production, an authentic expansion of the mass of wage earners and markets.
But, in any case, beyond their nature and particular composition the phases of relative and drugged growth have hidden a historical slowdown in the growth of production. This is the primary characteristic of the decadence of capitalism. Thus, there is no question of an absolute stoppage of growth, but this observation cannot obscure the fundamental tendency.
The same goes for other aspects of economic and social life. The fantastic discoveries in fields such as the human genome, telecommunications or transport, hide a profound deterioration in living conditions, health and the infrastructure of production. The restoration of facades in the great cities of Europe or America, the frantic building of useless glass monuments, illuminated skyscrapers, gives the illusory sensation that “all is well” obscuring an enormous, systematic and irreversible degradation of workers’ and the whole of humanity’s living conditions. It is the same with the functioning and maintaining of these dazzling cities: behind the bright shining lights we see the repeated power cuts in prosperous California and the proliferation of food, transport and ecological catastrophes etc.
It is essential to take the point of view of the totality, as the comrade himself emphasises. We cannot look at robotics and the genome, nor the phases of more or less sustained growth in themselves: it is necessary to see the contradictory and destructive framework within which they occur. The gravity of the system’s crisis is not measured by the volume of rises and falls in production but from a historical and global standpoint, by the worsening of its contradictions, the progressive reduction in its room for manoeuvre and above all by the deterioration in the living conditions of the working class.
In China at the same time as they constructed a dazzling artificial island of skyscrapers adjoining Shanghai, they forced school children to work in order to keep them open. Whilst a totally robotized factory was being opened in Sao Paulo, Brazil, the number of street children continued to grow, and more than 50% of the population still lives below the vital minimum. In Great Britain at the same time as Pharaonic works are being carried out in London’s old docklands, livestock in their hundreds of thousands are being sacrificed. Which of these two sets of facts reflect capitalism’s real situation? We don’t have any doubts about the answer. We hope that we have contributed to dissipating any doubts that the comrade, or our readers in general, may feel on the matter.
Adalen 2.4.2001
[1] [36] See International Review, numbers 29 and 30 for a critique of these accusations by Bukharin and Duyaneskaya against Rosa Luxemburg.
[2] [37] He rarely quotes Rosa Luxemburg directly, the criticisms that he mentions are taken word for word from the Bukharin of “Bolshevisation” (Stalinisation in reality) and from a whole series of “academics” who may occasionally have something interesting to say, but who generally hold positions alien to Marxism. The quotes from Mattick and Pannekoek are a different matter. We do not agree with them, but they demand a more detailed answer.
[3] [38] For an analysis of the decadence of modes of production before capitalism, see the article in the series “Understanding the Decadence of Capitalism” in International Review n°55.
[4] [39] See the “Decomposition of Capitalism” in International Review n°62.
[5] [40] We refer the reader to the pamphlet on The decadence of capitalism, to the articles in International Review numbers 54 and 56, part of the series “Understanding the Decadence of Capitalism” and to the polemics with the IBRP in the International Review numbers 79 and 83.
[6] [41] The level of growth in the decade of the 90’s has been less than that in the previous 5 decades.
[7] [42] See the series “30 years of capitalist crisis” in International Review numbers 96 to 98.
[8] [43] See the “Presentation of the VIIIth Congress”, International Review n°59, for some reflections about this.
14th Congress of the ICC
The alternative facing humanity at the beginning of the 21st century is the same as the one which faced it at the beginning of the 20th: the descent into barbarism or the renewal of society through the communist revolution. The revolutionary marxists who insisted on this inescapable dilemma in the turbulent period 1914-23 could hardly have imagined that their political descendants would still be obliged to insist on it again at the start of the new millennium. Indeed, even the 'post-68' generation of revolutionaries, who emerged from the revival of proletarian struggles after the long counter-revolution that set in during the 1920s, did not really expect that a declining capitalism could be quite so adept at living with its own contradictions as it has proved to be since the 1960s.
For the bourgeoisie, all this is further proof that capitalism is the last and now the only possible form of human society, that the communist project was never more than a utopian dream. This notion, a necessary cornerstone of all bourgeois ideology, was granted an apparent historical verification by the collapse of the 'Communist' bloc in 1989-91. Ably presenting the downfall of a part of the world capitalist system as the final demise of marxism and communism, the bourgeoisie from this moment on concluded from this false premise that capitalism had entered a new and exciting phase in its life. According to this view:
- capitalism, for the first time, was a global system; the free operation of the laws of the market would no longer be fettered by the unwieldy 'socialist' obstacles raised by the Stalinist regimes and their imitators;
- computerisation and the Internet signalled not only a vast technological revolution but also an unlimited new market
- national competition and wars would become a thing of the past
- class conflict would also disappear because classes themselves were being superseded; above all, the working class was a thing of the past.
In this new dynamic capitalism peace and prosperity would be the order of the day. Barbarism would be banished and socialism would become a total irrelevance.
2. In reality, the decade since 1991 has systematically refuted all these fables. Every new ideological gimmick used to prove that capitalism could offer mankind a bright future has proved to be faulty, a cheaply made toy that breaks down almost as soon as you play with it. Future generations will surely look at the bourgeois rationalisations of this decade with the utmost contempt; they will certainly see this period as one of unprecedented blindness, stupidity, horror and suffering. The marxist prognosis that capitalism has outlived its usefulness to humanity - already confirmed by the world wars and world crises of the first half of the 20th century - is being further proven by the prolongation of this senile system into its phase of decomposition, which is the real 'new' period whose entry was marked by the events of 1989-91. Humanity today does not merely face the prospect of barbarism in the future: the descent has already begun and it bears with it the danger of gradually eating away at the very premises of any future social regeneration. But contrary to the propaganda campaigns of the ruling class, the counter-force to the tendency towards barbarism - the communist revolution, logical culmination of the struggle of the working class against capitalist exploitation - is no utopia, but remains a necessity demanded by the death agony of the present mode of production, and at the same time a concrete possibility given that the working class has neither disappeared nor been decisively defeated.
3. All the promises made by the ruling class about the new age of prosperity inaugurated by the 'victory of capitalism over socialism' have one by one been exposed as insubstantial bubbles:
- first we were told that world capitalism would receive an immense boost from the collapse of 'Communism' and the opening up of vast new markets in the former Eastern bloc countries. In fact, these countries were not outside the capitalist system but merely backward capitalist states unable to compete with the countries of the western bloc in a saturated world market. The fact that there was no more room for any major new capitalist economies compelled these countries to shut themselves off behind protectionist barriers, while their bloc leader, the USSR, could only compete with its western rival at the military level. The 'opening up' of these economies to the capital of the more industrialised countries has only highlighted their inherent weaknesses and has served to plunge their populations into an even deeper misery than they experienced under the Stalinist regimes: collapse of whole sectors of production, massive unemployment, shortages of consumer goods, inflation, endemic corruption, wages unpaid for months on end, break-down of social services, growing financial convulsions and the repeated failure of all the western-imposed packages of economic 'reforms'. Far from being a boon to the western economies, the ex-Eastern bloc threatens to be a huge burden. This is evident in Germany where the eastern side is a sheer drag on the economy as a whole; but it also applies more broadly, given the gigantic amounts of capital that has been thrown into the bottomless pit of these economies with no tangible reward, and now the growing flood of refugees fleeing from economic or military chaos in the Balkans or the ex-USSR;
- then it was the turn of the far-eastern tigers and dragons who were going to show the way forward for the rest of the world with their phenomenal growth figures. These economies proved very quickly to be another mirage. They had initially been artificially built up by US capitalism in the period of the blocs as a firebreak against the spread of 'Communism'; their spectacular rise in the 80s and 90s was based on the same marshy ground as the rest of the world economy: the massive resort to credit, itself a product of a an insufficiency of new markets for global capital. The equally spectacular crisis of 1997 was proof of this: it only required the debts to be called in for the whole house of cards to come crashing down. And while a series of sticking-plaster measures, led by the US, have kept this crisis within certain bounds in the Far East and prevented it from provoking an open recession in the West, the long-drawn out stagnation of the once unbeatable Japanese economy is proof that there will be no new 'locomotive' provided by the Far East. Japan's economic condition is so dangerous that it periodically sends waves of panic across the world, as when the Japanese finance minister recently declared the country to be bankrupt. And despite the appearance of new versions of the old 'Yellow Peril' mythology of the early 20th century, there is even less chance that China can become a new beacon of economic development. Whatever economic development has taken place in China is also based on the massive resort to debt; moreover, this has not prevented millions of workers from languishing in unemployment while further millions of workers go with wages unpaid for long period;
- the most recent Great White Hope of capitalism has been the performance of the US economy, with its 'ten years of uninterrupted growth' and in particular with its leading role in the 'new economy' based on the Internet. But the 'Internet-driven economy' has proved to be such a short-lived promise that bourgeois commentators themselves scoff openly at it. 'dot.com' companies are going to the wall at a tremendous rate, many of them exposed as being no more than speculative frauds, symbolically summarising the real fraud: that capitalism could save itself simply by operating as a huge electronic department store. Furthermore, the downfall of the 'new economy' is itself a reflection of deeper problems now openly affecting the entire US economy. It is no longer any secret that the US 'boom' was based also on a flight into astronomical debts which are directly raised by enterprises and individuals, and which resulted in a negative savings rate for the first time in decades; the gigantic growth rates which the bourgeoisie has boasted about are based in reality on a financial system which has been made increasingly fragile by the madness of speculation, and on an accentuation of attacks against workers' living conditions, i.e. increase in precarious jobs, the cutting of the social wage, the diversion of a growing portion of workers' income into the casino of the stock exchange;
- in any case, the boom is now over and there is now increasing talk of the US tilting over into recession. Not only the dot.com companies, but key manufacturing sectors are also in deep trouble.
Despite these alarming signs, the bourgeoisie continues to prate about particular booms in Britain, France, Ireland? but these refrains are increasingly a form of whistling in the dark. Given the tight dependence of the other industrial countries on their investments in the US, the visible end of the 'ten years of US growth' cannot fail to have very serious effects throughout the industrialised world.
4. The capitalist mode of production entered into its historic crisis of overproduction at the beginning of the 20th century - the time when capitalism indeed became 'globalised', simultaneously reaching the limits of its outward expansion and laying the foundations for the world-wide proletarian revolution. But the failure of the working class to carry out the death sentence on the system has meant that capitalism has survived despite the growing weight of its inner contradictions. Capitalism does not simply cease to function once it is no longer a factor of historical progress. On the contrary, it continues to 'grow' and to function, but on a diseased basis which plunges mankind into a spiral of catastrophe. In particular, decadent capitalism entered into the cycle of crisis, war and reconstruction which marked the first two thirds of the 20th century. World wars permitted a redivision of the world market while the ensuing reconstruction provided a temporary stimulus for the latter. But the survival of the system has also demanded a growing political intervention by the ruling class, which has used its state apparatus to flout the 'normal' laws of the market, above all through the policies of deficit spending, of creating artificial markets through the use of credit. The crash of 1929 proved to the bourgeoisie that the war-reconstruction process in itself could only culminate in a spectacular world wide slump after a single decade; it was, in other words, no longer possible to restore capitalist production on a firm basis by returning to the 'spontaneous' operation of commercial laws. Capitalist decadence is precisely the expression of the clash between the productive forces and the commodity form; hence, in this epoch, the bourgeoisie itself is compelled to act more and more at variance with the natural laws of commodity production, even while being driven by them. Hence the reconstruction of 1945 was consciously financed by the US, using the apparently irrational mechanism of lending money to its customers so that they could constitute a market for its goods. And once the limits of this conundrum were reached in the mid-60s, the world bourgeoisie only took the interventionist line to further heights. During the period of the imperialist blocs, this intervention was in general co-ordinated by bloc-wide mechanisms; and the disappearance of the blocs, while introducing dangerous centrifugal tendencies at the economic as well as the imperialist level, still did not lead to the disappearance of these international mechanisms: in fact they were reborn and even reinvigorated as the institutions most often identified as the principle agents of 'globalisation', such as the World Trade Organisation. And even though these organisms operate as a battle ground between the main national capitals or as coalitions between particular geo-political groupings (NAFTA, EU, etc), they express the fundamental necessity for the bourgeoisie to prevent the total paralysis of the world economy. This has been concretised, for example, in the persistent efforts of the USA to bail out its principal economic rival, Japan - even though it has also meant fuelling Japan's enormous debts with even more debts.
This organised cheating of the law of value via state capitalism does not do away with the convulsions of the system; it merely postpones or displaces them. It postpones them in time, particularly for the more advanced economies, by continually avoiding the slide into recession; and it displaces them in space by pushing the worst effects onto the peripheral regions of the globe, which are more or less abandoned to their fate except as pawns in inter-imperialist games. But even in the advanced countries this postponing of open recessions or depressions still makes itself felt through inflationary pressures, financial 'mini-crashes', the dismantling of whole swathes of industry, the break-down of agriculture and the accelerating decay of the infrastructure (roads, rail, services,) etc. This process also includes official recessions, but for the most part the real depth of the crisis is deliberately masked by the conscious manipulations of the bourgeoisie. The perspective for the coming period therefore continues to be a long slow descent into the abyss, punctuated by increasingly violent, but by no means final downward plunges. But there is no absolute point of no return for capitalist production in purely economic terms: long before such a theoretical point could be reached, capitalism would have been destroyed either by the generalisation of its tendency towards barbarism, or by the proletarian revolution.
5. At the beginning of the 90s, we were told that the disappearance of aggressive 'Communism' from the face of the earth would usher in a new era of peace, since capitalism in its democratic form had long since ceased to be imperialist. This ideology was later combined with the myth of globalisation, arguing that national rivalries were a thing of the past.
It is true that the collapse of the Russian bloc and the subsequent break-up of its western counter-part removed a fundamental condition for world war, leaving aside the question of whether the social prerequisites for such a conflict existed. But this development did not alter the essential reality that national capitalist states cannot go beyond the relentless struggle to dominate the globe. Indeed, the fragmentation of the old bloc structures and disciplines unleashed national rivalries on an unprecedented scale, resulting in an increasingly chaotic struggle of each against all from the world's greatest powers to the meanest local warlords. This has taken the form of a growing number of local and regional wars around which the major powers continually jockey for advantage.
6. From the start the USA, as the world's policeman, recognised the danger of this new tendency and took immediate action to try to counter-act it. This was the essential significance of the Gulf war of 1991, which was a massive display of US military superiority aimed first and foremost not at Saddam Hussein's Iraq but at cowing the USA's great power rivals into submission. But although by obliging the other powers to take part in its anti-Saddam coalition the USA temporarily succeeded in strengthening its 'world leadership', the real success of this endeavour can be judged by the fact that ten years later, the USA is still being obliged to use the 'tactic' of bombing Iraq but each time it does so it is subjected to more and more criticism from the majority of its 'allies', and by the fact that it has been compelled to make similar displays of force in other arenas of conflict, in particular the Balkans.
The military superiority of the US has over the past decade shown itself to be completely incapable of halting the centrifugal development of imperialist rivalries. Instead of the US-run new world order promised by his father the new President Bush is confronted with a growing military disorder - with a proliferation of war all over the planet:
- in the Balkans, which, despite massive US-led intervention in 96 and 99, remains a chessboard of tension between the major powers and their local agents; in 2001, 'pacified' Kosovo is still a daily killing field and this brutal 'ethnic' bloodletting has now spilled over into Macedonia, threatening the involvement of several regional powers;
- in the Middle East where the Oslo peace agreement now lies in utter ruin. The escalation of the armed conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is a body blow to the USA's hopes for a 'pax Americana' in the region, providing opportunities for other great powers which, however, have no ability whatever to impose an alternative order of their own;
- in Chechnya where despite enjoying the support of the other great powers, who have no desire to see the Russian Federation being split up by a plethora of nationalist movements, the Kremlin has been unable to bring the war to a close;
- in Afghanistan where different Muslim factions vie for control with the Taliban;
- in Africa where wars are not only endemic and chronic, stretching from Algeria in the north to Angola in the south, but have also widened in scope to become true regional wars dragging in the armies of a number of neighbouring states, as in the Congo;
- in the Far East where countries like Myanmar (Burma) and Cambodia continue to be wracked by internal fighting, and China is more and more asserting its claim to be a major regional power;
- on the Indian subcontinent where India and Pakistan have rattled nuclear sabres at each other and where Sri Lanka is still torn apart by the war against the Tamil separatists;
- in Latin America where tension is being increased by the USA's new 'war against drugs', which is in effect another attempt to re-impose US authority in its own backyard faced with the growing interference of its European rivals (e.g. through their open support for the Zapatistas);
- in Ireland where another 'peace process' has been punctuated by the sound of exploding bombs and assassins' bullets, and in the Basque country where the 'truce' has been broken and ETA has escalated its terrorist activities.
The list could be extended but the picture is clear. Far from bringing peace and stability, the break-up of the bloc system has considerably accelerated capitalism's slide into military barbarism. The wars characteristic of the present phase of capitalist decomposition are no less imperialist wars than the wars of previous phases of decadence, but they have become more widespread, more uncontrollable, and more difficult to bring to even a temporary close.
7. In all these conflicts, the rivalry between the US and its former great power 'allies' has been more or less masked. More in the Gulf and the Balkans where the conflicts have taken the form of an 'alliance' of democratic states against local 'tyrants'; less in Africa where each country has acted more openly and more separately to protect its own national interests. Officially, the USA's main 'enemies' - those who are cited as justification for its ever-increasing military budgets - are either local 'rogue' states like North Korea or Iraq, or its former direct rival from the Cold War era, Russia, or its one time rival, then ally from the same period, China. The latter in particular is increasingly identified as the main potential rival to the USA. And in fact the recent period has seen a real build-up in tension between the US and these two powers - over the issue of NATO's extension into Eastern Europe, over the exposure of Russian spy-network based on a former FBI supervisor, and in particular over the spy plane incident in China. There also exists within the US bourgeoisie an important faction which is convinced that China is indeed the USA's main enemy. But perhaps a more significant development in the recent period is the accumulation of declarations by sections of the European bourgeoisie about the 'arrogance' of the US, in particular over its decision to repudiate the Kyoto agreement on carbon dioxide emissions, and to press ahead with its 'Son of Star Wars' anti-missile project. This latter indeed represents a formidable offensive by US imperialism to transform its technological advantage into an unprecedented planetary domination. This project represents a new stage in an increasingly aberrant arms race and can only sharpen antagonisms with its principal rivals.
These antagonisms have been further exacerbated by the decision to form a 'Euro-Army' separate from NATO. Although there is a strong tendency to blame the growing US-European rift on the new Bush administration, this 'new anti-Americanism' in Europe is only the explicit acknowledgement of a trend that has been in operation since the disappearance of the Western bloc at the beginning of the 90s. Ideologically, it reflects a tendency which, along with the trend towards every man for himself, was also unleashed by the break-up of the blocs - the tendency towards a new anti-American bloc based in Europe.
8. We are still however a long way from the formation of new imperialist blocs, for both military/strategic and social/political reasons:
- no state or even combination of states is able to measure up to the US at the level of military firepower. Germany, which has benefited most from the process of decomposition, advancing its interests into its traditional spheres like Eastern Europe, has no nuclear weapons and because of its past is obliged to take a very low key approach to its strategy of expansion. France, by far the most openly anti-American European power, is not able to pose itself as a potential bloc leader;
- 'Europe' is far from united, and the tendency towards every man for himself operates on this continent as much as any other. Though France and Germany would be the central axis of a European bloc, there are both historic and more immediate sources of tension between them. Britain meanwhile still tends to play both off against each other to prevent either becoming too powerful, and still plays the USA against both. It is important not to confuse the development of economic cooperation between European states with the immediate formation of a bloc structure, since there is no mechanical relationship between immediately economic and strategic/military interests;
- at the social level it is not possible to cohere society around a new war ideology comparable to anti-fascism in the 30s or anti-communism in the post-war period, because the working class is not mobilised behind the banners of the nation. The ideological basis for the formation of new blocs is thus not yet established even if the new anti-Americanism gives us a glimpse of what form it might take in the future.
World war thus remains off the agenda for the foreseeable future. But this in no way minimises the dangers contained in the present situation. The proliferation of local wars, the development of regional conflicts between nuclear-armed powers like India and Pakistan, the spread of these conflicts towards the heartlands of capital (as witness the Balkans war); the necessity for the USA to throw its weight around more and more to reassert its declining leadership, and the reactions this could provoke from other powers - all this could become part of a terrible spiral of destruction which could undermine the bases of a future communist society, even without the active mobilisation (behind capitalist ideology) of the proletariat in the centres of world capital.
9. The ruling class tends to reduce the global significance of these mounting tensions by looking for specific local, ideological, and economic causes of each particular conflict: 'ingrained' ethnic hatreds here, religious schisms there, oil in the Gulf or the Balkans, diamonds in Sierra Leone, etc. In this they are often echoed by the confusions of the proletarian political milieu, which easily mixes up a materialist analysis with the effort to explain each imperialist conflict in terms of the immediate economic profit that can be made from it. Although many of these economic and ideological factors are real, they cannot explain the general characteristics of the period which capitalism has entered. In decadence, war has more and more become an economic disaster for capitalism, a sheer loss. The costs involved in maintaining each particular conflict far outweigh the immediate economic benefits which can be drawn from it. Thus while severe economic pressures certainly played a key part in driving Zimbabwe to invade the Congo, or Iraq Kuwait, the ensuing military entanglements have brought these countries further towards the abyss of ruin. More generally, the cycle of crisis-war-reconstruction, which gave the appearance of conferring a certain rationality on world war in the past, is now over, since after any new world war there would be no reconstruction to follow it. But none of these calculations of profit and loss enable imperialist states to abstain from the necessity to defend their imperialist presence around the globe, to sabotage the ambitions of their rivals, or to increase their arms budgets. On the contrary, they are all caught up in a logic which escapes their control and which makes less and less sense even in capitalist terms, and this is precisely what makes the situation facing mankind so dangerous and unstable. To overestimate the rationality of capital is to underestimate the real menace of war in this period.
10. The working class today thus faces the possibility that it could be engulfed by an irrational chain reaction of local and regional wars. But this is only one aspect of the threat posed by decomposing capitalism. The last decade has seen all the consequences of decomposition becoming more and more deadly:
- at the level of social life, particularly in the growing phenomenon of 'gangsterisation': corruption of state officials at the highest levels, growing involvement of the mafia and international drug cartels in the political and economic life of the bourgeoisie, the enrolment of the exploited and the oppressed in local gang structures, which in the peripheral countries have become veritable instruments of imperialist wars; connected to this is the spread of extremely retrograde ideologies selling ethnic or religious hatred and the 'banalisation' of genocide after the inter-ethnic massacres in Rwanda, East Timor, Bosnia or Borneo;
- through the break-down of the infrastructures of transport and housing, making ever-larger masses of people victims of all kinds of accidents and disasters (rail crashes, floods, earthquakes, etc); closely linked to this is the crisis in agriculture which has resulted in new outbreaks of disease that further intensify the crisis that gave rise to them;
- more generally, at the level of the planetary eco-system: more and more evidence piles up for the reality of global warming (rising sea temperatures, melting ice-caps, violent fluctuations in the weather, etc) while the repeated failure of international climate conferences demonstrate the total incapacity of the capitalist nations to do anything about it.
Capitalism today is therefore painting a clearer and clearer picture of what the descent into barbarism would look like: a civilisation in full disintegration, torn apart by storms, drought, plague, starvation, irreversible poisoning of air, land and water; society turned into a hecatomb by murderous internecine conflict and wars that leave entire countries, even continents, in ruins; wars which further poison the atmosphere and which can only be made more frequent and devastating by the desperate struggle by nations, regions, or local fiefs to preserve their cache of dwindling resources and necessities; a nightmare world where the last remaining castles of 'prosperity' clang iron gates against the encroaching hordes of refugees fleeing from war and catastrophe; in short, a world where the rot had set in so far that there would be no turning back and where capitalist civilisation finally sank beneath a quicksand of its own making. This apocalypse is not so far from what we are experiencing today; the face of barbarism is taking material shape before our eyes. The only question remaining is whether socialism, the proletarian revolution, still remains a living alternative.
The working class still holds the key to the future
11. Throughout the 1970s and 80s, the struggle of the working class in response to the resurfacing of capitalism's historic crisis was a barrier to the outbreak of a third world war - the only real barrier, because capitalism had already formed the imperialist blocs which would launch the war, and the economic crisis was already pushing the system into this 'solution'. But for a number of connected reasons, some historic, some more immediate, the working class found it extremely difficult to pass from the defensive level to an open affirmation of its own political perspective (the weight of the previous decades of counter-revolution which had decimated its organised political expressions, the long drawn-out nature of the economic crisis which made it hard to see the truly catastrophic situation facing world capitalism, and so on). The inability of the two major social classes to impose their solution to the crisis gave rise to the phenomenon of decomposition; and this in turn was greatly accelerated by its own product, the collapse of the Eastern bloc, which marked decadent capitalism's entry into a phase in which decomposition would be the centrally defining characteristic. In this new phase, the struggle of the working class, which over the course of three successive international waves had revealed visible lines of advance at the level of consciousness and self-organisation, was thrown into a profound reflux, both at the level of consciousness and of militancy.
Decomposition posed both material and ideological difficulties for the working class:
- at the economic and social level, the material processes of decomposition have tended to undermine the proletariat's sense of identity - traditional working class industrial concentrations have been broken up more and more; social life has become increasingly atomised (which further reinforces the tendency towards gangsterisation as a false 'communal' alternative); long-term unemployment, especially among the youth, reinforces this atomisation and further severs the link with traditions of collective struggle;
- these objective processes are in turn made more effective by the incessant ideological campaigns of the ruling class, selling nihilism, individualism, racism, occultism and religious fundamentalism, all of which help to obscure the reality of society whose fundamental division remains a class division; these campaigns are crowned by the brainwashing that accompanied the collapse of the Eastern bloc and has been maintained ever since: communism has failed, marxism has been refuted, the working class is finished. This theme has in turn has been boosted by all the ideologies about 'newness' which also 'explain' how capitalism has now superseded its old class divisions ('new economy'. 'globalisation', 'recomposition of the working class', etc).
The working class today is thus faced with a serious loss of confidence - not only in its capacity to change society, but even in its capacity to defend itself at the day to day level. This has allowed the trade unions, which in the 80s had been more and more exposed as instruments of bourgeois order, to renew their hold over workers' struggles; at the same time, it has increased capitalism's ability to divert the workers' efforts to defend their specific interests into a patchwork of 'popular' and 'citizens' movements for greater 'democracy'.
12. The real difficulties confronting the working class today are obviously exploited by the ruling class to intensify its message about the end of the class struggle. This message is taken up by many who are not blind to the barbaric future that capitalism is preparing for us, but who do not believe that the working class is the subject of revolutionary change, and are searching for some 'new' movement to create a better world (this is the case with many elements involved in the 'anti-capitalist' mobilisations). Communists, however, know that if the working class is truly finished, there is no other barrier to capitalism's drive towards the destruction of humanity. But they are also able to affirm that this barrier has not been removed; that the international working class has not said its last word. This confidence in the working class is not some species of religious faith. It is based:
- on a historic vision of the working class, which is not an immediate, photographic snapshot but which recognises the real link between the past, present and future struggles of the class and its organisations;
- on an analysis of the last decade in particular, which enables them to conclude that for all the difficulties it has experienced, the working class has not suffered a defeat of world-historic proportions, comparable to what it experienced at the end of the first revolutionary wave.
13. The evidence for this conclusion is provided by:
- the fact that despite undeniable difficulties in the last decade (isolation and discontinuity of struggles, and consequently the absence of class struggle on the overall social scene), the working class of the main concentrations still conserves large reserves of militancy and has not accepted the austerity plans which capitalism tries to impose on it. This militancy is set to undergo a slow, tortuous but real development in response to the degradation of proletarian living and working conditions;
- the signs of a subterranean maturation of consciousness within the working class. Contrary to idealist visions which see consciousness being brought to the class from the outside, or mechanistic theories which see consciousness developing only in the immediate, visible struggle, communists have always been keenly aware that mass strikes or revolutions do not spring from nowhere, but have their source in 'underground' processes which build up over long periods and which are often only discernible in sudden outbursts or in the appearance of combative minorities within the class. In the recent period it has been particularly clear that such a minority has been emerging, taking the form both of a considerable enlargement of the zone of political transition between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, and of the development of a small but important minority which is relating to the proletarian political milieu. It is especially significant that many of these 'searching' elements derive not only from those who have been politicised for a long time, but from a new generation of people who are asking questions about capitalism for the first time;
- evidence of the 'negative' weight that the working class still exerts on the ruling class. This expresses itself, among other things, in the bourgeoisie's reluctance to admit the real scope of imperialist rivalries between the major powers, to dragoon the workers of these powers directly into its military adventures; in the concern of the ruling class not to reveal the true level of the economic crisis, to avoid overt economic slumps that could provoke a massive class reaction; in the enormous amount of time and energy devoted to its ideological campaigns against the proletariat, not least those devoted to showing that the latter is a spent force.
Communists can thus continue to argue that the historic course towards massive class confrontations, opened by the international wave of struggles in 1968-72, has not been overturned. The working class has proved itself to be a barrier to world war. And while the danger remains that the more insidious process of decomposition could gradually overwhelm the class without capitalism having to inflict a frontal defeat upon it, the class still represents a historic obstacle to the full working out of capitalism's slide into military barbarism. More than this: it still retains the capacity to resist the effects of social decomposition through the development of its struggles and the consequent strengthening of its sense of identity and solidarity, which can offer a real alternative to the atomisation, the self-destructive violence and despair typical of this rotting system.
14. On this difficult path towards the working class rediscovering its fighting spirit and renewing its acquaintance with past traditions and experiences of struggle, it comes up against the anti-proletarian strategy of the bourgeoisie:
a) First, the use of the left parties in government, where they are still generally better placed than the right to:
- present the obvious signs of capitalism's downward plunge as results only of the action of particular sectors of capitalism (egoistic, irresponsible companies etc) - the only alternative being the action of the democratic state in defence of the interests of all citizens;
- present the spiral of wars and militarism as the result only of the war policy of 'hawkish' sections of capitalism (Sharon, Bush, etc.), which should be countered by 'international law' based on 'human rights';
- stagger the attacks on workers' living conditions, above all in the main industrial concentrations, in order to try to postpone and disperse the militancy of the workers, to create division in the ranks of the proletariat, between 'privileged' sectors (workers with a fixed contract, western workers, etc.) and disadvantaged ones (those on precarious contracts, immigrants, etc.);
- mask these attacks as though they were steps towards a more just society.
b) In complete coherence with this, the activities of the leftists as well as of radical unionism are aimed at neutralising the distrust of the workers towards the centre-left parties and diverting it into a radical defence of bourgeois democracy. The development of the Socialist Alliance in Britain is a clear illustration of this function.
c) Last but not least, we have the activities of the anti-globalisation movement, which is frequently presented by the media as the only possible form of anti-capitalism. The ideology of these movements, when it is not an expression of the 'no-future' of the petty bourgeoisie (defence of small-scale production, cult of desperate violence which deepens the feeling of desperation, etc.) is only a more radical version of what is put forward by its big brothers on the so-called 'traditional' left: the defence of the interest of national capital vis-à-vis its rivals.
These ideologies serve to block the evolution of new 'searching' elements within the population and the working class in particular. As we have seen, these ideologies do not contradict the more general propaganda about the death of communism - which will continue to be used in spades - but are an important complement to it.
15. The responsibilities facing the working class are immense: nothing short of the fate of humanity is in its hands. This in turn confers tremendous responsibilities on the revolutionary minority, whose essential task in the coming period will be:
- to intervene in the day to day struggles of the class, insisting on the need for solidarity and the involvement of the widest possible number of workers in any movement to resist capitalism's attacks;
- to explain with all the means available to it (press, leaflets, meetings etc), and in a manner that is both accessible and profound, why capitalism is bankrupt, why all its 'solutions' - particularly those touted by the left and extreme left - are a fraud, and what the real proletarian alternative is;
- to assist the efforts of radical minorities - struggle groups at the workplace, discussion circles, etc - to draw the lessons of recent experience, prepare for new struggles to come, while at the same time renewing the links with the proletariat's historic traditions ;
- to intervene within the proletarian political milieu, which is entering a period of significant growth, insisting that the milieu acts as a real reference point for serious debate and clarification for all the new elements coming towards it.
The historic course towards class confrontations also provides the context for the formation of the world communist party. The proletarian milieu of today provides the matrix of the future party, but there is no guarantee that it will actually engender it. Without responsible and rigorous preparation by today's revolutionaries, the party will be still-born, and the massive class conflicts we are heading for will not take the vital step from revolt to revolution.
May 2001
The "communist left" is to a very large extent the product of those sections of the world proletariat who posed the greatest threat to capitalism during the international revolutionary wave that followed the 1914-18 war: the Russian, the German, and the Italian. It was these "national" sections which made the most telling contribution to the enrichment of marxism in the context of the new epoch of capitalist decline inaugurated by the war. But those who rose the highest also fell the lowest. We saw in previous articles in this series how the left currents of the Bolshevik party, after their first heroic attempts to understand and to resist the onset of the Stalinist counter-revolution, were almost completely wiped out by the latter, leaving the left groupings outside Russia to carry on the work of analysing what had gone wrong with the revolution in Russia and of defining the nature of the regime which had usurped its name. Here again, the German and Italian fractions of the communist left played an absolutely key role, even if they were not unique (the previous article in this series, for example, looked at the emergence of a left communist current in France in the 1920s-30s, and its contribution to understanding the Russian question). But while the proletariat in both Italy and Germany had suffered important defeats, the proletariat in Germany - which had effectively held the fate of the world revolution in its hands in 1918-19 - had certainly been crushed more brutally and bloodily by the interlocking efforts of social democracy, Stalinism and Nazism. It was this tragic fact, together with certain vital theoretical and organisational weaknesses that went back to the revolutionary wave and even before, which contributed to a process of dissolution hardly less devastating than that which had befallen the communist movement in Russia.
Without entering into a discussion about why it was the Italian left which best survived the shipwreck of the counter-revolution, we want to refute a legend maintained by those who not only claim to be the exclusive heirs of the historic Italian left, but who also reduce the communist left, which was above all an international expression of the working class, to its Italian branch alone. The Bordigist groups, which most clearly express this attitude, do of course recognise that there was an important "Russian" component of the marxist movement during the revolutionary wave and its aftermath, although here they amputate many of the most significant left currents within the Bolshevik party (Ossinski, Miasnikov, Sapranov, etc) and tend to refer approvingly only to the "official" leaders like Lenin and Trotsky. But as for the German left, Bordigism merely repeats all the distortions heaped upon it by the Communist International precisely at the time when the latter first began to open the door to opportunism - that it was anarchist, syndicalist, sectarian, etc. From this logically flows the conclusion that there can be no question today of debating with any currents who derive from this tradition or who have attempted to make a synthesis of the contributions of the different lefts.
This was emphatically not the approach adopted by Bordiga, either in the early years of the revolutionary wave, when the paper Il Soviet opened its columns to articles written by those who were part of the German left or within its orbit, such as Gorter, Pannekoek and Pankhurst; or in the period of growing reflux, as in 1926, when, as we saw in the last article in this series, Bordiga responded very fraternally to the correspondence he received from the Korsch group.
This attitude was continued by the Italian Fraction during the 1930s. Bilan was highly critical of the CI's facile denigrations of the German and Dutch left, and was very willing to open its columns to contributions from this current, as it did on the question of the period of transition. Although it had very deep disagreements with the "Dutch internationalists", it respected them as a genuine expression of the revolutionary proletariat.
With the benefit of hindsight, we can say that on many crucial questions, the German/Dutch left arrived much faster at the correct conclusions than the Italian: for example, on the bourgeois nature of the trade unions, on the relation between the party and the workers' councils, and on the issue we are dealing with in this article - the nature of the USSR and the general tendency towards state capitalism.
In our book on the Dutch Left, for example, we point out that Otto Ruhle, one of the key figures of the German left, had reached very advanced conclusions about state capitalism by 1931.
"One of the first theoreticians of council communism to investigate the phenomenon of state capitalism in more depth was Otto Rühle. In a remarkable pioneering book, published in 1931 in Berlin under the pseudonym Carl Steuermann, Rühle showed that the tendency towards state capitalism was irreversible and that no country could escape from it, because of the world wide nature of the crisis. The path taken by capitalism was not a change of nature, but of form, aimed at ensuring its survival as a system: 'The formula of salvation for the capitalist world today is: a change of form, transformation of the managers, renewing the façade, without renouncing the goal, which is profit. It is a question of looking for a way that will allow capitalism to continue on another level, another domain of evolution'.
Rühle envisaged roughly three forms of state capitalism, corresponding to different levels of capitalist development. Because of its economic backwardness, Russia represented the extreme form of state capitalism: 'the planned economy was introduced in Russia before the free capitalist economy had reached its zenith, before its vital processes had led to its senility'. In the Russian case, the private sector was totally controlled and absorbed by the state. At the other extreme, in a more developed capitalist economy, like Germany, the opposite had happened: private capital had seized control of the state. But the result was identical - the strengthening of state capitalism: 'There is a third way of arriving at state capitalism. Not through the usurping of capital by the state, but the opposite - private capital grabs hold of the state'. The second "method", which could be called "mixed", took place through the state gradually appropriating sectors of private capital: '[The state] conquers a growing influence in entire industries: little by little it becomes master of the economy'.
However, in none of these cases was state capitalism a "solution" for capitalism. It could only be a palliative for the crisis of the system: 'State capitalism is still capitalism (...) even in the form of state capitalism, capitalism cannot hope to prolong its existence for very long. The same difficulties and the same conflicts which oblige it to go from private to state capitalism reappear on a higher level'. No state capitalist "internationalisation" could resolve the problem of the market: 'The suppression of the crisis is not a problem of rationalisation, organisation, production or credit, it is purely and simply a problem of selling'. (The Dutch and German Left (English edition), p.276-7).
Although, as our book adds, Ruhle's approach contained a contradiction in that it also saw state capitalism as in some a sense a "higher" form of capitalism that was preparing the way for socialism, his book remains "a contribution to marxism of the first order". In particular, by posing state capitalism as a universal tendency in the new epoch, the ground was laid for overcoming the illusion that the Stalinist regime in Russia represented some total exception to the rest of the world system.
And yet Ruhle embodies the weaknesses of the German left as well as its undoubted strengths. The KAPD's first delegate to the Second Congress of the Communist International in 1920, Ruhle saw first hand the terrible bureaucratisation which had already gripped the Soviet state. But, without pausing to consider the origins of this process in the tragic isolation of the revolution, Ruhle quit Russia without even attempting to defend the views of his party at the Congress, and quickly rejected any position of solidarity towards the beleaguered Russian bastion. Expelled from the KAPD for this transgression, he began to develop all the premises of "councilism": the Russian revolution was no more than a bourgeois revolution; the party form was appropriate only to such revolutions; all political parties being in essence bourgeois, it was now necessary to fuse the economic and political organs of the class into a single "unified" organisation. These ideas were certainly resisted by many within the German left in the 1920s, and even in the 1930s they were by no means universally accepted within the council communist movement, as can be seen from the text from Rate Korrespondenz we published in IR 105. But they certainly did wreak a great deal of havoc in the German/Dutch left and greatly accelerated its organisational collapse; at the same time, by denying the proletarian character of the Russian revolution and the Bolshevik party, they blocked any possible understanding of the process of degeneration to which both succumbed. These views really did reflect the weight of anarchism on the German workers' movement, and made it far easier for the entire German left communist tradition to be tarred with the anarchist brush.
In the previous article in this series, we saw that, within the milieu around Trotsky's left opposition, including many of the groups who were moving towards the positions of the communist left, there was a great deal of confusion about the issue of the USSR in the late 20s and the 30s, not least the notion of the bureaucracy as some kind of new class unforeseen by marxism. Given the deep theoretical weaknesses which also predominated in the German and Dutch left on this question, it is hardly surprising that the Italian Fraction approached the problem with a considerable amount of caution. Compared to many proletarian groups, they were very slow in coming to recognise the real nature of Stalinist Russia. But because they were solidly anchored in the marxist method, their ultimate conclusions were more consistent and thorough going.
The Fraction approached the "Russian enigma" in the same way as they approached all the other aspects of the balance sheet that had to be drawn from the titanic revolutionary struggles in the period after the first world war - and above all, from the tragic defeats the proletariat had suffered: with patience and rigour, avoiding any hasty judgements, grounding themselves on the conclusions which the class had acquired once and for all before calling any hard-won positions into questions. With regard to the nature of the USSR, the Fraction was in direct continuity with Bordiga's reply to Korsch which we looked at in the last article: for them what was definitively established was the proletarian character of the October revolution and of the Bolshevik party which had led it. Indeed we can say that the Fraction's growing understanding of the epoch inaugurated by the war - the epoch of capitalist decadence - enabled them to see more clearly than Bordiga that only the proletarian revolution was on the agenda of history in all countries. They thus had no time for any of the speculations about the Russian revolution having been a "bourgeois" or "dual" revolution. An idea which, as we have seen, had taken an increasing hold on the German and Dutch left. For Bilan, rejecting the proletarian character of the October revolution could only result in a kind of "proletarian nihilism" - a real loss of confidence in the capacity of the working class ever to make its own revolution (the phrase is from Vercesi's article 'The Soviet state' in the series 'Party, International, State' in Bilan no. 21).
None of this meant that the Fraction was wedded to the notion of the "invariance of marxism" since 1848, which was to become an article of faith for latter-day Bordigists. On the contrary: from the start - the editorial in Bilan no. 1 in fact - they committed themselves to examining the lessons of the recent class battles "without dogmatism or ostracism"; and this soon led them to call for a fundamental revision of some of the basic theses of the Communist International, for example on the national question. With regard to the USSR, while insisting on the proletarian nature of October, they also recognised that in the intervening years a profound transformation had taken place, so that from being a factor in the defence and extension of the world revolution, the "proletarian state" had assumed a counter-revolutionary role on a world scale.
An equally crucial starting point for the Fraction was that the international needs of the proletariat always took precedence over any local or national expression, and that under no circumstances could the principle of proletarian internationalism be compromised. This is why the Communist Party of Italy had always argued that the International must consider itself as a single world party whose decisions were binding on all its sections, even those, like the Russian, which held state power in particular countries; this is also why the Italian left immediately sided with Trotsky's opposition in its combat against Stalin's theory of socialism in one country. Indeed, for the Fraction, "It is not only impossible to build socialism in one country, but even to establish its basis. In countries where the proletariat has been victorious, it cannot be a question of realising the conditions for socialism (through the free management of the economy by the workers), it can only be a matter of safeguarding the revolution, which requires the maintenance of all the proletariat's class institutions" ('Nature and evolution of the Russian revolution - response to comrade Hennaut', Bilan 35, September 1936, p 1171). Here the Fraction went further than Trotsky, who with his theory of "primitive socialist accumulation" considered that Russia had indeed begun to lay the foundations for a socialist society, even if he rejected Stalin's claim that such a society had already arrived. For the Italian left, the proletariat could only really establish its political domination in one country, and even this would inevitably be undermined by the isolation of the revolution.
And yet despite this fundamental clarity, the majority position within the Fraction was, in appearance at least, similar to that of Trotsky's: the USSR remained a proletarian state, even though profoundly degenerated, on the basis that the bourgeoisie had been expropriated and that property remained in the hands of the state which had arisen out of the October revolution. The Stalinist bureaucracy was defined as a parasitic stratum, but it was not seen as a class - whether a capitalist class or some new class unforeseen by marxism: "The Russian bureaucracy is not a class, still less a ruling class, given that there are particular rights over production outside the private ownership of the means of production, and that in Russia the essentials of collectivisation still survive. It is certainly true that the Russian bureaucracy consumes a large part of social labour, but this is the case for any social parasitism, which should not be confused with class exploitation" (, 'Problems of the period of transition, part 4' Bilan no. 37, November-December 1936).
In the early years of the Fraction's life, the question of whether to defend this regime was not fully resolved, and it remained ambiguous in the first issue of Bilan, in 1933, where the tone is one of alerting the proletariat to the possibility of a definitive betrayal: "The left fractions have the duty to alert the proletariat of the role which the USSR has already played in the workers' movement, to show right now the evolution that the proletarian state will follow under the leadership of centrism. From now on, there must be a flagrant desolidarisation with the policy centrism has imposed on the workers' state. The alarm must be sounded within the working class against the position that centrism will impose on the Russian state not in its interests, but against its interests. Tomorrow, and this must be said today, centrism will betray the interests of the proletariat.
Such a vigorous attitude has the task of focussing the attention of the proletarians, of freeing members of the party from the grip of centrism, of really defending the workers' state. It alone can mobilise energies for the struggle which will keep October 1917 for the proletariat" ('Towards the Two and Three Quarter International?' Bilan no. 1 November 1933, p.26).
At the same time, the Fraction was always keenly aware of the necessity to follow the evolution of the world situation and to judge the question of the defence of the USSR according to a simple but clear criterion: was it or was it not playing a completely counter-revolutionary role on the international level? Did any policy of defence undermine the possibility of maintaining a strictly internationalist role in all countries? If so, then this far outweighed the issue of whether there were any concrete "gains" surviving form the October revolution within the confines of Russia. And here their point of departure was radically different from that of Trotsky, for whom the "proletarian" character of the regime was in itself sufficient justification for a policy of defencism, regardless of its role on the world arena.
Bilan's approach to this problem was intimately linked to their conception of the historic course: from 1933 onwards the Fraction declared with growing certainty that the proletariat had suffered a profound defeat, and that the course was now open to a second world war. The triumph of Nazism in Germany was one proof of this; the enrolment of the proletariat of the "democratic" countries behind the flag of anti-fascism was another; but a further confirmation was precisely the "victory of centrism" - the term that Bilan still used to describe Stalinism - within the USSR and the Communist parties, and along with this, the increasing incorporation of the Soviet Union into the march towards a new imperialist re-division of the globe. This was evident to Bilan in 1933, when the USSR was first recognised by the USA (an event described as "a victory for the world wide counter-revolution" in the title of its article in Bilan 2, December 1933). A few months later, Russia was granted entry to the League of Nations. "Russia's entry into the League of Nations immediately poses the problem of its participation in one of the imperialist blocs for the next war" ('Soviet Russia enters the concert of imperialist brigands', Bilan no. 8, June 1934, p 263). The brutally anti-working class role of Stalinism was further confirmed by its role in the massacre of the workers in Spain, and by the Moscow trials, behind which an entire generation of revolutionaries was being wiped out.
These developments led the Fraction to reject once and for all any policy of defence of the USSR. This in turn marked a further stage in the break between the Fraction and Trotskyism. For the latter, there existed a fundamental contradiction between the "proletarian state" and world capital. The latter had an objective interest in uniting against it, and therefore it was the duty of revolutionaries to defend it from imperialist attack. For Bilan however it was clear that world capitalism could quite easily adapt to the existence of the Soviet state and its nationalised economy, both on the economic level and, above all, on the military level. They predicted with chilling accuracy that the USSR would be fully integrated into one or other of the two imperialist blocs that would engage in the forthcoming war, even if the issue of which particular bloc it would join had not yet been decided. The Fraction thus argued very explicitly that the Trotskyist position of defencism could only lead to the abandoning of internationalism in the face of imperialist war:
"? according to the Bolshevik-Leninists, in the case of an alliance between the USSR with an imperialist state or an imperialist grouping against another grouping, the international proletariat still has to defend the USSR. The proletariat of an allied country would maintain its implacable hostility towards its imperialist government, but in practise it could not in all circumstances act like the proletariat of a country opposed to Russia. Thus, it would be for example 'absurd and criminal', in a situation of war between the USSR and Japan, for the American proletariat to sabotage the sending of American arms to the USSR.
Naturally we have nothing in common with these positions. Once it had entered into an imperialist war, Russia must be considered, not as an object in itself, but as an instrument of the imperialist war; it must be considered in relation to the struggle for the world revolution, i.e. in relation to the struggle for the proletarian insurrection in all countries.
The position of the Bolshevik Leninists is little different from that of the centrists and left socialists. You have to defend Russia, even if it allied with an imperialist state, while carrying on a pitiless struggle against the 'ally'. But this 'pitiless struggle' already commits class treason as soon as it is a question of banning strikes against the 'allied' bourgeoisie. The specific weapon of the proletarian struggle is precisely the strike and to forbid its use against a bourgeoisie can only strengthen the latter and prevent any real struggle. How can the workers of a bourgeoisie allied to Russia struggle pitilessly against the latter, if they are not able to unleash strike movements?
We consider that in case of war, the proletariat of all countries, including Russia, would have the duty to concentrate itself with a view to transforming the imperialist war into a civil war. The USSR's participation in a war of pillage would not change the essential character of the war and the proletarian state could only end up falling under the blows of the social contradictions brought to a head by such participation" ('From the Two and Three Quarter International to the Second International', Bilan 10, August 1934, p 345-6). This passage is peculiarly prophetic: for the Trotskyists in the second world war, the 'defence of the USSR' became a mere pretext for the defence of the national interests of their own countries.
Far from being a force intrinsically hostile to world capital, the Stalinist bureaucracy was seen as its agent - as the force through which the Russian working class was subjected to capitalist exploitation. In a number of articles, Bilan indeed showed very cogently that this exploitation was precisely that - a form of capitalist exploitation: "...in Russia, as in other countries, the frenzied rush to industrialise leads inexorably to making man a cog in the wheel of industrial production. The dizzying level reached by technology demands the socialist organisation of society. The incessant progress of industrialisation should harmonise with the interests of the workers, otherwise the latter become prisoners and finally slaves of economic forces. The capitalist regime is the expression of this slavery because through economic and social cataclysms, it finds in it the source of its domination over the working class. In Russia, it is under the law of capitalist accumulation that the gigantic construction of workshops is taking place, and the workers are at the mercy of the logic of this industrialisation: railway accidents here, explosions in the mines there, factor catastrophes somewhere else?" ('The Moscow Trial', Bilan No. 39, January-February 1937, p1271). Furthermore, Bilan recognised that the utterly ferocious nature of this exploitation was determined by the fact that the USSR's "building of socialism", the accelerated industrialisation of the 1930s, was in fact the building of a war economy in preparation for the next world holocaust: "The Soviet Union, like the capitalist states to which it is linked, must work towards the war which is getting closer and closer: the essential industry of the economy must therefore be the arms industry, which demands a ceaselessly growing supply of capital" ('The assassination of Kyrov, the suppression of bread vouchers in the USSR' Bilan 14, January 1935,.p 467). Or again: "the centrist bureaucracy is extracting surplus value from its workers and peasants for the preparation of imperialist war. The October revolution, which came out of the struggle against imperialist war, is being exploited by its degenerated epigones to push the new generations into the future imperialist war" ('The Moscow butchery'. Bilan 34, August-September 1936, p 1117).
Here the contrast with Trotsky's approach is patently obvious: while Trotsky could not hold back, in The Revolution Betrayed, from singing hymns to the USSR's enormous economic "achievements", which had supposedly demonstrated the "superiority of socialism". Bilan retorted that in no sense could progress towards socialism be measured by the growth of constant capital, but only by real increases in the living and working conditions of the masses. "If the bourgeoisie establishes its bible on the necessity for a continuous growth of surplus value in order to convert it into capital in the common interest of all classes (sic), the proletariat by contrast must go in the direction of a constant diminution of unpaid labour, which inevitably has the consequences of a much slower rhythm of accumulation than in the capitalist economy" ('L'Etat Sovietique' Bilan 21, July-August 1935, p720). This view was, moreover, rooted in Bilan's understanding of capitalist decadence: the refusal to acknowledge that Stalinist industrialisation was a "progressive" phenomenon was based not only on the recognition that it was based on the absolute misery of the masses, but also on an understanding of its historic function as part of the build-up towards an imperialist war, the latter being the most overt expression of the regressive nature of the capitalist system.
When we also recall that Bilan was perfectly acquainted with the passage in AntiDuhring where Engels rejects the notion that statification in itself has a socialist character, and indeed more than once used this argument to refute the claims of the Stalinist apologists, (cf 'L'Etat Sovietique', op cit; 'Problems of the period of transition' in Bilan 37), we can see how very close Bilan came to seeing the USSR under Stalin as a capitalist and imperialist regime. Finally, it was also being compelled to recognise that capitalism everywhere was more and more relying on state intervention to save it from the effects of the world economic slump and to prepare for the coming war. The best example of this analysis is contained in the articles on the De Man plan in Belgium in Bilan nos. 4 and 5. It could hardly have ignored the similarities between what was happening in Nazi Germany, the democratic countries, and the USSR.
And yet still Bilan hesitated to jettison the concept of the USSR as a proletarian state. It was perfectly well aware that the Russian proletariat was being exploited, but it tended to express this as a relation directly imposed on it by world capital without the mediation of a national bourgeoisie: the Stalinist bureaucracy was seen as an "agent of world capital" rather than as an expression of Russian national capital with its own imperialist dynamic. This emphasis on the primary role of world capital was fully in line with its internationalist vision and its profound understanding that capitalism is first and foremost a global system of domination. But global capital, the world economy, is no abstraction existing outside the clash of competing units of national capital. It was this last piece of the puzzle that the Fraction didn't succeed in fitting into place.
All the same, its later writings seem to express a growing intuition about the contradictions in its position, and its arguments in favour of the proletarian state thesis were becoming increasingly defensive and shaky:
"Despite the October revolution, the whole edifice, which from the first to the last stone is being built on the basis of the martyrdom of the Russian workers, must be swept aside because this is the only condition that makes it possible to affirm a class position in the USSR. Necessity to negate the 'building of socialism' by the proletarian revolution - this is where the involution of the last few years has led the Russian proletariat. If you object that the idea of a proletarian revolution against a proletarian state is a nonsense and that phenomena must be harmonised by calling this state a bourgeois state, we reply that those who reason in this way are simply expressing a confusion on the problem already dealt with by our masters: the relations between the proletariat and the state. It's a confusion which leads them to the other extreme: participation in the Sacred Union behind the capitalist state in Catalonia. Which proves that both with Trotsky who under the pretext of defending the conquests of October defends the Russian state, and with those who talk about a capitalist state in Russia there is an alteration of marxism which leads these people to defend the capitalist state under threat in Spain"" ('When the butchers speak', Bilan no. 41, May-June 1937, p 1339). This argument was strongly marked by Bilan's polemic with groups like Union Communiste and the Ligue des Communistes Internationalistes on the war in Spain; but it fails to show the logical link between defending the imperialist war in Spain and concluding that Russia had become a capitalist state.
In fact a number of comrades within the Fraction itself began to call the thesis of the proletarian state into question, and they were by no means identical to the minority which fell under the influence of groups like the Union or the LCI on the question of Spain. But whatever discussion took place within the Fraction on this issue in the second half of the 1930s was eclipsed by another debate provoked itself by the development of the war economy on an international scale - the debate with Vercesi, who had begun to argue that capital's resort to the war economy had absorbed the crisis and eliminated the necessity for another world war. The Fraction was literally consumed by this debate, and with Vercesi's ideas influencing the majority, the Fraction was thrown into total disarray by the outbreak of the war (see our book on the Italian left for a more developed account of this debate).
It had always been axiomatic that the war would finally clarify the problem of the USSR, and so it proved. It was no accident that those who had opposed Vercesi's revisionism were also the most active in calling for the reconstitution of the Italian Fraction and the formation of a French nucleus of the communist left. It was these same comrades who led the debate on the question of the USSR. In its initial statement of principles in 1942 the French nucleus still defined the USSR as an "instrument of world imperialism". But by 1944 the majority position was perfectly clear. "The communist vanguard will be able to carry out its task as the proletariat's guide towards the revolution to the extent that it is able to free itself of the great lie of the 'proletarian nature' of the Russian state and to show it for what it is, to reveal its counter-revolutionary, capitalist and imperialist nature and function.
It is enough to note that the goal of production remains the extraction of surplus value, to affirm the capitalist character of the economy. The Russian state has participated in the course towards war, not only because of its counter-revolutionary function in crushing the proletariat, but because of its own capitalist nature, through the need to defend its sources of raw materials, through the necessity to ensure its place on the world market where it realises its surplus value, through the desire, the need, to enlarge its economic spheres of influence and to ensure its access routes" ('The non-proletarian nature of the Russian state and its counter-revolutionary function', Bulletin international de discussion, no. 6, June 1944). The USSR had its own imperialist dynamic originating in the accumulation process; driven therefore to expand because accumulation cannot take place in a closed circle; the bureaucracy was thus a ruling class in the fullest sense of the word. These insights were amply confirmed by the USSR's ruthless imperialist expansion into eastern Europe at the end of the war.
The process of clarification continued after the war, again principally with the French group which took the name Gauche Communiste de France. The discussions also went on within the newly formed Partito Comunista Internazionalista, but unfortunately they are not well known. It would appear that there was a great deal of heterogeneity. Some of the comrades of the PCInt developed positions very close to those of the GCF; others however were sunk in confusion. The GCF article 'Private Property and collective property', Internationalisme no 10, 1946 (re-published in International Review 61) criticises Vercesi, who had joined the PCInt, for holding on to the illusion that, even after the war, the USSR could still be defined as a proletarian state; Bordiga for his part, was resorting to the meaningless term "state industrialism" at this point; and although he later came to see the USSR as capitalist, he never accepted the term state capitalism or its significance as an expression of capitalist decadence. The article in Internationalisme 10, by contrast, shows that the GCF had brought together all the essential strands of the problem. In its theoretical studies in the late 40s and early 50s, the GCF drew all the strands together. State capitalism was analysed as the "the form corresponding to the decadent phase of capitalism, just as monopoly capitalism corresponded to its phase of full development"; moreover, it was not something restricted to Russia: "state capitalism isn't the speciality of a one bourgeois faction or of a particular ideological school. We've seen it installed in democratic America and Hitler's Germany, in 'Labour' Britain and 'Soviet' Russia". By going beyond the mystification that the abolition of individual 'private property' got rid of capitalism, the GCF was able to locate its analysis in the material roots of capitalist production: "The Russian experience teaches us and reminds us that it's not the capitalists who make capitalism, but the reverse; it's capitalism which engenders capitalists?.The capitalist principle of production can continue to exist after the juridical, even the material disappearance of capitalists as the beneficiaries of surplus value. In this case, surplus value, just as under private capitalism, is reinvested in the production process in order to extract a greater mass of surplus value.
Before long, the existence of surplus value gives rise to men who form the class that appropriates surplus value. The function creates the organ. Whether they are parasites, bureaucrats or technicians who participate in production, whether surplus value is redistributed in a direct manner, or indirectly through the intervention of the state, in the form of high salaries or various types of privileges (as in the case of Russia), this changes nothing about the fact that we are dealing with the rise of a new capitalist class".
The GCF, in continuity with Bilan's studies of the transition period, also drew out the necessary implications for this with regard to the proletariat's economic policy after the seizure of political power: on the one hand, the refusal to confuse statification with socialism, and the recognition that, after the disappearance of private capitalists, "the real danger of a return to capitalism will come essentially from the state sector. All the more because here capitalism attains an impersonal, almost ethereal form. Statification can serve to camouflage, for a considerable period, a process opposed to socialism". And on the other hand, the necessity for a proletarian economic policy which radically attacks the basic process of capital accumulation: "The capitalist principle of accumulated labour commanding living labour with a view to producing surplus value must be replaced by the principle of living labour commanding accumulated labour with a view to producing consumer goods to satisfy the needs of society's members". This did not mean that it was possible to abolish surplus labour as such, especially in the immediate aftermath of the revolution when a whole process of social reconstruction would be required. Nevertheless, the tendency to overturn the capitalist ratio between what the proletariat produced and what it consumed would have to serve "as an indication of which way the economy is going, as a barometer of the class nature of production".
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It was not accidental that the GCF had no fear about including the best insights of the German/Dutch left in its programmatic bases. In the post war period, the GCF devoted considerable effort to reopening discussion with this branch of the communist left (see our pamphlet La Gauche Communiste de France). Its clarity on issues such as the role of the trade unions and relationship between the party and the workers councils was certainly the fruit of this work of synthesis. But the same can also be said about its understanding of the question of state capitalism: the insights that the German left had developed some decades before were now integrated into the overall theoretical coherence of the Italian Fraction.
This did not mean that the whole problem of state capitalism had been closed once and for all: in particular, the collapse of the Stalinist regimes at the end of the 1980s was to demand further reflection and clarification about the way the capitalist economic crises affected these regimes and brought about their demise. But what had been settled once and for all by the end of the second imperialist holocaust was the Russian question as a class frontier: from now on, only those who recognised the capitalist and imperialist nature of the Stalinist regimes were able to remain within the proletarian camp and to defend internationalist principles in the face of imperialist war. The negative proof of this is provided by the trajectory of Trotskyism, whose defence of the USSR had contributed to their betrayal of internationalism during the war, and whose continued adherence to the thesis of the 'degenerated workers' state' turned them into apologists of the Russian imperialist bloc during the Cold War. The positive proof is provided by the groups of the communist left, whose capacity to defend and develop marxism in the period of capitalist decadence enabled them to finally resolve the Russian "enigma", and to keep the banner of authentic communism free from the stains of bourgeois propaganda.
CDW
In early May 2001, the International Communist Current held its 14th Congress.
As for any organisation in the workers' movement, its Congress is the ICC's sovereign body. This is the moment when the organisation evaluates its work since the previous Congress, and lays down its perspectives for the period to come.
This evaluation, these perspectives, are not drawn up in a vacuum. They are strictly determined by the conditions wherein the organisation is called to live up to its responsibilities, and first and foremost, of course, by the general historical context.
The Congress must therefore analyse the world as it is today, what is at stake in the events that affect social life on the economic level (which as marxists know, in the final analysis determines all the other aspects), at the level of the political life of the ruling class, and therefore of the conflicts between its different fractions, and finally at the level of the life of the only class capable of overthrowing the existing social order: the proletariat.
In examining the latter's situation, it is up to communists to examine not only the present state and the perspectives of the class struggle, the extent to which the working masses are aware of what is at stake in these struggles, but also the state and activity of the existing communist forces, which are a part of the proletariat.
Finally, and in this context, the Congress must examine the activity of our own organisation, and put forward the perspectives which will allow us to live up to our responsibilities within the class.
These are the points which this presentation of our 14th International Congress will consider.
The world today
In this same issue of the International Review, we are publishing the resolution on the international situation adopted by the Congress, which synthesises the reports presented to the Congress and the discussions based on these reports. In this sense, we need not go over every aspect of the discussions on the international situation. Suffice it to quote from the beginning of the resolution, which establishes the framework for what is at stake in the world today: "The alternative facing humanity at the beginning of the 21st century is the same as the one which faced it at the beginning of the 20th: the descent into barbarism or the renewal of society through the communist revolution. The revolutionary marxists who insisted on this inescapable dilemma in the turbulent period 1914-23 could hardly have imagined that their political descendants would still be obliged to insist on it again at the start of the new millennium. Indeed, even the 'post-68' generation of revolutionaries, who emerged from the revival of proletarian struggles after the long counter-revolution that set in during the 1920s, did not really expect that a declining capitalism could be quite so adept at living with its own contradictions as it has proved to be since the 1960s.
For the bourgeoisie, all this is further proof that capitalism is the last and now the only possible form of human society, that the communist project was never more than a utopian dream. This notion, a necessary cornerstone of all bourgeois ideology, was granted an apparent historical verification by the collapse of the 'Communist' bloc in 1989-91 (...) [Point 1]
Future generations will surely look at the bourgeois rationalisations of this decade with the utmost contempt; they will certainly see this period as one of unprecedented blindness, stupidity, horror and suffering (...) Humanity today does not merely face the prospect of barbarism in the future: the descent has already begun and it bears with it the danger of gradually eating away at the very premises of any future social regeneration. But contrary to the propaganda campaigns of the ruling class, the counter-force to the tendency towards barbarism - the communist revolution, logical culmination of the struggle of the working class against capitalist exploitation - is no utopia, but remains a necessity demanded by the death agony of the present mode of production, and at the same time a concrete possibility given that the working class has neither disappeared nor been decisively defeated [Point 2]".
In fact, a major part of each of the reports presented, discussed, and adopted at the Congress1 was devoted to refuting the bourgeoisie's daily flood of lies, designed both to reassure itself and to justify its system's survival in the eyes of the exploited masses. This is because the sole aim of revolutionaries' analyses and discussions on the situation they are confronted with, is to sharpen as well as they can, the proletariat's weapons for its struggle against capitalism. The workers' movement understood long since that the proletariat's greatest strength, apart from its organisation, is its consciousness: a consciousness based on a profound understanding of the world it must transform and the enemy it must defeat. This is why the fighting nature of the Congress' documents and discussions in no way means that our organisation has succumbed to the temptation of being content with asserting mere slogans to denounce the lies of the bourgeoisie, quite the contrary. The depth with which revolutionaries examine a question is an integral part of their struggle. This has been a constant feature of the workers' movement for more than 150 years, but today its importance is still more fundamental. In a society in decadence since World War I, and which today is rotting on its feet, the ruling class is incapable of generating the slightest rational or coherent social thinking, still less any depth of thought. All it is able to do is to produce a proliferation of ideological gadgets, each one more superficial than the last but which are nonetheless presented as "profound truths" ("capitalism's definitive victory over communism", the "supreme values" of democracy, "globalisation", etc), even though they are devoid of the slightest originality, since their supposed "newness" is nothing but a lick of paint over the most shameless old platitudes. But however vacuous bourgeois "thought" may be today, thanks to the incessant din of the media it still manages to fill the workers' heads, and to colonise their minds. In this sense, the communists' efforts to get to the root of things is not just a means to understand the world today as fully as possible, it is the vital antidote to the destruction of thought, which is one expression of the decomposition into which society is plunging today. This is why our organisation decided that a major characteristic of the reports prepared for the Congress should be, not just the analysis of the three essential aspects of the world situation - the economic crisis, imperialist conflicts, and the balance of class forces between bourgeoisie and proletariat and therefore the perspectives for the proletarian struggle - but also the way in which the workers' movement posed these questions in the past.
At the turn of the century, such an approach was all the more necessary in that the last decade of the 20th century witnessed the overturning of a whole series of "givens" of the previous world situation.
At the end of 1989, the Eastern bloc collapsed like a house of cards, leading not only to the disintegration of the imperialist alignments which had emerged from the Yalta agreements of 1945, but also to a profound retreat by the working class, confronted as it was with an enormous campaign on the "end of communism". Such upheavals obviously demand that revolutionaries bring their analyses up to date, which is what our organisation has done in the course of events. Nonetheless, we thought it important to go back over the implications of these earthshaking events of 1989, and over two aspects in particular:
- how imperialist antagonisms find expression once the world is no longer divided into two blocs, as it had been since World War II;
- the notion of the historic course, in a period when because of the disappearance of the blocs, a new world war is no longer on the agenda.
Clarity on these questions is all the more important, in that they are the object of a good deal of confusion among the organisations of the Communist Left today. The Congress reports and resolutions therefore aimed to answer these confusions, which are in fact so many concessions to the ideological themes of the ruling class. In particular, these documents:
- refute the idea that there is any economic "rationality" underlying the wars that are breaking out in the present period (Point 9 of the resolution);
- insist that "the historic course towards massive class confrontations, opened by the international wave of struggles in 1968-72, has not been overturned. The working class has proved itself to be a barrier to world war. And while the danger remains that the more insidious process of decomposition could gradually overwhelm the class without capitalism having to inflict a frontal defeat upon it, the class still represents a historic obstacle to the full working out of capitalism's slide into military barbarism. More than this: it still retains the capacity to resist the effects of social decomposition through the development of its struggles and the consequent strengthening of its sense of identity and solidarity, which can offer a real alternative to the atomisation, the self-destructive violence and despair typical of this rotting system" (Point 13).
This concern to examine in detail, and eventually to criticise, the analyses of the present historic situation that exist within the proletarian political milieu, is part of our organisation's constant effort to define and clarify the responsibilities of revolutionary groups today - responsibilities which of course involve more than simply the analysis of the situation.
The responsibilities of revolutionary groups
The reports, resolution, and discussions at the Congress highlighted the existence today, after a decade of great difficulties, of a certain subterranean maturation of consciousness within the working class.
"The subterranean maturation of class consciousness, in a context where the historic course remains one towards class confrontations, expresses a process of reflection which - although it still only concerns a minority - is affecting wider sectors of the class, and is going deeper than during the period that followed 1989. The visible expressions of this maturation include:
- the numerical growth in the main organisations of the proletarian milieu, and in the environment of their sympathisers and contacts;
- the growing influence of the communist left in the swamp, including in parts of the anarchist milieu;
- the growing potential for the creation and development of proletarian discussion circles;
- certain experiments in regrouping minorities of combative workers, beginning to pose the problems of resistance to capital's attacks, but also the lessons of the struggles before 1989;
- some workers' struggles - though these remain for the moment the exception rather than the rule - where the class' self-activity and distrust for the trades unions is beginning to find expression" (Resolution on the activities of the ICC).
This situation lays new responsibilities on the groups who draw their origins from the Communist Left. An important part of the Congress work was therefore devoted to examining the evolution of these groups. This highlighted their difficulty in living up to their responsibilities. On the one hand, the cessation of the publication of Daad en Gedachte in Holland means that there is no longer any organised expression of the Dutch-German branch of the Communist Left (the "councilist" current). On the other hand, the groups which come from the tradition of the Italian Left (the various groups of the "Bordigist" tradition, each of which calls itself the International Communist Party, as well as the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party) remain closed in on themselves, or are increasingly withdrawing into sectarianism, as we have already pointed out two years ago following their refusal to adopt a common position against the war in Kosovo (see International Review n°98).
And yet it is important that the new elements turning towards the Communist Left should find there the tradition of the Left in its entirety: a tradition in which were intimately connected the greatest rigour at the level of its political positions, and an attitude of openness in discussion with other groups of the Communist Left. This is a precondition for these organisations to play a real part in the emerging process of a new development of consciousness in the proletariat.
This is why our resolution on the international situation includes the specific responsibilities of our own organisation within those of today's revolutionary current as a whole:
"The responsibilities facing the working class are immense: nothing short of the fate of humanity is in its hands. This in turn confers tremendous responsibilities on the revolutionary minority, whose essential task in the coming period will be:
- to intervene in the day to day struggles of the class, insisting on the need for solidarity and the involvement of the widest possible number of workers in any movement to resist capitalism's attacks;
- to explain with all the means available to it (press, leaflets, meetings etc), and in a manner that is both a accessible and profound, why capitalism is bankrupt, why all its 'solutions' - particularly those touted by the left and extreme left - are a fraud, and what the real proletarian alternative is;
- to assist the efforts of radical minorities - struggle groups at the workplace, discussion circles, etc - to draw the lessons of recent experience, prepare for new struggles to come, while at the same time renewing the links with the proletariat's historic traditions ;
- to intervene within the proletarian political milieu, which is entering a period of significant growth, insisting that the milieu acts as a real reference point for serious debate and clarification for all the new elements coming towards it.
The historic course towards class confrontations also provides the context for the formation of the world communist party. The proletarian milieu of today provides the matrix of the future party, but there is no guarantee that it will actually engender it. Without responsible and rigorous preparation by today's revolutionaries, the party will be still-born, and the massive class conflicts we are heading for will not take the vital step from revolt to revolution" (Point 15).
The Congress considered that our organisation can evaluate positively its ability to carry out its responsibilities during the last two years. Nonetheless, it concluded that the ICC, in common with the rest of the class, is subject to the damaging pressure of society's increasing decomposition and that consequently it should remain vigilant against the different expressions of this pressure, as much in its efforts at working out its own analyses and political positions as in its organisational life. More than ever, the fight to build a communist organisation, vital instrument of the proletariat's revolutionary struggle, is a permanent and daily one.
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/105_crisis_letter_01.htm
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/105_crisis_letter_02.htm#_ftn1
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/105_crisis_letter_02.htm#_ftn2
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/105_crisis_letter_02.htm#_ftn3
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/105_crisis_letter_02.htm#_ftn4
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/105_crisis_letter_02.htm#_ftn5
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/105_crisis_letter_02.htm#_ftn6
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/105_crisis_letter_02.htm#_ftn7
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/105_crisis_letter_02.htm#_ftn8
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/105_crisis_letter_02.htm#_ftn9
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/105_crisis_letter_02.htm#_ftn10
[12] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/105_crisis_letter_02.htm#_ftn11
[13] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/105_crisis_letter_02.htm#_ftnref1
[14] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/105_crisis_letter_02.htm#_ftnref2
[15] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/105_crisis_letter_02.htm#_ftnref3
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[17] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/105_crisis_letter_02.htm#_ftnref5
[18] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/105_crisis_letter_02.htm#_ftnref6
[19] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/105_crisis_letter_02.htm#_ftnref7
[20] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/105_crisis_letter_02.htm#_ftnref8
[21] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/105_crisis_letter_02.htm#_ftnref9
[22] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/105_crisis_letter_02.htm#_ftnref10
[23] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/105_crisis_letter_02.htm#_ftnref11
[24] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/readers-letters
[25] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/324/crisis-theories
[26] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/15/decadence-capitalism
[27] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/30/economics
[28] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/106_crisis_letter_02_reply.htm#_ftn1
[29] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/106_crisis_letter_02_reply.htm#_ftn2
[30] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/106_crisis_letter_02_reply.htm#_ftn3
[31] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/106_crisis_letter_02_reply.htm#_ftn4
[32] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/106_crisis_letter_02_reply.htm#_ftn5
[33] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/106_crisis_letter_02_reply.htm#_ftn6
[34] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/106_crisis_letter_02_reply.htm#_ftn7
[35] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/106_crisis_letter_02_reply.htm#_ftn8
[36] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/106_crisis_letter_02_reply.htm#_ftnref1
[37] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/106_crisis_letter_02_reply.htm#_ftnref2
[38] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/106_crisis_letter_02_reply.htm#_ftnref3
[39] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/106_crisis_letter_02_reply.htm#_ftnref4
[40] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/106_crisis_letter_02_reply.htm#_ftnref5
[41] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/106_crisis_letter_02_reply.htm#_ftnref6
[42] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/106_crisis_letter_02_reply.htm#_ftnref7
[43] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/106_crisis_letter_02_reply.htm#_ftnref8
[44] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/congress-resolutions
[45] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/50/united-states
[46] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/war-iraq
[47] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/911
[48] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/1937/communist-programme-revolutions-1917-1923
[49] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/history-workers-movement/1917-russian-revolution
[50] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/14/proletarian-revolution
[51] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/26/revolutionary-wave-1917-1923
[52] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/communist-left
[53] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/italian-left
[54] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/international-communist-current