The International Situation

Extracts from the report to the 6th Congress of the ICC (August 1985)

A generalized crisis of over-production

 

The accelerating tendency towards absolute pauperazation

Today, in 1985, 40,000 human beings die of hunger each day, and the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) predicts that by the year 2000, 200,000,000 men women and children will have died from malnutrition. Still, according to the FAO, a third of the Third World's population does not even dispose of the recognized minimum for physical subsistence; 835 million inhabitants of the planet have a yearly income of less than $75.

In Brazil, a country once presented as an ex­ample of development, the health minister has admitted that almost half the population (55 million people) is ill: tuberculosis, leprosy, malaria, schisostamiosis, and other parasitic diseases; 18 million suffer from mental ill­ness. In Brazil's seven north-eastern states, more than half the children die before the age of five. Millions of others are blind (protein deficiency) underfed, diseased. The Brazilian government estimates the number of abandoned children at 15 million. The Brazilian miracle has been forgotten.

Africa's 450 million inhabitants have the world's lowest life expectancy: on average, 42 years. Africa has the highest rate of infant mortality: 137 deaths during the first year per 1,000 births. From Morocco to Ethionia, famine is raging throughout the Sahel: in 1984, 300,000 died of hunger in Ethiopia, 100,000 in Mozambique. Since 1982, in Bangladesh, 800,000 have lost their sight through protein deficiency.

For more than two-thirds of the planet's population, every day and night is a never-ending Calvary.

The 1980s, which have witnessed the constant increase in misery throughout the world, to a point unknown in humanity's history, which has never before seen such a world-wide extension of famine, have definitively put an end to the illusions in any kind of development in the under-developed countries. The gap between developed countries and the constantly under-dev­eloped countries is growing unceasingly. Today, 30% of the world's population lives in the industrialized countries of Europe (USSR included), North America, Australia and Japan, representing 82% of world production, and 91% of all exports.

It is certainly not the least of paradoxes to see the bourgeoisie using the misery for which its system of exploitation is responsible to make the proletarians of the industrialized world, who produce the major part of the planet's wealth, think that they are privileged, and would be wrong to complain. The aim of the incessant media campaigns on the famine, far from easing the suffering of the hungry, in which they have long since shown themselves totally ineffective, is to create a feeling of guilt in this determin­ing fraction of the world proletariat at the heart of the industrialized metropoles, to make it accept its own worsening misery without reacting.

The first half of the ‘80s has been marked by a brutal drop in living standards in the developed countries. In this respect, the evolution of unemployment is particularly significant; thus, for the European countries of the OECD, it has gone from 2.9% in 1968 to 6.2% in 1979, and 11.1% at the beginning of 1985, reaching 21.6% in Spain, and 13.3% in the world's oldest industry­ ial country: Great Britain. Even then, these official (OECD) figures are profoundly underestimated. 25 million workers are unemployed in Western Europe and are seeing their and their families' living conditions getting worse as state benefits drop. But unemployment is only an inadequate indication of the developing poverty in the industrialized countries. Thus, in France, while unemployment hits 2.5 million people, there are some 5 to 6 million who survive on 50 Francs (about $5) a day.

In the United States, the richest country in the world, hunger is gaining ground. Whereas in 1978 there were 24 million Americans living below the poverty level, today there are 35 millions.

As for the USSR, unemployment figures certainly won't give us an indication as to the degradat­ion in the population's living conditions. Just one figure gives an idea of the growing; misery; life expectancy has fallen from 66 years in 1964 to 62 years in 1984.

‘New Poor', the ‘Fourth World' - the expressions have flourished to describe this misery that was thought to be reserved for the under-developed countries. The tendency towards absolute pauperization appears today as a sinister reality throughout the world, not only in the death rows of the third world's slums and countryside, but also at the heart of the industrial metropoles of ‘developed' capitalism. The economic catastr­ophe is world-wide, and the last illusions about the supposed ‘islands of prosperity' of the industrialized countries in contrast to the rest of the world's under-development are disapp­earing with the generalization of misery from the periphery to the centre of capitalism.

Even more than the dramatic growth in the misery at capitalism's periphery, it is the proletariat of the industrialized countries plunge into poverty under the blows of the bourgeoisie's austerity programs that is significant of the quantitative and qualitative deepening of the crisis at the beginning of the 1980s. The crisis has undermined and reduced the bourgeoisie's room for maneuver; transferring the crisis' major effects onto the weaker countries is no longer enough to avoid a frontal attack on the living conditions of the world working class' decisive fractions in the develop­ed countries, which produces 4/5ths of the world's wealth, which has the greatest historical experience, and which is the most concentrated. If the bourgeoisie is today attacking the strongest bastions of its historic enemy, the working class, this is because it cannot do otherwise. In the middle of the 1980s, the bank­ruptcy of the capitalist economy is obvious not only in the misery of under-development - it is lived out daily by the working class everywhere, in the dole queues, the penniless ends of the month, the accentuation of exploitation at work, day to day worries and problems, the anxiety for tomorrow. Over and above the figures, this is the balance sheet of the capitalist crisis, of a bankrupt system that has nothing left to offer.

Faced with this truth appearing more and more clearly, the bourgeoisie has nothing but lies to offer. Ever since the beginning of the open crisis of its economy at the end of the ‘60s, the bourg­eoisie has constantly proclaimed that it has the remedies to the crisis, that tomorrow everything will be fine, and yet the situation has constan­tly degenerated. Today, Reagan and the American bourgeoisie are once again serving up the shame­less propaganda in the form of ‘Reaganomics', accompanied by a ‘new technological revolution' sauce, and to prove these affirmations, we are presented with the recovery of the American economy. What exactly is this famous recovery that we are so often told about? What is the state of the world economy?

In spite of all the bourgeoisie' talk, claiming daily to have felled the monster of the crisis, the recovery of the American economy has been the tree that has hidden the forest of the world recession. The planetary economy has not emerged from the recession begun with the opening of the 198Os. Thus, while in 1984 grew in value by 6.5% and 6.1%, for imports and exports respectively, this was only after three continuous years of recession. The recovery has not been enough to get back to the level of 1980. Relative to 1980, the industrialized countries' exports and imports have fallen by 2% and 4.5%, respectively. This decline is even greater for the countries of the third world, whose exports and imports have fallen in the same period by 13.7%, and 12.5%.

A generalized crisis of overproduction

Mounting stocks of minerals and closing mines, farm produce heaped up in the silos and refrigerators while crops are destroyed wholesale, closing factories and masses of workers unemploy­ed - all this expresses one thing: the generalized crisis of overproduction.

Let's take just one example: oil, a symbol in itself! Despite the paralysis of production in war-locked Iran and Iraq, both big exporters during the 1970s, overproduction is raging. The scarcity which supposedly threatened the world economy in 1974 has been definitively forgotten. OPEC is on the verge of breaking up. Stocks are piling up on land and sea, super­tankers are rotting in the Norwegian fjords, or sent to the breaker's yard, the shipyards' order books are empty, the oil companies have cash-flow problems and the bankers who have lent them money are biting their nails. The black gold is incapable of extracating Nigeria, Mexico, Venezuela or Indonesia from their under­development and misery, while even ‘rich' countries like Saudi Arabia are announcing balance of payments deficits. The overproduction of oil affects the whole world economy, and resonates with the overproduction in other sectors.

The generalized crisis of overproduction is a crying demonstration of capitalism's contradictions. American farmers are pulling the bankers who lent to them down into bankruptcy, while cereals rot in the silos for lack of a solvent market, and famine ravages the world. And today, this intolerable contrast has erupted in the ‘rich' countries, where a mere shop window separates the unemployed and the ‘new poor' from the ‘riches' which can no longer be sold, and pile up until they rot.

The infernal cycle of overproduction is getting worse. In a saturated market, competition intensifies; production costs must be lowered, and therefore so must wares. Therefore the number of wage earners which turn reduces the solvent market and intensifies competition ... Thus each country tries to reduce its imports and increase its exports, and the market continues inexorably to contract.

The end of American recovery

Already 1985 mark the slowdown of the American economy which is showing signs of running out of steam. The enormous budget deficit is more and more inadequate in maintaining US economic activity: the growth rate has fallen from 6.8% in 1984 to a feeble 1.6%, for the first 6 months of 1985. American industry is suffering from the dollar's high exchange rate, which is hitting its exports and its competivity against its Japanese and European rivals, who are cutting; themselves large shares out of the world market, and even in the US home market. Between May 1984 and May 1985, US exports fell by 3.1%.

Reflecting the slowdown in growth, the net income of the 543 major US companies fell by 11.3%, dur­ing the first quarter of 1985, and by 14%, during the second. The three major US car manufacturers recorded a drop in profits of 26.4% while the decline in the hi-tech sector, with a 15% drop in IBM's profits, and losses for Wang, Apple and Texas Instruments (3.9 million dollars for the latter, at the second quarter of 1985), have blown to pieces the myth of the supposed techno­logical revolution that was to have given capit­alism a second wind.

Whereas a whole series of important sectors of the American economy, such as the oil and steel industries, and agriculture (US farm debt today exceeds that of Brazil and Mexico together), have never emerged from the doldrums, today new crucial sectors are joining them in the crisis - construction, electronics, the computer and car industries.

In this situation, to maintain a minimum of health in the economies of the industrialized countries, the American state will have to allow the balance of payments and budget deficits to grow ever more enormous. Even the world's greatest economic power cannot permit itself this luxury, which would mean in the end that its debt would reach the limits of the finance available on the world market.

The perspective of a new dive into recession

After hardly two years, the famous victorious recovery of the American economy, so dear to Reagan, is showing signs of exhaustion. This illustrates clearly the world economy's constant tendency towards shorter recoveries, of more limited effects, while at the same time the periods of recession become longer and deeper. This demonstrates the acceleration of the crisis and the increasing damage that its effects wreak on the world economy.

With the slowdown of the American economy, the perspective of a still-deeper plunge into recession looms on the horizon. No bourgeois economists dare to forecast the effects of a lasting recession on the world economy. The recession of 1981-82 was the worst since 1929, and the one to come, because it expresses the impotence and exhaustion of the recipes adopted by the Reagan administration since then, can only be still deeper and longer lasting in the developed countries, since the under-developed countries have never emerged from the recession begun at the opening of the 1980s.

The plunge into recession implies:

-- A new decline in world trade, following the contraction of the solvement market, when in 1984 it had still not returned to the level of 1980;

-- A fall in production, which will hit the heart of the industrialized countries still harder than in 1981-82, while the production of the under-developed countries has not stopped falling since 1981;

-- More company bankruptcies, more factory closures; millions more laid-off workers will join the ranks of the unemployed, which have not stopped swelling in every country except the USA, despite the ‘recovery';

-- And, in the end, an increased fragility of the international monetary system, which is likely to culminate in monetary storms and a return to high rates of inflation.

It is understandable that the bourgeoisie, faced with such a perspective, should want to hold back as long as possible this plunge into the crisis, for behind the collapse of capital looms a developing instability on every level: economic, political, military and above all, social. Its room for maneuver is more and more limited as the crisis deepens, and now that they have witnessed the bankruptcy of all their theories, the irresistible exhaustion of all the measures they have recommended, the wise economists of the ruling class are anxious­ly scanning the future, what they themselves call the "economy's unexplored zones", thereby admitting their own ignorance and impotence.

The bourgeoisie no longer has any economic policies to propose; more and more, day to day measures are forced on it. The bourgeoisie is flying without instruments to try and put off a catastrophe. However, the fact that its room for maneuver is diminishing does not mean it no longer exists; and from a certain standpoint, the very restriction of the room for maneuver pushes the ruling class to do so more intellige­ntly. However, all the measures adopted, while they make it possible to put off the deadline, and to slow down the crisis' devastating effects, contribute to making the deadlines more catas­trophic, accumulating capitalism's contradictions, pushing the tension daily closer to its breaking point.

The international monetary system is a good example of this situation, and of the contradictions in which the theoreticians and managers of capital are caught. While the policy adopted during the ‘70s, of easy credit and a cheap dollar, made it possible, by absorbing part of the surplus product, to put off the dead­lines at the same time as it ensured the suprem­acy of the dollar, it is expressed today in a mountain of debt all over the world, which, with the recession of the 1980s, states, companies, and individuals are less and less able to repay. The breath of panic that blew through the world's financial markets in the winter of 81-82 due to the inability of third world countries to pay back a debt of 300 billion dollars, could only be calmed by the intervent­ion of the great international lending organisms such as the world Bank and the IMF, which imposed draconian austerity programs on the indebted countries as a condition for according new credits. While they did not make possible the repayment of the overall debt, these credits at least allowed the maintenance of interest payments to give the banks a breathing space while awaiting the results of the hastily erect­ed austerity plans.

However, while a crisis was avoided, the inter­national monetary system's fragility has nonetheless continued to grow. The bankruptcy of the Continental Illinois in 1983, whose debts were the least weak, forced the American state to intervene rapidly to mobilize $8 billion aimed at plugging the hole and avoiding a chain reaction in the US banking system, which, once again, could have led to a major crisis. Despite the American recovery, these last years have seen a record number of bank failures in the US, and some 100 more bankruptcies were forecast for 1985 as a result of the slowdown in the American economy.

But if the third world's debts are large, they are nothing compared with the $6000 billion of debt accumulated by state, companies and individuals in the USA. In such conditions it's easy to see that Volker, head of the Federal Reserve, can say that: "debt is a pistol aimed at the American economy."

The crisis of the American farming, industry, whose competivity has been wiped out by the rise of the US dollar, is directly expressed in a series of bankruptcies of farm savings banks; for the first time since 1929, anxious depositors are to be seen queuing up at the doors of closed banks. Federal intervention has made it possible to stave off a worse panic, but today the Federal Farm loan organization (the Farmer Bank) is itself on the verge of bankruptcy, with a deficit of more than $10 billion that the state will have to fill in. The mere slowdown of the US economy in the first half of 1985 has been transformed, for Bank America, the USA's second largest bank, into enormous losses for the second quarter of 1985: $338 billion. At this rate, the federal state is likely to have more and more difficulty in filling in the gaping holes that opening in the accounts of American banks. This situation contains the germ of the bankruptcy of the whole international monetary system, with the dollar at the heart of the bankruptcy. The speculation which has taken the dollar to the heights is likely to turn against it, and still further accentuate the yo-yo move­ment that, in six months (March to August 1985) has taken it from ff10.60 to ff8.50 and severely disturbed the equilibrium of the international banking system.

In these conditions, it is easy to understand the anxiety that is gripping the capitalists, with the slowdown of the American economy and the worsening world-wide recession looming on the horizon, and which means a dramatic aggravation of their difficulties, as millions of workers are laid off, thousands of companies go into liquidation, and new states are unable to continue paying their debts. Capital's contradictions on the financial level will become explosive, and are likely to take on the form of panic crisis of speculatory capital on the world financial markets; and, because the international banking system is indissolubly tied to the international monetary system centered around the dollar, by monetary storms that will reveal a return to large-scale inflation.

Even though diminished, inflation has certainly not disappeared, and if we consider that the inflation of the ‘70s was reduced essentially thanks to the fall in the prices of raw materials which, apart from oil, have dropped by 28% between 1980 and 1985, and thanks to falling production costs due to the attack on wages and redundancies, then even its low level during the first half of the ‘80s is a demonstration ‘a contrario' of the increased inflationary pressures linked to the gigantic debt, to the weight of unproductive sectors (especially army and police), and to the load of the bankrupt but strategic sectors that the state has to finance. Thus, even as far as inflation is concerned, in reality the situation is far from having improved, and inflationary pressures are far stronger now than they ever were during the ‘70s; this means that the return of inflation will become, much more quickly than in the past, a tendency towards hyper-inflation.        

While the 1970s demonstrated the bourgeoisie's ability to transfer the effects of the crisis on to capitalism's periphery, the 1980s show that this is no longer enough to allow the most developed economies to escape from stagnation and recession. Increasingly, capitalism's contradictions tend to reveal themselves at the centre to polarize around king dollar and the American economy that supports him, and on which the whole world economy is more and more dependent. This is why capitalists throughout the world are keeping their eyes riveted on the day to day results of the US economy; the whole world's economic and monetary stability depends on its health.

This is why, as soon as the first signs of an economic slowdown appeared, Washington sounded the call to arms, to soak the budget deficit, reduce the state's indebtedness, and diminish the balance of payments deficit by restoring the American economy's competivity. But this policy can only be carried out at the expense of the exports of European and Japanese industry which have profited from the US recovery and the balance of payments deficit of the world's biggest market, so reviving the trade war between the most developed countries. However, the US, through its economic and military power, and because it controls the dollar, has the means to turn the laws of the market to its advantage, to impose its diktats, and can also use the blackmail of protectionism.

The 20% drop in the dollar in recent months aimed firstly to restore the American economy's competivity, which had suffered badly (falling by 40% since 1980) from the previous rises in order to correct its balance of payments. However, such a measure can only have two results:

-- on the one hand, to plunge Europe and Japan into recession by closing the US market to them, and through the competition with their products in the rest of the world;

-- on the other hand, a return to inflation, to the extent that the fall of the dollar is in fact a devaluation, which will raise the prices of imports to the American market.

For American capitalists, the temptation is extremely strong to allow the dollar to fall and inflation to rise, since this is the best means for them to pay back their debts in "funny money" after having harvested the capitals of the whole world. It is vitally necessary to keep the US economy afloat to avoid a world-wide economic disaster. But this can only be done at the expense of the USA's main allies.

However, given that Europe and Japan are essential pieces of the imperialist puzzle of the western bloc, and faced with the social instability that can only develop in Europe, primary proletarian concentration on the planet whose working class has, since autumn ‘83, been at the heart of the international recovery in the class struggle which continues to develop, the bourgeoisie can only be extremely cautious and try to slow down as much as possible the effects of the recession in order to keep the situation under control. This is why Reagan is talking about a "soft landing" for the American economy, and at the same time as he demands economic concessions from the capitalists of Europe and Japan (opening of their markets, limitations of their exports to the US, internationalization of the Yen in order to support the dollar and weaken the competivity of Japanese industry by revaluing its currency), he invites them to apply the same policies as those adopted in the US in recent years, ie budget deficits and rising debts, in order to counter the negative effects on their economic activity of their falling exports. But Europe and Japan are not the United States, and they cannot adopt such a policy without a rapidly increasing inflation: that is to say that Washington today is preaching exactly the opposite policy to the one imposed 5 years ago. However even if the bourgeoisie is managing to slow down the movement, this will be less and less effective; the ‘80s are marked firstly by an acceleration of the crisis, and by increasing­ly serious shocks to the world economy.

Whereas the first half of the ‘80s was marked by descent into the recession and stagnation, with a fall in inflation, the second half of the decade will be marked by both a renewed plunge into recession, which will hit the most developed economies head-on, and a sharp rise in the inflation that the bourgeoisie thought had been throttled in a situation of growing monetary and economic instability which will culminate in acute crisis characteristic of the acceleration of the crisis' devastating effects.

The 1980s are the years of truth, because they lay bare for all to see the catastrophic bankruptcy of the capitalist economy.

JJ

Introduction

This article is the first part of' a chapter dealing with the Dutch Tribunist current up to the First World War. The chapter in question is part of a critical study of the whole current of the German-Dutch Communist Left.

The Dutch Left is not at all well known. Described as anarchist by the avowed defenders of Russian or Chinese state capitalism, or as ‘illuminist' and ‘idealist' by the Bordigists who are more ‘Leninist' than the king, it has been no better treated by its councilist admir­ers. The latter have ‘forgotten' that it waged its fight inside the 2nd and the 3rd Inter­national that it was a marxist current and not an anarchist sect; that it was for organization and not anti-organization; that it was part of an international current and that it refused to be a local ouvrierist sect or a kind of club for propaganda and study.

Certainly there are historical reasons for the Dutch Left remaining less well-known than the Italian Left. Unlike the Italian Fraction of the ‘30s it didn't go through a phase of emigration enabling it to spread out into several countries. Despite its close links to the German Left in the ‘20s and ‘30s, it tended to wilt in the atrophied framework of little Holland. The maj­ority of its contributions, often written in Dutch, didn't have such a large audience as those of the Italian and German Left. Only the texts of Pannekoek, written in German and thus more easily translated into French, English, Spanish and Italian, can give an idea of the theoretical contribution of this fraction of the international communist left.

The first part proposes to show the difficulties in the development of a marxist current in a country which still remained dominated by commer­cial capital, in a parasitic capitalism relying on the exploitation of its colonies. The growth of the proletariat was a long process, which didn't become marked until after the Second World War and decolonization. For a very long time the proletariat lived in an artisans env­ironment and was fairly isolated in a still agricultural population. Hence the strength of anarchist ideas and currents over a long period. This historical backwardness is however in contrast to the development of a vigorous marx­ist current represented by the Left and which - like the Bolsheviks in peasant Russia - made clear theoretical advances within the Internat­ional, being a direct influence on the KAPD in Germany, which always considered Pannekoek and Gorter as its theoreticians. The Dutch Left, despite its weakness on the numerical level, after the 1909 split, had an enormous internation­al weight on the theoretical level (the question of the state, of class consciousness, of the mass strike). Alongside Luxemburg and the Bol­sheviks it was in the front line of the struggle against revisionism. It would be one of the essential foundation stones of the future international communist left.

To make a balance sheet of the strengths and weaknesses of the Dutch Left is to contribute to the development of proletarian class consciousn­ess, which is inseparably linked to a critical memory of its entire revolutionary past.

The backwardness of Dutch capitalism

The political weight of Holland in the internat­ional workers' movement before and after the First World War seems out of proportion to the industrial under-development of the country and the crushing domination of agriculture. A classic country of the bourgeois revolution in the 17th century, the Kingdom of Holland had its greatest expansion in the form of commercial capital based on the colonies. The golden age of the East Indies Company (Ost-Indische Kompag­nie), which saw to the exploitation of Indonesia, corresponded to the grip of the state (1800) over its fruitful commerce, with the king obtaining for the state the commercial monopoly for the exploitation of this colony.

Pushed away from the profits from the colonies by the king, who didn't invest in the industrial sector but in speculation, the Dutch bourgeoisie, despite its long history, was still playing a secondary role up to the end of the 19th century, both on the economic and politic­al levels. This is what explains its verbal ‘radicalism' during this period when it was vegetating under the shadows of the state, the enthusiasm among some of its number for marxism. This enthusiasm quickly disappeared with the first class confrontations at the beginning of the century. As in Russia, where the liberal bourgeoisie was still weak, the Netherlands pro­duced its local versions of people like Struve, liberals disguised as ‘legal' marxists. But unlike Russia, the Dutch Struves ended up inside the social-democratic workers' party[1].

The decline of the commercial bourgeoisie from the end of the 17th century, its inability to develop an industrial capital, its search for speculative investments in the soil, all these factors explain the economic backwardness of the Netherlands in the middle of the 19th century. Thus in 1849, 90%, of the Dutch national product came from agriculture. While 75%, of the populat­ion lived in towns, the majority vegetated in a state of permanent unemployment and lived off the alms provided by the wealthy and the church­es. In 1840, in Haarlem, a town of 20,000 inhab­itants, 8,000 ‘poor' were registered, a figure well below the real situation. The physical degeneration of this sub-proletariat was such that, in order to build the first railways, the Dutch capitalists had to call upon the English workforce. In her study Kapitaal en Arbeid in Nederland[2], the socialist theoretician Roland-Holst noted that:

"Since the second half of the 18th century our country has been in a state of decline, then of stagnation and abnormally slow, defect­ive development. In the space of a few generat­ions, our proletariat has degenerated physically and spiritually."

And Engels analyzed the Holland of the 19th century as: "a country in which the bourgeoisie feeds off its past grandeur and in which the proletariat has dried up."[3]

These historical characteristics explain the slow development of the workers and revolutionary movement in Holland. The workers' move­ment was at the beginning a movement of artisans and of workers from small, artisan-type enterpr­ises, with an important role being played by cigar workers and diamond workers (who formed a Jewish proletariat in Amsterdam). The ‘Dutch' working class properly speaking - ie those coming from rural origins - was still extremely small in the mid-19th century. The proletariat was to a large extent either of Jewish or German origin. This particularly explains its great openness to marxism. But the tardy character of its industrial development, which kept alive the archaic traits of artisan labor, at the same time made Holland for several decades a chosen land for anarchism.

Up until 1848, the social movements remained very limited, taking the form of explosions of revolt which could not in themselves take up a conscious goal. The demonstrations of the unemployed in Amsterdam and the hunger march in the Hague, in 1847, were not yet clear expressions of a working class consciousness, owing to the absence of a developed and concentrated proletar­iat. During the 1848 revolution, the demonstrat­ions and looting which took place in Amsterdam were the expression of a true lumpen-proletariat, whose desperate actions were foreign to a proletariat which has become conscious and thus organized.

The first forms of proletarian organization in Holland immediately expressed the international nature of the emerging workers' movement. In 1847, German workers created a communist club which carried out its activities in the Dutch-speaking proletariat[4]. One year later, the Communist League, which had several sections in Holland, illegally introduced copies of the first edition of the Communist Manifesto, which had just come back from the printers. But for 20 years, these first steps of the marxist movement weren't followed up, since there was no real industrial development until the 1870s. The section of the International Workingmen's Assoc­iation remained under the influence of anarchist and trade unionist ideas (the Workers' League of Holland was formed in 1871). In 1872, at the Hague Congress, the Dutch delegates rallied to the positions of Bakunin.

It was the growing industrialization facilitated by an influx of German capital after Prussia's victory over France which finally allowed the Dutch socialist movement to develop. In 1878 the Social Democratic Association was formed in Amsterdam (Sociaal-Democratische Vereeniging) which soon led to the local appearance of groups (The Hague, Rotterdam, Haarlem) who saw their task as leading the class struggle. The regroup­ment of these workers' associations took the name Social Democratic Union (Sociaal-Democat­ische Verbond). The term ‘Union' already display­ed all the ambiguity of an organization which would oscillate between marxism and anarchist anti-centralism.

The ‘Sociaal Democratische Bond'

The personality which was to make its mark on the Dutch workers' movement from the beginning was that of Domela Nieuwenhuis, a former pastor converted to socialism. At the time Nieuwenhuis wasn't yet an anarchist and led big campaigns for universal suffrage. The activity of his movement consisted of leading economic strikes and helping to set up trade unions. The found­ation in 1879 of the review Recht voor Alle - organ of the Sociaal-Democratische Bond - gave rise to a considerable ferment amongst groups of workers. Its activities were multifarious: distribution of leaflets in the factories and barracks, the education of the proletariat through courses on marxism, demonstrations and meetings against the army, the churches, the monarchy, alcoholism and class justice.

Very soon, repression descended on the young workers' movement. Not only was Nieuwenhuis arrested and condemned to a year of prison; for the first time in its history, the police began to arm, and would be helped by the inter­vention of the army ‘in case of a conflict'. The police had the right to be present in public meetings, to dissolve them and arrest socialist speakers.

Considering himself to be a disciple of Marx and Engels, Nieuwenhuis for a long time kept up a written correspondence with the theoreticians of scientific socialism. The latter, though follow­ing sympathetically the development of the socialist movement in Holland, had many reservat­ions about the immediately ‘revolutionist' con­ceptions of Domela Nieuwenhuis. Marx warned against doctrinaire views which sought to draw up plans for "a program of action for the first day after the revolution"[5]. The over­turning of society could not be a "dream about the world to come." On the contrary,

"The scientific  notion of the inevitable and constant decomposition of the existing order, the increasing exasperation of the masses with governments which embody the specter of the past, and on the other hand the positive develop­ment of the means of production, all this guarantees that at the moment when the true proletarian revolution breaks out modus operandi all the conditions ,for its immediate progress. (not in an idyllic way, of course), will have been created."[6]

In the 1880s, Nieuwenhuis and the SDB did not spend time dreaming of the ‘Great Day' like the anarchists of that time, who completely ignored the real conditions for the maturation of the revolution. Like the other socialists of his time, Nieuwenhuis was convinced of the correctness of the parliamentary tactic, as a tribune for the emerging workers' movement. Very popular among the workers, but also among the small peasants in the north of Holland, he was elected deputy in 1889. For two years, he made proposals for reforms: social security, indepen­dence for the colonies, suppression of the wages in kind for workers. These reforms were part of the social democratic ‘minimum program'.

But quite soon Domela Nieuwenhuis began to reject parliamentarism and became the only anti­parliamentary social-democratic leader within the newly-created 2nd International. This reject­ion of parliamentarism led him unknowingly towards anarchist positions. This evolution can be explained by the upsurge of class struggle during the ‘90s, both in Holland and other countries, leading to the numerical growth of the organized workers' movement. Under the pressure of a cyclical crisis, which manifest­ed itself through the development of unemployment, troubles were breaking out. In Holland the workers confronted the police, who had been supporting the gangs of thugs attacking SDB locals. In this climate, which gave rise to hones that the ‘final struggle' was near, Nieuwenhuis and the militants of the SDB began to doubt the parliamentary tactic.

False responses to opportunism

This calling into question of parliamentarism wasn't restricted to the Dutch party. The ‘90s saw the development both of an anarcho-syndical­ist opposition and of an opposition within international social-democracy which rejected any kind of parliamentary activity. The dominat­ion over the party by the parliamentary fraction, as in the German social-democracy, the growth of opportunist tendencies which this encouraged, explains the revolt against the party leadership by some of its new adherents. Those who called themselves the ‘Young' (Jungen) in Germany, and whose example was followed in other countries like Sweden and Denmark, were to be at the head of an often ambiguous kind of contestation which denounced the reformist tendencies gangrening the parliamentary leadership, but progressively made concessions to anarchistic, anti-organization tendencies[7].

In fact, the question was whether or not the period was a revolutionary one, or one of the growth of capitalism implying an immediate activity within the unions and parliament. On this question, Nieuwenhuis, the Jungen in Germany, and the anarchists crystallized a petty-bourgeois impatience, all the more vigorous because it was nourished by a healthy opposition to the reformist tendencies.

In Holland itself, the debate on the tactic to be used by the workers' movement was complicated by the fact that the opposition to Nieuwenhuis was taken up in the SDB not only by avowed reformists like Troelstra, but also by marxists like Van der Goes who remained firmly revolution­ary.

In a resolution of 1892 the majority of the SDB decided not to participate in elections. A parliamentarist opposition was formed around the future revisionist leaders of social-democracy (Troelstra, Van Kool, Vliegen) and some young intellectuals who had just joined the party. With the sole aim of participating in the elect­ions, which had been modified by a law abolish­ing the census system, and without trying to convince the majority, the minority split. Thus, in the worst of confusion, and with many elector­alist prejudices, the Dutch social-democratic Party, the SDAP, was formed in 1894.

This split was not only confused but premature. In fact, the majority of the SDB gradually went over to the tactic of participation in elections it showed this in practice by presenting candid­ates to the 1897 elections. This new orientation rendered obsolete the separate existence of the SDB, whose 200 members decided in 1899 to fuse their party with Troelstra's. This fusion had the consequence that Nieuwenhuis and Cornelissen left the organization.

The latter, along with Nieuwenhuis, represented the anarchist tendency within the SDB. It was on his instigation that the NAS, whose orientation was more revolutionary syndicalist than anarchist was created in 1893. This small radical union was to play a great role in the workers' movement: not only did it represent a militant atti­tude in the class struggle, in contrast to the social-democratic union NVV created by the SDAP, which was to play a role of sabotaging strikes, but it would also constitute more and more the trade union organization of the Tribunists, then of the Communist Party[8].

The evolution of Nieuwenhuis towards anarchist positions does not alter the fact that he was a great figure of the international workers' move­ment. Though he became an anarchist, he didn't betray the working class, unlike anarchist lead­ers like Kropotkin who advocated participation in the imperialist war. He was one of the rare anarchists to remain an internationalist[9].

Even so, it's necessary to see all the limitations of the contribution of Nieuwenhuis, because for many he has become the symbol of the impossibil­ity of staying inside the 2nd International, which is seen as bourgeois from the beginning[10]. It's thus important to evaluate the criticisms that Nieuwenhuis made of German social-democracy. They were valid to the extent that they went along with what Engels said in the same period, and with what the left said later on. In his book Socialism in Danger published in 1897 at the time of his departure from the SDB, he correctly denounced a certain number of faults in the social-democratic lead­ership, which would be crystallized in Bernstein's revisionist theory:

-- the penetration of petty-bourgeois elements into the party, endangering its proletarian character, and manifesting itself in ideological concessions, particularly during elections;

-- the theory of state socialism, which saw the revolution as no more than the reformist take­over of the state by the workers' movement: "...the social-democrats are just reformers who want to transform today's society along the lines of state socialism."[11].

But the scope of Nieuwenhuis' critique remained limited. He represented a Tolstoyan, religious, anarchist tendency which was very marked in the Dutch workers' movement and which existed up until the First World War, when it formed the main body of the pacifist current. By denying; the necessity for class violence in the seizure of power by the proletariat, of a dictatorship of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie, Nieuwen­huis definitively broke.with the marxism which he had helped to introduce into Holland, and evolved towards Tolstoyan pacifism:

"...the anarchist communists call for the abolition of political authority, ie the state, since they deny the right of one class or one individual to rule over another class or indiv­idual. Tolstoy has expressed this perfectly and there's nothing to be added to his words."

Those who - like the anarchists and their present-day descendants - refer themselves to Nieuwenhuis in order to proclaim the 2nd International ‘bourgeois' from the beginning, deny some very obvious things:

-- the 2nd International was the place where the developed proletariat of the great industrial concentrations was educated and tempered, leaving behind the artisan characteristics which it still had at the time of the 1st Internation­al, and which explain the weight of individual­ist anarchism within it. It's through this International, which had not yet failed, that the socialist proletariat developed numerically but also qualitatively, both within Europe and outside it;

-- it was within the International that the resistance against revisionism and opportunism was developed. It was because the Internation­al - before 1914 - was still proletarian that the left was able to develop within it and combat the Right and the Centre. It was within the International that arxism was enriched by the contributions of Luxemburg, Pannekoek, etc. From a bourgeois body no proletarian organism can emerge;

-- it was federalism, not centralism which ended up undermining the International, to the point of transforming it into a simple addition of national sections. This was the basis on which developed the exorbitant power of the parlia­mentary cliques who finally came to dominate the party. In fact, from the beginning, in 1889, it was affirmed in a resolution that "in no case and under no pressure" could there be a question of "violating the autonomy of national groupings these being the best judges of the tactics to use in their own country."[12]

It was thus that the left - in the countries where it arose - always fought for the strictest centralism and for the national parties to respect international discipline, against the tendency for the chiefs organized in parliament­ary fractions to become autonomous from the organization. Like the Bolsheviks, like Bordiga later on, like the German and Polish Lefts, the Dutch Left waged this battle for respecting the principles of a centralized International.

The beginnings of the Dutch Left

That Dutch social-democracy was not ‘bourgeois' from the beginning is proved by the fact that after 1897 it was joined by a whole constellation of marxists whose contribution to the internat­ional revolutionary movement was to be consider­able.

This marxist Left had the particularity of being composed of artists and scientists who were of no small importance in the history of Holland. Gorter, the most well-known, was certainly Holland's greatest poet. Born in 1864, the son of a pastor and writer, and after writing a thesis on Aeschylus, he became known as the poet of ‘May' - his most celebrated poem (1889). After a spiritual crisis which led him towards a kind of pantheism - inspired by Spinoza's Ethics, which he translated from Latin into Dutch - Gorter went on to study Marx, and joined the SDAP in 1897. Very dynamic and a remarkable orator, Gorter was above all a good popularizer of marxism, which he presented in a very lively manner that was comprehensible to the great maj­ority of workers[13].

Less practically, but more theoretically, Pannekoek inscribed himself in the movement of the international marxist left, and was the least ‘Dutch' of all. An astronomer of some reputation, he joined the socialist movement in 1899. Born in 1873 the son of a director of an enterprise, "he was able to detach himself from his bourge­ois surroundings and devote himself unreservedly to the proletarian cause. With his rigorous mind, his scientific and philosophical formation, Pannekoek was one of the main theoreticians of the Left; in many areas and theoretical debates - like the one on the meaning of the mass strike - he showed himself, by the depth of his think­ing, to be the equal of Luxemburg, and he influenced Lenin in his book State and Revolut­ion. He was one of the first marxists to wage the fight against the tide of revisionism. In his study Kant's Philosophy and Marxism, publ­ished in 1901, he attacked the neo-Kantian vision of the revisionists which made scientific social­ism not a weapon of combat but a simple bourgeois ethic. However, since he was more of a theoretic­ian than an organization man, his influence was exerted mainly at the level of ideas, without him being able to be an active force in the organizational battle against the opportunist majority of the SDAP[14].

Other, less well-known intellectuals of the Left still had an enormous weight, but often their confusions helped to distort the image of the Left. The poetess Roland-Holst, though making a strong contribution to marxist theory and the history of the workers' movement[15], symbolized both a certain religiosity that still clung to the emerging socialist movement, and also ‘centrist' hesitations at the time when important decisions had to be taken on the organizational level. Apart from her, militants like Wijnkoop and Van Ravesteyn stood out as real organizers of the Tribunist movement. Oscillat­ing between a verbal radicalism and a practice which was in the long term to prove an opportun­ist one, they often held back the expansion of the Dutch Left, which gave the appearance of being more a sum of brilliant theoreticians than a real body.

The drama of the Dutch Left at its inception was that marxist theoreticians like Gorter and Pannekoek, who were recognized internationally and who displayed great strength and revolution­ary conviction, were not deeply involved in the organizational life of their party. In this they differed from Luxemburg and Lenin who were both theoreticians and party organizers. Gorter was constantly torn between his activity as a poet - to which he sometimes devoted himself totally - and his militant activity as a party propagandist and orator. Thus his truncated, episodic activity which sometimes led him to disappear from party congresses[16]. Pannekoek, dedicated both to his astronomical research and his activity as a marxist theoretician, never felt himself to be an organization man[17]. He did not give himself fully to the socialist movement until 1909 when, until 1914, he worked as a paid teacher in the party school of German social-democracy. Thus he was absent from Holland at the most crucial moment, when things were heading towards a split in the SDAP.

In this period of the development of the workers' movement, the weight of personalities, of brill­iant individuals, was still considerable. It was all the more negative in that the party chiefs were avowed revisionists who used their personal­ity to crush the party's life. Such was Troelstra, a lawyer who had been a Frisian Poet in his spare time. Constantly elected not by workers' sectors, but by the backward peasants of Frisia, he had a tendency to identify himself with the interests of the petty-bourgeoisie. Close to Bernstein, he defined himself as a revisionist, even a bourge­ois ‘liberal', to the point of declaring in 1912 that "social-democracy has the role today that the Liberal party played in 1848"[18]. But he was sufficiently skilful to situate himself close to Kautsky's Centre at the congresses of the International, in order to maintain a free hand in his own national territory. Very concerned to keep his post as an SDAP chief and parliament­arian, he was ready to use any maneuver to elim­inate all criticism of his opportunist activities. From the standpoint of Troelstra and other revisionists like Vliegen and Van Kol, all such criticisms were just anarchism or purely ‘personal' attacks. The weight of these leaders in a new party which had come out of an ambiguous split was to be a major obstacle which the whole of the Left had to confront.

************************

The struggle of the Left began as soon as new, young elements like Gorter, Pannekoek, Roland-­Holst, Wijnkoop and Van Raveseyn joined the party. Grouped around the review Nieuwe Tijd (New Times), which sought to rival Kautsky's theoretical rev­iew Neue Zeit, they began to wage the fight for the defense of marxist principles, which were being stamped upon by a growing reformist pract­ice. Their combat would be all the more intrans­igent for the fact that militants like Gorter and Pannekoek had had friendly relations with Kautsky and he had believed that they could count on his support in the struggle against revisionism within the Second International.[19]

To be continued.

Chardi

---

[1] Peter Struve was one of those Russian bourg­eois liberals who at the end of the 19th century developed a ‘passion' for marxism, which they saw as no more than a theory about the peaceful trans­ition from feudalism to industrial capitalism. Their brand of ‘marxism', known as ‘legal' bec­ause it was tolerated and even encouraged by the Tsarist censorship, was an apology for capital­ism. Struve soon became one of the leaders of the Cadet liberal party and was soon in the front ranks of the bourgeois counter-revolution in 1917.

[2] This book was published in 1932. The quote is from MC Wiessing Die Hollandische Schule des Marxismus (The Dutch School of Marxism) VSA Verlag, Hamburg, 1980.

[3] Marx-Engels, Werke, Vol 23, pp 335-336.

[4] Cf Wiessing opcit.

[5]Letter from Nieuwenhuis to Marx, 28 March 1882, cited by Wiessing, p. 19.

[6] Letter to Nieuwenhuis, 22 February, 1881, MEW, Vol 35, p. 159

[7] Engels' criticisms of the ‘Young' can be found in the collection of texts by Marx and Engels on German Social-Democracy, 10/18, Paris ‘75

[8] cf. R. de Jong, ‘Le Mouvement Libertaire aux Pays-Bas', Le Mouvement Sociale 83, April-­June,1973.

[9] During the war, Nieuwenhuis distributed pamphlets by Gorter.

[10] The councilists of Daad en Gedacht (Thought and Action), in Holland, argued in their February ‘84 issue that "in reality social democracy didn't become a party of bourgeois reforms; it was that from the beginning..." A group with Bordigist inclinations like the Groupe Communiste Internationaliste (GCI) takes up the anarchist and councilist theses when it says exactly the same thing: "...it was these bourgeois tendencies denounced by Marx who entirely dominated social democracy and this from the very beginning of the International." Abundantly citing the author of the preface to the Payot re-edition of Nieuwenhuis - Beriou, one of the ‘theoreticians' of modernism which sees the proletariat as a ‘class for capital' - the GCI thus joins up with the political constellation of the modern­ists and councilists. See their article ‘Theories de la decadence, decadence de la theorie' in Le Communiste 23, November ‘85.

[11] All these quotes come from Nieuwenhuis' book.

[12] cf the book by G. Haupt: La Deuxieme Internationale, Etude Critique des Sources. Essai Bibliographique, Mouton, Paris-Hague, 1964. A great deal on the lack of centralization.

[13] cf. H De Liagre Bohl: Herman Gorter SUN, Nijmegen, 1973. The only existing biography of Gorter, written in Dutch.

[14] On Pannokoek, there's an introduction by the former council communist BA Sijes, who published the ‘memoires' of the theoretician of the workers councils, written in 1944: Herinnev­ingen, Van Gennep, Amsterdam, 1982.

[15] Roland-Holst's contributions on the mass strike are still waiting to be republished and translated into languages other than Dutch. cf De Revolutionaire Massa-aktie. Een Studie, Rotterdam, 1918.

[16] In 1903, Gorter published his Versen, which were individually inspired. After that he tried to write poems of a ‘socialist' inspirat­ion, which were far from the poetical strength and value of his first inspiration. Een Klein Heldendicht - ‘A Little Epic' - told of the evolution of a young proletarian towards a conviction in socialism. Pan (1912), composed after the 1909 split, was a poem that was less ideological and more inspired by a poetical vision of the emancipation of men and women. Without ever losing his inspiration, Gorter was cut in half between his propagandist activity and his poetic creativity, oscillating between personal lyricism and didactic socialist epic.

[17] Pannekoek wrote to Kautsky that in general he prefered "only to bring theoretical clarification". He added: "You know that ...I only allow myself to get dragged into practical struggles when I am constrained and forced to do so." (cited by Sijes, op cit, p. 15). This is very far from the attitudes of the leaders of the current of the international left who - like Lenin and Luxemburg - didn't hesitate, even while carrying out their theoretical work, to ‘get dragged', to plunge themselves into daily struggles.

[18] Cited by Sam de Wolff - a Jewish social-democrat who ended up as a Zionist: Voor het Land van Belofk Een Terublik op mijn Leven (Before the Promised Land. A Backward Glance at My Life). SUN, Nijmegen, 1978.

[19] cf De Liagre Bohl, op cit, p 23-25. As with Rosa Luxemburg, Gorter and Pannekoek's friendship with Kautsky didn't stop them waging the theoretical battle against the ‘centrist' positions of the ‘Pope of Marxism'. The revolut­ionary truth, for them, came before personal feel­ings of friendship.

 

After the crisis which shook the revolutionary milieu at the beginning of the '80 (see IR 32), the political vanguard of the proletariat is again showing signs of a new strength. One of the most obvious signs is the appearance of a number of new groups moving towards a communist coherence. Some examples:

-- in Belgium, the appearance of RAIA in a process of breaking with anarchism (see Internationalisme 105);

-- in Austria, the appearance of a circle of comrades breaking with the Kommunistische Politik group for its academicism and evolving towards revolutionary positions;

-- in Argentina, the development of groups such as Emancipacion Obrera and Militancia Clasista Revolucionaria, who seem to be close to Groupe Communiste Internationaliste but have also been in contact with other groups of the milieu (see Le Communiste 23);

-- in Mexico, development of the Alptraum Communist Collective and the publication of the first issue of its review Communismo (see IR 44) .

But perhaps the most dramatic developments are those which have recently taken place in India. The aim of this article is to present an outline of the origins and trajectory of the milieu there, based on their publications, on correspondence, and on a recent, visit, of an ICC delegation to India.

The emergence of revolutionaries in the peripheries of capitalism

Before discussing the specific groups of the Indian milieu, it is necessary to make some remarks about the fact that the majority of these new groups have appeared in the peripheral countr­ies of capitalism. In the next issue of the IR we will criticize the position of the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party, who hold that the conditions in these regions, where democrat­ic and trade unionist institutions have less hold over social life, are ‘better' for the ‘massific­ation' of communist organizations. A similar pref­erence for the exotic is expressed by the GCI who ceaselessly denounce what it refers to as the ‘so-called revolutionary milieu' for ignoring the appearance of revolutionaries in the peripheries (a blatant untruth, as will be seen from the content of this article).

The emergence of revolutionary groups in India and Latin America is certainly an expression of the international scope of the present resurgence of class struggle and confirms - against all leftist theories about the need for ‘democratic' revolutions in the ‘dominated' countries - the unity of the communist tasks confronting the proletariat. But it does not prove that communist consciousness is deeper or more extensive in the peripheries than the metropoles, and that conse­quently (whether or not this is stated openly) the revolution is closer at hand in the former.

To begin with, we must remember that the views of the IBRP and others are distorted by their inabil­ity to distinguish the appearance of genuine rev­olutionary groups from the radicalization of leftism, as demonstrated by their unfortunate alliance with the ‘Communist Party of Iran' and ‘Revolutionary Proletarian Platform' in India. Secondly, the revamped version of Lenin's theory of the weakest link is based on a very narrow empiricism which fixates on the immediate facts and fails to situate the emergence of these groups in the historical context of the general resurgence of class struggle which began in 1968, and which provides the background to the various wave-movements of struggle which characterize this period. Once this context is grasped, it becomes clear that these groups are appearing between one and two decades later than the groups in the metropoles, most of which came out of the first international wave of class combats from 1968-74. And of a break, thirdly, while there is an important element of spontaneity in the engendering of elements looking for class positions, we should not have tell groups like the IBRP that this spontaneity is insufficient, that there would be little chance these groups finding a solid communist coherence if it were not for the intervention of the groups centered in western Europe, who have a more direct connection to the traditions of the communist left. It will become obvious from this article that the more the Indian groups have opened up towards the international political milieu, the more thoroughly they have been able to develop a communist practice.

It is extremely dangerous to underestimate the difficulties facing revolutionaries in the backward capitalisms. As well as the ‘physical' problems posed by geographical isolation from the main foci of the revolutionary movement, by language barriers (including illiteracy), by material Poverty (things which revolutionaries in the West take for granted today as tools for their inter­vention - typewriters, telephones, duplicators, cars, etc - are far less accessible to groups in a country like India), there are the profound political problems created precisely by the overt domination of imperialism and the absence of ‘democratic' norms, which makes the working class more vulnerable, in the final analysis, than workers in the West to the mythology of national liberation, democratization, etc. This in turn makes it even harder for revolutionaries in the peripheries to fight these illusions, both within the class as a whole and within their own ranks. Neither should the dead weight of the more ‘traditional' ideologies in such countries be under­played: in India, for example, it is extremely difficult at this stage for women to enter into revolutionary politics. All this is of course connected to and compounded by the weakness or lack of a historical left communist tradition in most of these countries, in opposition to the prevailing leftist perversions, particularly Stalinism/Maoism, which is capable of dressing itself in very radical colors in these areas. To forget all this will not help the evolution of the comrades who are now beginning revolutionary work in spite of and against these problems.                                                                                

The milieu in India: the difficult process of breaking with leftism         

Communist Internationalist

"A revolutionary organization is always indispensable, even amidst deepest defeat of the class. Of course, the changing role and impact of a revolutionary organization, in a period of defeat of the class and of deepening class struggle, can only be understood through the concepts of fraction and party. Today, in a period of accelerating world-wide crisis and collapse of capital and rising class revolts tending towards confrontation with the state and opening up towards revolution, the role of revolutionaries is becoming increasingly important and decisive. It is calling for the international regroupment of revolutionaries and the formation of the revolutionary party." (Letter from the Faridabad circle to the ICC, 11.1. ‘85)

Most of the elements making up today's element of proletarian milieu in India have emerged out of a break, more or less clear, with radical leftism, facilitated by the direct intervention of the groups of the international milieu, in particular the ICC and IBRP. But as the ICC has always stressed, the future of a group which has emerged in this way depends to a great extent on the clarity of this break, the degree to which the elements involve are aware of where they have come from and how much further they have to go. The group in India which is making the most thoroughgoing rupture with leftism is the one which in its positions and political attitude is closest to the ICC: Communist Internationalist.

As we wrote in IR 42, a number of the comrades of CI were formerly involved in radical leftist politics, most recently in Faridabad Workers' News, an activist, trade unionist paper in Faridabad, an important industrial centre near Delhi.

In India, as in many ‘underdeveloped' countries, the trade unions usually behave in such an openly anti-working class manner (blatant corruption, beating up militant workers, etc) that workers often have a deep hostility towards them as well as towards the left parties with which they are linked (CPI, CPIM, etc). An anecdote illustrates this: while travelling by train from Delhi to West Bengal, the comrades of the ICC and CI got into a discussion with some railway workers who had saved us from missing the train by inviting us into their work-carriage. After a few minutes of general conversation, and without any prompt­ing from us, these workers (who had participated in the great rail strike of 1974) began to say that all the left parties were bourgeois, all the unions were thieves, and that only the revolution would change things for the workers. Such attitudes, which are fairly widespread in India today, don't mean that revolution is imminent, because the workers have great difficulty in seeing how to turn their disillusion into an active struggle against capital. But they do indicate the extent of the workers' antipathy to the unions and left parties.

This accounts for the whole importance, in India, of very radical forms of leftism, which are quite capable of denouncing the unions and the left as agents of capital - in order to trap workers in a more extreme variety of the same thing. In Faridabad itself there had been a whole series of struggles in which, following the exposure of one union/party apparatus, another, more left-sounding one had stepped in to fill the breach, circle had gone through several turns until it came to the point that the ‘Faridabad Workers Group' had been on the verge of forming an ultra-radical union in certain plants; but the ‘arrival' of ICC literature on the union question allowed them to escape this vicious circle. And since this was coupled with a process of clarification of the national question, which is a life-or-death issue for any emerging proletarian group in the peripheries, the comrades were able to embark on the painful path of breaking with their leftist past.

From the collapse of the Faridabad Workers Group a discussion circle was formed which very quickly found itself agreeing with what it understood of the positions and analyses of the ICC. The com­rades then faced the question of how to organize. They recognized that the discussion with the ICC had not been sufficiently homogeneous to consider the possibility of a rapid integration into the Current; but the need to intervene in the resurgent class struggle, to defend revolution­ary positions, impelled the comrades to form themselves into a group which while still engaged in clarifying basic positions and analy­ses, could take up the tasks of intervention through publishing a magazine, leaflets, etc. Thus Communist Internationalist was born.

In our discussions with CI, we expressed our support for the decision to move from discussion circle to political group, while stressing that the first priority of the comrades is theoretical deepening and homogenization, which means that the group as a whole must acquaint itself more fully not only with ICC positions but with the history of the workers' movement and the posit­ions of other groups in the revolutionary milieu. But in today's period, revolutionaries, even when their understanding of class positions is only at an initial stage, cannot remain silent. CI will thus continue to intervene, through leaflets through a physical presence, in important moments of class struggle; t will maintain publication of Communist Internationalist in Hindi and - in order to make its work more accessible both to the milieu in India (where English is a more univers­al medium than Hindi) and, more importantly, to the international milieu - it will produce and English language supplement to CI.

The overall perspective for CI is towards integration into the ICC. But both CI and the Current are fully aware of the problems involved in this process. For a solid and lasting regroup­ment to take place, a whole work of political and organizational education needs to be carried out; incomprehensions or possible divergences confronted. There is nothing predestined or automatic about this. But we are confident that CI's grow­ing convergence with the ICC's positions, especi­ally those on the nature of leftism, on the proletarian milieu and the dangers it faces, provide a firm and reliable basis for the group to complete its break from the leftist past and assume the enormous responsibilities it faces both in India and internationally.

As is often the case, the step that the Faridabad circle took in forming CI was not taken without a price: a split with a comrade who had played a leading role in the initial break with leftism and has subsequently formed a small circle of his own. The reasons for this split were for a long time obscured by ‘personal' issues but through its intervention into the situation, aimed at healing an unjustified split or at least bringing out the real differences, the ICC now considers that the essential question was this: the CI, for all its weaknesses and immaturity, understood that it could not do without a collective framework for homogenizing the group, and that it must at least begin the tasks of a political intervent­ion in the class. The conceptions of the seceding comrade, however, expressed a greater difficulty in breaking from leftist attitudes.

His argument that CI wasn't a political group because there wasn't sufficient homogeneity within it was actually based, on the one hand, on a classical leftist elitism which judges individual comrades to be fixed forever at a greater or lesser level of understanding and fails to see how consciousness can advance through a process of collective discussion; and, on the other hand, as frequently happens with comrades reacting against a past in leftist activism, on an academic approach which does not grasp the relationship between theoretical deepening and practical intervention. This was expressed, for example, in a tendency to fixate on Luxemburg's theory of decadence without seeing its militant implications for revolutionaries today.

Academicism today generally appears as an aspect of the weight of councilist ideology, of the underestimation of the need for an organization of political combat within the class. Had CI followed the orientations of the seceding comrade it would have postponed indefinitely its work of intervention. We regret this development because these comrades could have made an important cont­ribution to CI's work. But we think that these comrades will have to go through a bitter process of political failure before they can understand the mistake they are making.

It is no accident that the question of collective work should have been so central in this split. We consider that CI, because of its movement towards a clear conception of organization, intervention, and the political milieu, is going to play a key role within this milieu, through its defense not only of general communist positions but also of a rigorous approach to the process of discussion and clarification. This was expressed, after many days of discussion with the ICC delegat­ion, by one of the CI comrades who had been involved with Maoist politics for many years. For him, one of the most evident proofs that there is no common ground whatever between leftist and revolutionary politics was precisely the contrast between the phony ‘discussions' that take place in a leftist group, based on the old bourgeois division of labor between thinkers and doers, and the truly collective effort of clarification where all comrades are called upon to take a posit­ion and develop their political and organizational capacities in a context of clearly defined, centralized responsibilities. The defense of this view of organization against both the hierarch­ical notions inherited from leftism, and the anti-organizational neuroses of councilism, will be a primary task for revolutionary groups in India.

Lal Pataka

The ICC may be the clearest international pole of reference for revolutionaries, but it is not the only one. Since the collapse of the ICP (Communist Programme) the IBRP, whose positions tend to be half way between the ICC and Bordigism, has developed its international presence, albeit in a manner strongly marked by opportunism.

In India, at about the same time that CI was being formed, a split took place in the radical leftist group Revolutionary Proletarian Platform, which had been exposed to the positions both of the ICC and the IBRP. The comrade responsible for producing RPP's Bengali paper, Lal  Pataka  (Red Flag) was pushed out of the organization after calling for RPP to restructure itself along the lines of the basic positions of the IBRP.

Before describing the discussions between the ICC and the Lal Pataka comrade, we want to make clear our position on RPP.

When we first received the English language pub­lications of RPP, we were not entirely clear whether this was an attempt to break from left­ism or another radical Stalinist group like the ‘CP of Iran'. These uncertainties persisted in the article on the Indian milieu in World Revolution 77, which while being more clear on the bourgeois nature of RPP, still makes certain concessions to the notion of a ‘movement away from leftism' by this group. But our own internal discussions on opportunism and centrism[1] and a further acquaintance with the history and positions of RPP (thanks largely to the work of the CI comrades), enabled us to close the door finally on any notion that leftist groups as such can pass from one camp to the other. As it states in the resolution on opportunism and centrism from the 6th ICC Congress (see IR 44):

"The collective passages of a political organism that is already structured or in formation in the existing parties can necessarily only take place in one direction: from parties of the proletariat to the bourgeoisie, and never in the opposite direction: from bourgeois parties to the proletariat."

A brief survey of RPP's pre-history makes it clear that this group was always a "structured political organism" of the bourgeoisie. At the beginning of World War 2, the Revolutionary Socialist Party of India was formed, in rupture with the Indian Communist Party, but not at all on a proletarian basis: on the contrary, the policy of the RSP was to fight for the ‘national liberation' of India by allying itself with Brit­ain's enemies - German and Japanese imperialism. The overt integration of the RSP into left front governments in ‘independent' India led to a split in 1969, giving rise to the RSPI (ML), which was characterized by some very radical-sounding pos­itions (denouncing Russia, China, the CPs, and even the unions as capitalist), but which never criticized the nationalist origins of the RSP. RPP was formed at the beginning of the ‘80s from a split in RSPI (ML): again, not to defend class positions, but in reaction against the RSPI (ML)'s: "ultra-leftist deviations" (to quote RPP in Proletarian Emancipation, December ‘85). In particular, RPP defined itself from the beginning as a staunch defender of the trade unions as basic workers' organizations, and has never wavered from this: significantly, the union question was at the heart of the split with Lal Pataka. Neither did RPP ever put into question the nationalist ancestry of the group, or the dogma of the ‘right of nations to self-determin­ation'. The whole trajectory of RPP and its forbearers thus contains moments in the radicalization of leftism, but never a qualitative break from its bourgeois starting point.

RPP's encounter with groups from the proletar­ian camp has not shifted this trajectory. While the IBRP, repeating the errors it made with Iranian leftism, has persisted in relating to RPP as though it were a confused proletarian group, RPP itself is in a way more conscious that it has nothing to do with the communist movement. Despite the IBRP's protestations that RPP shouldn't mix them up with the ICC, RPP has now publically denounced both these revolutionary organizations as ‘petty bourgeois anarchists', and has identified itself with the CP of Iran and the American ‘ex'-Maoists of the Organization for a Marxist-Leninist Workers' Party. Moreover, the picture painted in the IBRP's Communist Review (No 3) of RPP ‘disintegrating' under the impact of the Bureau's positions, seems to be completely false. It's true that Lal Pataka (which, significantly enough, existed before joining RPP and always had a certain autonomy within it) has left to defend proletarian posit­ions, but the departure of a small number of elements has not resulted in the collapse of RPP, which as far as we can ascertain still has several hundred members and a certain implantation in the union apparatus (another small split which took place at the same time as Lal Pataka's, in Nagpur, was entirely on a leftist basis, as their elements want to defend the CP of Iran's position on the ‘democratic revolution' and are openly opposed to the positions of the communist left, as we discovered by meeting them).

In our discussions with the Lal Pataka comrade in December ‘85, it became clear that he had already advanced beyond the positions of the IBRP and his own former position expressed in Lal Pataka's final text within RPP (published in CR 3), which is where he calls for RPP to adopt the platform of the IBRP. We pointed to the ambiguity of this text, and of the fact that the comrade had not himself formally left RPP, but had been ‘suspended' by them on the basis of various trumped-up organizational charges. We emphasized the need for a clearer statement in the next issue of the paper, denouncing RPP as leftist (as he now characterized it) and pro­claiming his break from it. We also argued that the name of the paper be changed in order to indicate this total break in continuity.

One of the positive outcomes of our discussions with Lal Pataka was expressed in a letter to the ICC following our visit:

"We are preparing a statement about our present positions in Bengali for Lal Pataka which will clearly define our total break from leftism; we have no confusion that the rump of the RPP is a left-capitalist group ... Although an eclectic group in political transition, the RPP had at least one positive point in its attitude when it stated itself to be a draft platform which ‘... may be suitably changed and improved through discussions and analyses of the objective material conditions prevailing in India and the world at large ...' However in reality the majority faction of the CC of RPP has refused to face up to the political and organizational implication of completing the break with the counter-revolution ... Thus the rump of the RPP remains a faction of the capitalist left, the inevitable result of which is the splintering of the organization itself. Lal Pataka leaves behind its prehistory - the history of left-capitalism." (28.12. '85)

In our reply to Lai Pataka we welcomed the intention to publish a statement defining RPP as a "left capitalist group." On the other hand, as we pointed out in our reply, Lal Pataka's formulations retain a number of confusions:

"When you say "although an eclectic grouping in political transition, the RPP at least had one positive point in its attitude, etc ... you avoid the issue of the bourgeois nature of this group from the beginning. RPP did not begin its life as a break, however confused, however eclectic, from leftism ... As a well-structured leftist group with a certain implantation in the union apparatus, it could not, by definition, be ‘in evolution' towards anything except a more radical form of leftism.

By talking about the ‘rump' of the RPP, you give the impression that it is only now that the RPP can be clearly defined as leftist. In fact what is left after your departure is not a rump but ... the RPP." (4.2. '86)

Nevertheless, this discussion is a fruitful one because it poses a vital question facing the entire revolutionary movement: the need for a coherent method for grasping the relationship and distinction between bourgeois and proletar­ian organizations.

The discussions between Lal Pataka, CI and ICC in West Bengal were held in a very fraternal atmosphere, and we were able to talk construct­ively about the proposed conference of emerging revolutionary elements, in the preparations for which Lal Pataka has played a galvanizing role. We think that these discussions indicate the possibility of overcoming sectarianism, of confronting divergences in a context of funda­mental class solidarity. We do not for a moment water-down our criticism of opportunism and confusionism wherever it appears in the prolet­arian camp, but neither must we forget the under­lying unity of interests between the different components of the revolutionary movement, because at root this unity expresses the indivisibility of the interests of the proletariat as a whole.

Majdoor Mukti

Through Lal Pataka we entered into contact with another group, based in Calcutta: Majdoor Mukti (Workers' Emancipation), which has appeared recently in a somewhat ‘spontaneous' manner, breaking with the leftist milieu essentially on the question of the party and class consciousness. In a political environment dominated by the left­ist version of ‘Leninist' views on organization, it is significant indeed that a group should arise which, in its founding statement, contains positions such as:

"Against attempts at replacing the role of the working class in its own emancipation by various self-styled liberating agents the communists must consistently advocate that the emancipation of the working class or the build­ing of socialism is impossible without the self-conscious activity of the proletarian masses from below."

or again:

"Against usurpation and monopolization of political power by so-called communist parties and designating that power as proletarian power the communists should bluntly declare that party power is not and can never be synonymous to workers' power..."

In fact, of the seven basic principles elab­orated in the statement, at least five of them are criticisms of substitutionist conceptions. While showing a healthy preoccupation with the need for workers' self-organization, this is still an imbalance which demonstrates - in a country lacking any councilist traditions - the immense pressure of councilism on today's prol­etarian movement. Furthermore, councilist fixat­ions do not represent a bulwark against leftism, on the contrary. From the group's statement and our discussions with them, it is clear that the group doesn't see the dividing line between left­ism and the proletarian movement, a difficulty compounded by its confusions between substitutionism (an error within the proletarian camp) and the anti-proletarian behavior of the capitalist left; that, although it insists that "socialism has not yet been achieved in any part of the world whatsoever," it has hesitations in defining Russia, China, etc, as capitalist states; that, having no clear conception of decadence, it is extremely fuzzy on the nature of unions, reform­ism, etc.

For these and other reasons, it is obvious that the group's break with leftism is far from complete. But we could hardly expect anything else from a group which initially arose without any direct reference to the existing communist forces. What permits us to hope that this group can throw off its leftist and councilist influences is its confidence in the revolutionary capacities of the working class; its rejection of nationalism and emphasis on the international tasks of the prol­etariat; its defense of the need for communist organizations, and a communist party, to inter­vene actively in all the struggles of the class; and, last but not least, its open attitude, its willingness to discuss with and learn from the groups of the revolutionary milieu.

Conferences of revolutionaries

The appearance of these groupings in India expresses a real ferment in the proletariat's avant-garde. It is absolutely essential that the relationships between the components of this milieu be established on a serious and organized basis, to permit the necessary con­frontation of ideas, to allow for practical cooperation and solidarity. We thus wholeheartedly support the proposal of Lal Pataka to organize conferences for these emerging elements. Though unable to attend the initial meeting, the ICC sought to make its political presence felt by sending a declaration to the conference:

-- stressing the importance of the conference by situating it in today's period of accelerat­ing crisis and class struggle;

-- supporting the choice of its essential theme, ‘the foundations and implications of capitalist decadence', ie in that an understanding; of decad­ence is indispensable in the elaboration of the class frontiers which separate the proletariat from the bourgeoisie. At the same time, we emphasized the need to avoid academic debates and to apply the concept of decadence to the present unfolding of reality and the resulting tasks of revolutionaries (in conjunction with CI, the ICC submitted to the conferences three of its published texts on crisis theory, the proletarian struggle in decadence, and the present international situation);

-- calling on the conferences to adopt criteria for future participation ‘broad' enough to keep it open to all emerging proletarian elements, but ‘narrow' enough to exclude radical leftists;

-- insisting on the need for the conference not to be ‘dumb' but to take positions through joint resolutions, to clearly define areas of agreement and disagreement;

-- defending the need for the conference to open up to the international revolutionary milieu, particularly by publishing its results in English;

-- pointing out the link between this conference and the need for an international forum for debate between revolutionaries. As the declarat­ion puts it:

"Although the 1976-80 conferences collared under the weight of the prevailing sectarianism in the milieu, we think that the resurgence of class struggle and the appearance of new revolut­ionary groups in a number of countries (India, Austria, Mexico, Argentina...) is again confirm­ing the need for an organized international framework for discussions and activities within the proletarian milieu. Even if a new cycle of international conferences is not yet an immediate possibility, the meetings in India, by breaking out of fragmentation and sectarianism, can play their part in the development of new and more fruitful conferences at the international level in the future."

The development of the revolutionary movement in India can thus be a factor in vitalizing the whole international milieu, It is a confirmation of the profound promise contained within today's period; an encouragement to revolutionaries everywhere; a clear indication of the need for the revolutionary organizations in the heartlands to live up to their international responsibilit­ies. For its part, the ICC has no doubt that it must do everything it can to support and stimul­ate the work of all our comrades in the ‘Indian section' of the world proletarian movement.

MU

---

[1] See IR 43, ‘Discussion: Opportunism and Centrism in the Working Class and its Organizations'; IR 44 ‘Resolution Adopted on Opportunism and Centrism in the Period of Decadence' and rejected resolution on ‘Centrism and the Political Organizations of the Proletariat'.

A year particularly difficult combats, confronting a more and more skilful, but also more and more frightened bourgeoisie. The perspective for these combats: their unification, through a long process of experienced and confrontation

As always at the beginning of a new year, the ruling class has drawn up a ‘social balance sheet' of the previous year. To hear them, they all agree on one point: 1985 has been marked by a generalized retreat in the workers' struggle.

Page after page is filled with statistics showing the fall in the number of strikes, and the number of ‘strike days lost'. Then they explain: in these times of crisis, the workers have at last understood that their interests are not in contradiction to those of the companies that employ them. And so they refrain from striking, the better to defend their jobs.

Far from sharpening class antagonisms, the econ­omic crisis is supposed to have reduced them. The crisis is supposed to have demonstrated the truth of the old song that the exploiters sing to the exploited when business is bad: ‘we're all in the same boat'.                          

Even the majority of the groups within the prol­etarian political movement line up behind the analysis of a retreat in the class struggle. To all intents and purposes, only the ICC develops the opposite vision, recognizing an international recovery in the class struggle since the end of 1983. This recovery (the third following the waves of 1968-74 and 1978-80) is worldwide: obvious in the under-developed countries, it also appears clearly in the devel­oped countries - especially in Western Europe - as long as we consider the reality of the class struggle, and place it within its historical and international dynamic.

Paradoxically, the bourgeoisie, with all its governments and its political apparatus (parties and trade unions) is well aware of the situation, and is constantly developing and deploying a whole arsenal of political, economic and ideol­ogical weapons to ward off, to confront the proletariat's combativity. The bourgeoisie reveals in practice its fear of the working class threat,         while the revolutionary groups indulge in pitiful lamentations because their class' movement is not faster, more spectacular, or more immediately revolutionary.

***********

In this article, we intend:                                               

1) To demonstrate that the reality of the class struggle in 1985 totally disproves this idea that the world proletariat is passively submitting to the demands of capitalism in crisis;

2) To draw out the resulting perspectives for the proletariat's worldwide combat.

How to look at the facts

A few preliminary remarks are absolutely necessary before drawing up a chronology of workers' struggles throughout the world during 1985.

Generally speaking, it is true that in the West European countries the official statistics reveal a low level of strikes and strike days lost during 1985, compared to those reached at the end of the ‘60s or during the ‘70s. But this is not enough to determine the direction of the dynamic of the workers' struggle ... still less to con­clude that the workers are rallying to the necessities of the capitalist economic logic.

Firstly, strike statistics (inasmuch as they are not faked by governments always anxious to demon­strate their ability to maintain ‘social peace') are generally swollen by long strikes, confined to a single sector (like the British miners' strike). Now one of the major characteristics of the evolution of workers' struggle in recent years, strongly confirmed in 1985, is the ten­dency to abandon this kind of action - which is a trade union specialty - whose uselessness is appearing more and more clearly- to European workers.

As we will see, the short, explosive kind of struggle, usually unofficial at first, and quickly trying to spread, such as the strikes in Belgium during October or the Paris metro strike in December I985, is much more significant and characteristic of the coming period, and appears very little (or not at all) in the official strike statistics.

From this standpoint, the low statistics of the number of strike days does not mechanically express a retreat in the working class' struggle, but rather a maturation in its consciousness.

Secondly, going on strike in 1985 is not at all the same thing as going on strike in 1970. The threat of unemployment hanging over every worker like the sword of Damocles on the one hand, the combined action of all the forces of the bourge­oisie - with the unions in the forefront - to prevent any mobilization of the class on the other, means that in the mid-‘80s, it is much ­more difficult for the workers to launch themselves into struggle than during the ‘70s or at the end of the ‘60s.

A quantitative comparison, that puts a ‘strike day' today on the same level as one a decade ago, completely ignores the gravity of the historical evolution of the last 15 years. In this sense, we can say that a strike in the mid-‘80s is more significant than a strike in the ‘60s or ‘70s.

Thirdly, no strike statistics can take account of another crucial aspect of workers' actions in our epoch: the struggle of the unemployed. Even at its first steps, the beginnings of the organization of unemployed committees in Germany, Italy, Britain and France represent an important element - and one that is completely ignored by the statistics - of workers' combativity today.

1985: The world working class refuses to bow the knee to the logic of capital in crisis

The ruling class may dream that the crisis will push the workers to adopt the logic of capitalist profitability. But throughout the world, reality daily disproves its lying propaganda. 

Taking account of the forgoing remarks on the significance of today's workers' struggles in the most developed countries, a rapid survey, month by month, of the major struggles that have marked the year 1985 is enough to reduce to ridicule such assertions.                                                     

Obviously, the list that follows cannot claim to include all the important struggles of the year. The bourgeoisie has a conscious and systematic policy of blacking out all the news concerning the workers' struggles. This is already true within one country: it is all the more true at   an international level. Therefore, for example, we cannot cite examples from the so-called ‘communist' countries, even though we know the working class is fighting there, as it is in the West. 

Even if January was marked by the decline of the British miners' strike, already in February when it was drawing to a close, a new wave of workers' struggles was beginning in Spain, and was to last until March, hitting, amongst others, shipyards, the car industry (especially Ford-Valencia), the Barcelona postal workers (a spontaneous struggle which remained for a long time under the sole control of the strikers' assembly), and the farm laborers of the Levant region.   

The month of April began with the explosion of workers' struggles in Denmark - another ‘paradise of Scandanavian socialism' - with a general strike mobilizing more than half a million workers. During the same month, in Latin America, in the country of the ‘Brazilian miracle' and in the midst of its ‘transition to democracy', 400,000 went out on strike and paralyzed the very modern suburbs of Sao Paulo, the major industrial concentration on the American sub-continent (despite the appeals of the new unions, the workers refused to call a halt to the struggle at the death of the new ‘democratic' president).                                                                   

The month of May witnessed the outbreak of the first large-scale struggles of the South African miners.                         

The month of June began with the strike of 14,000 New York hotel workers who themselves organized the extension of the struggle with mass flying pickets. The myth of the USA as a country reduced to the muscle-bound social peace of Ronald Reagan was once again disproved. Still during June, and once again in response to government austerity measures, strikes proliferated in Columbia, to the point where, on the 20th, the unions were forced to organize a general strike.                                                                

The month of July began with the outbreak, in the USA, of the Wheeling Pittsburg engineering workers' strike: the steel industry is hard-hit in the US. Their struggle - in one of the major industrial regions of the world's most powerful country - was to last until October.

In Britain, where strikes had been breaking out continuously ever since the end of the miners' strike, a large and unofficial strike began on the railways and spread rapidly; in Wales, railwaymen's strike pickets broke down trade barriers to help the pickets from a striking steel works. In France, the largest shipyards in the country went out on strike, and twice, in Lille and Dunkirk, the workers broke out of union control to confront the police for several hours. In Israel, still during July, workers reacted immediately to the ‘socialist' Peres government's announcement of a whole series of austerity measures (price rises of up to 100%, wage cuts between 12% and 40%, 10,000 government workers laid off): the union (tied to the ruling party) had to organize a 24 hour general strike (followed by 90% of the working population). But when the moment came to go back, whole sectors stayed out, while the union bosses talked of "a real risk of things getting out of control".

During August, in ‘socialist' Yugoslavia, a stream of austerity measures unleashed a wave of strikes that hit several regions: the most important strikes mobilized the miners and the dock workers.

In the month of September, particularly draconian austerity measures (food prices multiplied by 10, bread prices by 4, household gas by 20, at the same time as a 4-month wage freeze for all state employees) were announced in Bolivia, one of the world's poorest countries, but with a rich tradition of class struggle, especially in the mining industry, provoking a generalized reaction from the workers. The COB (principal union) called for a 48-hour general strike, the widely followed. The movement was violently repressed. The workers immediately prolonged the general strike for another 16 days. In France, at the end of September, an unofficial strike broke out on the railways - the biggest since the end of the ‘60s. It spread rapidly, forcing the government to withdraw - temporarily the new measures of control that had provoked the movement.

In October, in Belgium, strikes break out in the post office, the railways, the Brussels underground, the Limburg mines, which all go through the same stages: starting unofficially, rapidly spreading to other workers in the same sector, followed by a temporary ‘withdrawal' by the government, for fear of further extension. At the same time, Holland is hit by a similar wave of strikes affecting essentially the firemen, lorry drivers, and various branches in the port of Rotterdam.

On the 6th of November, just as the Limburg miners were going back to work, in Greece 100,000 state and private sector workers came out on strike against the ‘socialist' government's austerity measures. During the same month, Brazil was once again hit by a wave of strikes (500,000 workers). In Argentina, where the new ‘democratic' government imposed, in 1985, wage cuts of up to 45%, a period of agitation and workers' struggles began, which had to continue until January ‘86. Still in November, Sweden ‑ another socialist ‘paradise' - went through the largest strike wave since the end of the ‘60s: slaughter-house workers in the north, locomotive repairmen throughout the country, industrial cleaners at Borlange and above all the strike of the child-minders, who organized their struggle themselves throughout the country, against the state and the unions, culminating on November 23rd with a simultaneous demonstration in 150 different towns. In one demonstration, the workers chanted: "The support of the unions is our death." In Japan, well-known for its lack of workers' struggles, a strike breaks out against the threat of massive lay-offs on the railways. The month of December - to close this brief survey of 1985 - is marked by renewed struggles in Spain: the hospital and health services in Barcelona; in the Asturian mines (against an unprecedented upsurge in industrial accidents); the region of Vigo in Galicia, but above all Bilbao, are hit by strikes in various sectors - once again in the shipyards, but also among; the unemployed taken on by the town council. In France, the Paris metro drivers walk out after disciplinary measures were taken against several of their comrades, and paralyzed the capital in a few hours. In Lebanon, torn apart by wars between rival factions of the local bourgeoisie and by international antagonisms, a 100% price rise provoked a general strike, and calls from workers from the Muslim sector to those of the Christian sector, saying: "famine doesn't recognize political colors; it hits everybody except the ruling minority".

******

We have intentionally presented this glimpse of the major movements of the workers struggles ‘in bulk', simply according to their chronological order.

Whatever the differences between the proletarian combats in the peripheries and those of the cen­tral countries, they are all elements of one and the same struggle, one and the same response to the same attack of world capital in crisis. It was first of all necessary to demonstrate clearly the worldwide aspect of workers' resistance to disprove the absurd idea that the economic crisis has calmed down the class struggle. It is necessary to point out this unity, the better to bring out, taking the differences between the workers' struggles as a starting point, their global dynamic.

The differences between the workers' struggles in the central industrialized nations and in the periphery

An overall look at the workers' struggles throughout the world today highlights the fact that, whereas in the under-developed countries they tend rapidly to assume a unified form, even if this is still behind union leadership, in the industrialized countries, the struggles have tended to be less massive at the end of the year than at the beginning: after movements like those of the British miners or the workers in Denmark, today we are witnessing a multitude of shorter, more explosive, more simultaneous, but also more isolated struggles.

This is essentially due to different degrees of economic development, and to the different strategies adopted by the ruling class according to the socio-political conditions confronting it.                     

In all the under-developed countries, whose economy is totally bankrupt, the ‘austerity' measures that capital is forced to take against the workers are inevitably far more massive, direct, and violent. Capital has no economic room for maneuver. Sky-high price rises on basic consumer goods, real wage cuts of 30% to 40%, immediate and massive redundancies such as those in Bolivia, Argentina and Brazil during 1985, are attacks that hit all workers immediately and simultaneously.

This creates the basis for large-scale movements very quickly capable of bringing together millions of workers.

Generally, the local bourgeoisie has no other means of confronting such movements than to use the most vicious and merciless repression. A repression that is made possible by the local Proletariat's numerical and historical weakness, and by the ruling class' ability to recruit its forces of repression amongst a vast mass of the population, jobless and marginalised for generations.

But such methods are increasingly inadequate, and run the risk of a total social destabilization (as we have seen in Bolivia, where this time, repression only exacerbated the workers' struggle). This is why today we are witness­ing a sham ‘democratization' of regimes in under-developed countries, often under the pressure of the imperialist powers (eg the pressure applied by the US and its European allies on the governments of South Africa, Latin America, Haiti, the Philippines) whose sole aim is to create union and political apparatuses capable of controlling the workers' struggles (far more dangerous than the hunger riots that have become chronic in some of these countries) and lead them into a nationalist dead-end.

These new control apparatuses benefit from the strength they draw from the workers' lack of experience in bourgeois ‘democracy' in these countries, and their illusions in them - at least at first - after years of civilian or military dictatorship.

In the developed countries, and especially in Western Europe, the situation is very different. On the economic level, the bourgeoisie still has room for maneuver - even though the system's crisis is reducing it day by day - which allows the ruling class to spread out and plan its attacks in order to avoid taking measures that hit violently and immediately too many workers at once. Its attacks are increasingly heavy and massive, but it works to disperse their effects, so that they appear to each sector of the working class as a particular, specific attack. At this level, if we compare 1984 to 1985, we can see clearly that this is a conscious policy on the bourgeoisie's part.

The policies of ‘privatization' of the economy's state sector and the development of so-called economic liberalism at the level of firms' operation is part and parcel of this strategy[1]. The layoffs due to ‘industrial restructuration' thus look like a specific question of job creation in new private companies that ‘come to the rescue' of the old bankrupt ones. The number of lay-offs remains the same, but they appear scattered in so many different companies, so many ‘individual cases'.

On this level, the world bourgeoisie seems to have learnt the lesson they were given by the big scare of Poland 1980: in the peripheral countries they understand that brutal repression is no longer enough, that it is absolutely necessary to create local ‘Solidarnoscs' capable of sabotaging the social movements from the inside; in the most industrialized countries, they know that too obvious economic attacks (like the one that unleashed the explosion in the Baltic towns in August 1980) are too great a risk for the stability of their social order.

Western Europe: the battleground of the most decisive confrontations

As we have shown on many occasions - in particul­ar in drawing the lessons of Poland 1980 - it is in Western Europe, the world's oldest and largest industrial concentrations that the most decisive confrontations of the world working class strugg­le will be played out[2]. This is where the proletariat is most concentrated and most exper­ienced. But it is also in Europe that reigns the bourgeoisie with the greatest experience of the class struggle.

This policy of dispersing workers' struggles through an apparent dispersal of the economic attack is in reality only an aspect of the comp­lex arsenal systematically developed by the bourgeoisie in this part of the world in order to confront the workers' struggle.

During; 1985, the European bourgeoisie has used all these methods, and has developed them in a more and more concerted manner. At one and the same time, it has had recourse to:

1) A division of labor between different union and political forces,

2) Ideological campaigns,

3) Repression.

The division of labor between, on the one hand the governments, which, whether right or left, have systematically enforced policies of ‘rigor' (ie increased exploitation), and on the other the forces of the ‘left' (both parties and unions) whose job it is to keep control of the workers, which have radicalized their language the better to channel the workers' reaction into dead-ends, or more simply to sabotage any mass mobilization on a class terrain.

During 1985, this movement to ‘radicalize' the left wing of the capitalist political apparatus has appeared first and foremost in the develop­ment and increasingly frequent use of ‘rank-and-­file unionism', ie union tendencies (usually under the impulse of the leftists) which criticize the union leaderships and apparatus, the better to defend the union terrain. Especially active in Belgium (in the Limburg mining industry), they have played an important part in the strikes in Britain (support for the shop stewards), in Spain, in the USA, in Sweden....

The big unions themselves have radicalized their language. The CGT in France is notorious for this. It has tried to make workers forget its mentor the French CP's 3-year participation in government; for LO in Sweden, the union tied to the Socialist government, which has increasingly been overtaken by the struggles at the end of the year; for the UGT in Spain, which because it relied too heavily on the PSOE in power, is more and more taken for a scab union.

But this radical language has only served to hide a systematic work of demobilization.

Unlike the ‘60s and ‘70s, when they could still organize massive street demonstrations with impunity, in order to polish up their image as the ‘workers' champions', the European unions don't take such risks today. They know that the workers' growing suspicion of them (concretized in a massive desertion of the unions) is only matched by the suppressed anger rumbling in the ranks of the exploited. They know that any large workers demonstration on a terrain of the defense of their class demands[3] runs the risk of gett­ing out of control. This is why the union strat­egy in most European countries is either to call demonstrations where the time and place are only announced at the last minute and as discretely as possible, so as to try and make sure that only solid union sympathizers take part, or to call many different demonstrations, but in different parts of the same town, taking care to avoid any meeting between groups of marchers (in Spain, France and Britain, the unions have become past masters at this game of dispersing proletarian combativity).

Ideological campaigns. Here again, the bourgeoi­sie's activity has been particularly fertile. European workers have been daily hammered over the head with campaigns on:

-- The uselessness of struggle in times of crisis - above all after the defeat of the British miners' strike;

-- How lucky we are to live in ‘democratic' coun­tries - especially during the struggles in South Africa;

-- Terrorism, trying to identify all struggle against the state with terrorism; in Belgium, this campaign has taken on gigantic proportions, to the point where, among other things, the government could decide to put crack troops at the gates of certain factories ... the better to protect them against terrorism!

-- The defense of the region, branch of industry, or even of the company, trying to make workers believe that the defense of their living condit­ions is the same as that of the instrument of their exploitation (‘defend the nation's coal' -Limburg, Britain, the Asturias); (‘defend the region' - the Basque country in Spain, the Lorra­ine in France, Wallonia in Belgium, etc).

Repression. Along with its economic, political, and ideological weapons, the European bourgeoisie has constantly developed its weapons of police repression. 1985 has been marked, in particular, by the examples of Belgium, which we have already mentioned, and above all of Great Britain where the bourgeoisie, in the wake of the miners' strike and the riots in Brixton and Birmingham has carried out a reinforcement unprecedented in the nation's history of the forces and methods aimed at the repression of social struggles.

Perspective for the class struggle

But if the world bourgeoisie - and especially the West European bourgeoisie - has been driven to such a development of the weapons for the defense of its system, it is because they are frightened. And they are quite right to be frightened. The third international wave of workers' struggle is only at its beginning, and its slow development is an expression of the depth of the upheaval to come.

In Western Europe - which will determine the future of the world workers' struggle - the workers' tendency to abandon forms of struggle that consist of long isolated strikes in symbolic fortresses expresses, even if it is in a form that is still too dispersed, an assimilation of years of experience and defeats, of which the British miners' strike is one of the most spect­acular recent examples. In this sense, 1985 has marked a step forward.

As for this dispersal, the basis for the present strategy of scattering workers' struggles in Western Europe is condemned to wear out more and more rapidly under the effects of the worsening economic crisis and the accumulated experience of the confrontation between the workers' comba­tivity and the union jail.

The limited room for maneuver that the bourg­eoisie still possesses in the industrialized countries can only go on diminishing, as its system's internal contradictions sharpen, and its palliatives for the crisis - all based on putting off the day of reckoning thanks to credit - are exhausted. On this level, the under-developed countries show the way for the industrialized regions.

As for the unions' and the ‘left' fractions' surviving ability to sabotage the workers' struggle, the permanent contradiction, the constant clash between the thrust of proletarian forces everywhere, and the practical and ideolog­ical barriers raised by these institutions, is leading; slowly but inexorably to the creation of the conditions for the flourishing of a truly autonomous workers struggle. The desertion of the union barracks by an ever-growing number of workers throughout Europe, the proliferation of struggles that start and try to spread with­out any official union support, bear unequivoc­al witness to this.

The working class can only become conscious of its strength, and of how to develop it, through the combat itself, a combat that will confront it, not only with the government and the bosses, but also with the union and the left forces of capital.

The perspective of the class struggle is the struggle's continuation. And the continuation of the struggle is and will be more and more the combat against dispersal, for its unificat­ion.

And at the end of today's process of a developing international movement, lies the internationalization of the workers' struggle.

RV

 

One and the same struggle throughout history

Strikes yesterday and today

For almost two centuries, the working class has used the strike to resist and combat capital's exploitation, to which it is subjected more directly than any other exploited class. However, it is obvious that a strike's significance is determined by the historical context in which it is placed. Like those of the 19th century, the workers' struggles of our epoch express the same antagonism between the exploited class which is the bearer of communism, and the exploiting class which profits from, defends, and ensures the continuation of the estab­lished social order. But unlike those of the 19th century, today's workers' struggles are not confronting a capitalism in the height of its youth, conquering the world, and pushing to make unprecedented progress in every domain. The strikes of the 1980s are fighting the reality of a senile, decadent system, which has twice plunged humanity into the horrors of world war, and which after 20 years of prosperity from the ‘50s onwards, thanks to the reconstruct­ion of what it had destroyed previously and to the development of weapons capable of destroy­ing the planet several times over, has been floundering in an unprecedented economic crisis since the end of the ‘60s.

Today's workers' struggles, because they are the only real, effective resistance to the totalitarian barbarism of decadent capital, are the only hope for a humanity subjected to an endless terror.

But capitalism's mortal wound, the fact that its laws have become historically obsolete, does not make it any more conciliatory towards its slaves. On the contrary. Today, the working class confronts a bourgeoisie that is cynical, adroit, experienced, capable of acting together nationally and internationally (Poland 1980) to confront the workers' struggle.

Because historically there is more at stake, because the difficulties encountered are greater, every sign of workers' resistance takes on a far greater importance today. Those who, today, in the name of a merely verbal ‘radicalism' con­sider strike after strike, struggle after struggle, with the same ‘transcendental disdain', because they are not yet ‘revolutionary enough' only express the impatience of those who understand nothing about the revolution and the complex process that prepares it. To ‘forget' the elementary necessity of placing today's workers' struggles in their context, their historical dynamic, makes it impossible to understand them at all[4].

RV

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[1] On the economic level, the weight of the state has never been greater than it is today ... and it is constantly increasing. We need only consider the ever-growing share of national income that, in one form or another passes through the state's hands. On a strictly economic level, the only used of this so-called ‘liberal' policy is to accelerate the concentration of capital thanks to a more rapid elimination of unprofitable branches and companies, to the benefit of big capital. 

[2] See ‘The West European Proletariat at the Heart of the Class Struggle', in IR 31.

[3] Obviously, the forces of the Left are still ready to mobilize the workers, but on inter-classist or ambiguous terrain: for example, the present anti-NATO campaign in Spain, or the campaigns for ‘democratic right' to strike in Germany.

[4] See ‘Understanding the Struggle: Marxist Method Against Empiricism' in IR 41 (2nd Quarter, 1985), and ‘What Method For Understanding the Recovery in Workers' Struggles' in IR 39 (4th Quarter, 1984).

 

The proletarian political milieu, already strongly marked by the weight of sectarianism, as the ICC has often shown and deplored, has just been ‘enriched' by a new sect. There is a new publication entitled Internationalist Perspectives, organ of the ‘External Fraction of the ICC' (EFICC) that "claims a continuity with the programmatic framework developed by the ICC". This group is composed of comrades who belonged to the ‘tendency' formed in our organisation and who left it at its Sixth Congress[1] to "defend the ICC's platform". We've already met many forms of sectarianism among revolutionaries today, but the creation of an ICC-bis with the same programmatic positions of the ICC constitutes a never - before -attained peak in this domain. They have also reached a peak in the amount of mud thrown at the ICC: only the Communist Bulletin (also formed of ex-ICC members) has gone so far. From its creation, this new group thus places itself on a terrain that only political gangsters (who distinguished themselves by stealing material and funds from the ICC) have exploited with such fervour. Even if the members of the ‘Fraction' have in no way been involved in such acts of gansterism, we can say that its sectarianism and predilection for gratuitous insults don't augur well for the future evolution of this group and its capacity to make a contribution to the proletariat's efforts to develop its consciousness. In fact, the little games of the EFICC express one thing: a total irresponsibility towards the tasks facing revolutionaries today, a desertion of militant combat.

Calumnies, calumnies... but there must be something in them...

In the main text in IP devoted to the ICC, we read, "This text does not seek to settle accounts nor to fall into a shallow polemic". We might ask what the text would have been like if this were the case. For in this article, amongst other compliments, we read that over the last two years the ICC has shown "an intolerable contempt for revolutionary principles, which have been dragged in the mud by its tactical volte-faces", that it has developed a "completely Stalinist vision of organisation", that it has "sunk into corruption", that it has tried to "sow fear, to try to terrorise and paralyse the militants with low insinuations" in order to "justify its new orientation, its 180 degree turn". At the same time, against the comrades who would go on to form the EFICC it "set the steamroller in motion to crush any resistance", using an impressive array of exactions: "sordid organisational practices", "personal attacks of all sorts, slander, suspicion, tactics of division and demoralisation, disciplinary measures, censure". These are just a few glimpses of what can be found in this article. One might well ask, who is it that has been engaging in "hysterical incantations", the ICC, as the EFICC claim, or the EFICC itself?

One might be tempted to dismiss these calumnies with a wave of the wrist; but they are of such a breadth and quantity that it is reasonable to suppose that they could impress the reader who is poorly-informed about the reality of the ICC; that, because they emanate from an organisation which claims to defend the platform of the ICC (a point which should be a mark of seriousness), they could give rise to the reaction that ‘there's no smoke without fire'. Thus, even if we can't reply to all the EFICC's accusations (which would take up the whole of this Review), we are obliged to refute at least some of the lies contained in the pages- of IP.

The lies of ‘Internationalist Perspective'

These lies are of an incalculable number and take numerous forms, starting with small, ridiculous falsifications and going on to odiously malicious accusations.

Thus, the article on ‘The Decline of the ICC' begins with a ‘small lie'. The first phrase asserts that "most of the comrades who have constituted the External Fraction of the International Communist Current were at the very basis of the constitution of the ICC in 1975". This is false: of the eleven comrades who left the ICC to form the EFICC only three were in the organisation at the foundation of the ICC in January 1975.

The article in IP is rife with these kinds of ludicrous ‘small lies'. It repeats, for example, the old dada of the ‘tendency' that the ICC's present analysis on opportunism and centrism represents a turn away from our classic positions. In International Review n°42 we showed, supporting this with quotations, that in reality it was the analysis of the tendency that represented a revision of the positions of the ICC and the communist left. Here we don't want to quarrel with them for making this revision. But we should point out that this attitude of attributing to others what itself was doing was quite symptomatic of the behaviour of the tendency and is today being carried on by the EFICC and boils down to obscuring the real questions posed, through contortions and bad faith.

This same propensity for attributing to another (in this case the ICC) what it itself is doing is shown when IP accuses the ICC of a "lack of fraternal spirit". Here again, the world is turned upside down! We are not going to bore the reader with all the examples that show that it was the comrades of the ‘tendency' who exhibited this "lack of fraternal spirit". It's enough to read the collection of odious insults, animated by spite and a spirit of revenge, in the ‘Decline of the ICC' article to see on what side this "lack of fraternal spirit" is situated.

We could go on refuting the small lies but we'd get lost in details. It is better to show the big lies used by the EFICC to justify its thesis of the degeneration of the ICC.

The first of these exceeds all the rest: that the comrades of the ‘tendency' were excluded from the ICC. Finding it hard to support such an assertion, the EFICC is careful to say in certain phrases that this was a ‘de facto' exclusion. We have to say it clearly once again: this is completely false. These comrades were not expelled, neither formally nor ‘de facto'. In the previous issue of the International Review we explained the circumstances in which these comrades departed. In particular we drew attention to a resolution unanimously adopted by the Sixth Congress clearly showing that the departure of these comrades was entirely their own responsibility. Without going into detail, let's recall here:

• that the Congress asked the comrades of the ‘tendency' what were their intentions for after the Congress; in particular, did they intend to remain militants of the ICC, given that some of them had asserted on several occasions that they intended to leave after the Congress;
• that the comrades of the tendency constantly refused to reply to this question, because they were in fact not in agreement about it themselves;
• that faced with this refusal to respond, the Congress asked these comrades to withdraw from the session so that they could reflect, discuss, and come to the next session with a clear response;
• that the comrades used this request as a pretext for withdrawing from the Congress, claiming that they had been excluded from it, which was utterly false;
• that the Congress adopted a resolution, transmitted over the telephone, demanding that these comrades return to the Congress;
• that these comrades rejected this demand as an "ignoble attempt to justify the exclusion of the tendency";
• that the Congress adopted a resolution condemning this attitude which "expresses a contempt for the Congress and its character as a moment in the militant action of the organisation" and "constitutes a real desertion of the responsibilities which are those of any militant of the organisation". This resolution envisaged sanctions against these comrades but in no way their expulsion.

To claim after all this that the ‘tendency' was excluded from the ICC, or even the Congress, is a lie as odious as it is ridiculous because the proceedings prove the exact opposite. What's more these comrades know perfectly well that when they left they had not been excluded from the organisation because in the declaration they handed in at the time they left they affirmed that they remained "as a tendency and as minority comrades within the ICC".

Another equally big and equally odious lie contained in International Review n° is that the ICC ‘stifled' the debates, including through the use of disciplinary measures, and censored the public expression of the positions of the ‘tendency'. Once again, a world in reverse! In January ‘84 the central organ had to insist that the comrades who had expressed ‘reserves' should write explaining their vote to the whole organisation. A year later it was the same central organ that requested, "any contributions should be seen in terms of opening the debate to the outside". Frankly, to affirm that the ICC, or its central organ, ‘stifled' the debate - that it has evolved towards monolithism as the EFICC claims - is to mock reality. In a period of over a year the internal bulletins of the organisation published around 120 texts on this discussion, or about 700 pages. All the texts of the minority comrades were published without exception in these bulletins.

Far from falling into ‘monolithism', the organisation permanently insisted on the need for clarity, the necessity for the different positions within it to be expressed as precisely as possible.

The same goes for the external publication of internal debates. It is a gross and stupid calumny to assert that the ICC "allowed practically none of this to filter through during the last two years", that it created a "wall of silence" around itself. Any reader knows that the last five issues of our Review have given a great deal of space to this debate (a total of 40 pages with three texts by the ‘tendency' and four texts defending the positions of the ICC). An equal calumny is the assertion that the ICC "systematically censored texts where we tried to discuss the general meaning of the debate". What does this ‘systematic censorship' amount to? In fact only two texts were not published. One was submitted to the territorial press in Britain, but because it dealt with so many questions, it was more suitable for the International Review. This was proposed to the tendency but rejected by it. The other was the ‘Declaration on the Formation of a Tendency' published in IP. On this text, the central organ of the ICC adopted a resolution which said that "the ‘Declaration' contains a certain number of affirmations or insinuations which denigrate the organisation" (the list of passages concerned follows). The resolution goes on: "(the central organ) considers that, in the interests of the dignity of the public debate, and thus of the credibility of the organisation, such formulations cannot appear in the next issue of the Review" and "thus asks the comrades who have signed this ‘Declaration' either to remove them from the text to be published, or to provide arguments for them, so that the public debate can evolve in a clear way and avoid using gratuitous insults". This is interpreted by the EFICC as, "the ICC simply gave itself the right to dictate to a minority what it could (and couldn't) write and think."

This is how history is rewritten!

If the ‘tendency' had really wanted the totality of its criticisms to be known about, all it had to do was take the trouble to provide some arguments for points that, in the text, look like no more than gratuitous insults. But this wasn't its concern. It clothed itself in its outraged dignity and "categorically refused to enter this game of compromises", as though explaining a disagreement or a criticism was a "compromise".

This is another point to be made about the approach of the ‘tendency': it did everything to convince the rest of the ICC of its own lack of seriousness, and in this, it has been a great success.

The ‘glorious combat' of the tendency

When a minority appears in an organisation to try to convince it that it's on the wrong road, its behaviour is at least as important in attaining this goal as its political arguments. IP gives an example of the seriousness of its efforts to ‘redress' an ICC facing the danger of degeneration: the minority comrades "had always carried on their struggle openly, in a militant and responsible way, without any harm to the general functioning of the organisation, with the goal of convincing the ICC of its errors."

In the previous issues of the International Review n° we pointed out the inconsistency of the political arguments of the ‘tendency'. The behaviour of these comrades both in the debate and the organisational life of the ICC was a faithful reflection of this. How can they say that they did no "harm to the general functioning of the organisation" when, for example:

• a member of the central organ tried to announce their resignation from it to the organisation as a whole, without even informing the central organ;
• several members of the same central organ communicated to a local section a document signed by them as members of the central organ and criticising it, without first bringing this document to its attention;
• on several occasions so-called ‘informal' meetings were held without the organisation being informed in advance;
• members of the central organ missed one of its meetings in order to hold a ‘tendency' meeting.

We could give many other examples of the lack of seriousness of the minority comrades in the conduct of the debate. They themselves were conscious of this when, at the end of ‘84, they wrote (in a text justifying the regular holding of separate meetings) that there had been a "lack in (their) contribution to the ongoing debate". This is very far from the self-satisfied assertions one reads in IP about the minority's ‘tireless' pushing forward of the debate against the ICC's efforts to "shut the door to discussion".

Here we will give just two examples of the admirable seriousness of the minority:

• in June ‘84, four minority comrades, members of the central organ, voted in the space of five minutes in a totally contradictory manner on the question of centrism: in a first vote they placed centrism in the bourgeoisie and in the second they made it a phenomenon within working class;
• since the beginning of the debate, the minority comrades never ceased affirming the need to address themselves "to the task of developing onto a higher level the marxist theory of class consciousness and the role of the party on the foundations already established by the ICC". And for two years, we've seen nothing from these comrades on this question. Nothing. Not one text! This speaks volumes about the seriousness with which they conducted the debate.

A caricature of an irresponsible sect

A question is posed: how can it be that such longstanding members of the organisation, with such experience and such undeniable political capacities, half of them members of the central organ of the ICC, could have allowed themselves to fall into such a regression, leading them to behave in an increasingly irresponsible way, to the point of splitting and unleashing such a torrent of hateful and ridiculous lies against the organisation? While keeping a sense of proportion, we are seeing today a very similar phenomenon to what happened during and after the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1903, and which resulted in the split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. Leading the Mensheviks there were also long-standing militants whose political capacities were widely recognised, and who for years had contributed a great deal to the cause of the socialist revolution, notably on the editorial board of the old Iskra (1900-1903).

And it was these elements (notably Martov, then followed by Plekhanov) that were to be at the head of an opportunist current in the RSDLP, a current that progressively moved towards the betrayal of the class.

In order to characterise the phenomenon of Menshevism at its beginnings and to analyse its causes, let's hand over to Lenin, the leading element of the revolutionary marxist wing of the RSDLP:

"... the political nuance which played an important role at the Congress, and which distinguished itself precisely by its flabbiness, its pettiness, its lack of any clear positions by its perpetual oscillations between the two clearly opposed positions, by the fear of openly exposing its credo, in a word by its floundering in the ‘swamp'. There are those in our party who, when they hear this word, are seized with horror and cry out about polemics shorn of any comradely spirit ... But hardly any political party which has gone through an internal struggle has failed to use this term, which still serves to describe the unstable elements who oscillate between the combatants. And the Germans, who know how to carry on the internal struggle in a suitable framework, don't get formalistic about this word ‘versumpft' (swamp), aren't seized with horror, don't show such an official and ridiculous prudery." (Lenin, Collected Works, vol.7)

"But the most dangerous thing isn't that Martov has fallen into the swamp. It's that, having fallen into it fortuitously, far from seeking to get out of it, he's sunk deeper and deeper into it." (Lenin, ibid)

Here, with a gap of eighty years, we have a clear characterisation of the attitude adopted by the comrades of the minority. On the basis of real councilist weaknesses a certain number of comrades happen to have fallen into a centrist approach towards councilism. Some of them managed to turn back from this but with others the same thing happened as happened with Martov: refusing to admit that they could be victims of centrism (on hearing this word they were ‘seized with horror and cried out about polemics shorn of any comradely spirit'), they sank deeper and deeper into it. This is what we pointed out in our article replying to the ‘tendency' in International Review n° 43 (‘The Rejection of the Notion of Centrism, the Open Door to the Abandonment of Class Positions'). These comrades found it hard to put up with the idea that they could be criticised. They interpreted a text and a resolution whose aim was to put the organisation on guard against the danger of centrism, and which illustrated this danger by, amongst other things, exposing their conciliatory attitude towards councilism, as a personal insult. This is not at all a ‘subjectivist' interpretation of their approach. Lenin explained the attitude of the Mensheviks in very similar terms:

"When I consider the behaviour of Martov's friends after the Congress, their refusal to collaborate ... their refusal to work for the Central Committee ... I can only say that this is a senseless attitude, unworthy of members of the Party ... And why? Solely because they are unhappy about the composition of the central organs, because, objectively, this is the only question that separates us. The subjective explanations (offence, insult, expulsion, being pushed aside, stigmatised, etc) are no more than the fruit, of an injured amour propre and a sick imagination." (Lenin, ibid)

We should also add that even the attitude of certain minority comrades towards the central organs is similar to that of the Mensheviks because on several occasions they boycotted them (by refusing to take part in their meetings or to take up the responsibilities that the central organ wanted to confer on them), while at the same time complaining about what IP calls "‘relieving' minority comrades of certain functions that they had, under the pretext that the divergences prevented their fulfilment".

Why were these comrades led to adopt this approach? Here again, the example of the Mensheviks is significant: "Under the name of ‘minority' there has been a grouping together within the Party of heterogeneous elements united by the desire, conscious or not, to maintain circle relationships, the previous form of Party organisation.

Certain eminent militants in the most influential of the former circles, not being used to restrictions on the organisational level, restrictions required by Party discipline, are inclined to identify the general interests of the Party with their interests as a circle which, in the period of circles, could indeed coincide." (Lenin, ibid)

When one examines the behaviour of the comrades who formed the ‘tendency', then the EFICC, the similarity with what Lenin describes is again striking.

Fundamentally, the ‘tendency' was formed by comrades who had known each other for a long time (even before the formation of the ICC in some cases) and who had established between them an artificial solidarity based essentially on their old ties of friendship and not on a political homogeneity. In the International Review n° we have already pointed to the lack of homogeneity of the ‘tendency', composed as it was of comrades who, at the beginning, had totally divergent positions, whether on the question of class consciousness, the danger of councilism, the definition of centrism, or the importance of our intervention at the present moment. This heterogeneity was still apparent at the Sixth Congress of the ICC, between those who wanted to leave the organisation, and those who wanted to stay in it. It is revealed again in IP when you compare the hysterical tone of the article ‘The Decline of the ICC' and the article ‘Critique of the ICC's Intervention', which is incomparably more fraternal. The only thing which cemented the ‘tendency', apart from and as a result of this ‘circle spirit' bequeathed by the comrades' past, was a common difficulty in putting up with the discipline of the organisation, which led them into numerous organisational lapses.

But the similarity between the Mensheviks of 1903 and the comrades of the ‘tendency' doesn't end there: "The bulk of the opposition was formed by the intellectual elements of our Party. Compared to the proletarians, the intellectuals are always more individualistic, if only because of their basic condition of existence and work, which prevent them from grouping together spontaneously in large numbers, from directly acquiring an education in organised collective work. Thus it is more difficult for the intellectual elements to adapt to the discipline of Party life, and those who are unable to do so, naturally raise the banner of revolt against the indispensable restrictions imposed on them by the organisation, and they elevate their spontaneous, anarchism into a principle of the struggle, wrongly qualifying this anarchism as a demand in favour of ‘tolerance', etc." (Lenin, ibid)

Here again, the resemblance is striking: if we had wanted to enrage the comrades of the ‘tendency', we would have called it the ‘tendency of teachers, academics and higher functionaries'. It's also clear that such ‘individualities' are much more susceptible to vanity of various kinds, since in their daily life they are much more accustomed than are the workers to being listened to in a respectful manner.

We could look at other resemblances between the ‘tendency-fraction' and the Menshevik current of 1903. We will, limit ourselves to two others:

• sectarianism,
• lack of a sense of responsibility in the face of the demands of the class struggle.

I. Sectarianism

On a number of occasions, Lenin denounced the sectarianism of the Mensheviks, who for him were entirely responsible for the split. He on the other hand considered that:

"The differences of principle between Vperiod (the Bolshevik paper) and the new Iskra (Menshevik) are essentially those which existed between the old Iskra and Robotchie Dielo (the ‘Economists'). We consider these differences to be important, but we do not consider that they constitute in themselves an obstacle to joint work within a single party..." (Lenin, ibid)

The ICC also considers that the political divergences it had with the ‘tendency', notably on class consciousness and the danger of centrism, are important. If the positions of the ‘tendency' had won over the whole organisation, this would have represented a danger for it. But we always insisted that these divergences were perfectly compatible with being in the same organisation and should not be an obstacle to working together. This isn't the conception of the ‘Fraction' which, like the Mensheviks, wants to make us responsible for the organisational separation. When the serious proletarian political milieu becomes aware of the basic questions which, accor­ding to the ‘Fraction', prevent joint work, it will only be able to ask what has got into these comrades' heads. Similarly, what will workers in general think when they are given two leaflets or papers which, on the essential questions they confront - the nature of the crisis, the bourgeoisie's attacks, the role of the left and the unions, the need to extend, unify and organise their struggles, the perspective for the struggle - say the same things? They could only conclude that revolutionaries (or some of them) aren't very serious people.

Sectarianism is the corollary of the ‘circle spirit', of individualism, of the idea that ‘a man's home is his castle'. The comrades of the ‘tendency' learned all this inside the ICC through the numerous battles we have fought against the sectarianism that weighs so heavily on the pre­sent proletarian milieu.

It's in order to mask their fundamental sectarianism - because the comrades who refer to the ‘old ICC' well know that their present divergences have never been for us a reason for organisational separation - that they have invented all these fables, all this abracadabra, all these hateful and imbecilic lies against our organisation.

The ‘Fraction' accuses the ICC of ‘monolithism'. Nothing is more absurd. In reality it is the ‘Fraction' which is monolithic, like all sects: from the moment when one considers that any divergence arising in the organisation can only lead to a split, you deny that such divergences can exist inside the organisation. This is the essence of monolithism. Furthermore, this monolithism can already be seen in IP: none of the articles are signed, as if there couldn't be the slightest nuance within it (whereas we know that quite the opposite is true).

2. Lack of a sense of responsibility in the face of the demands of the class struggle

The Mensheviks carried out their splitting activities on the eve of the first revolution in Russia. The RSDLP was thus badly equipped to deal with it when it broke out. Lenin never ceased to denounce the harm done by the Mensheviks' irresponsible actions to revolutionary ideas and the confidence that the workers could have in the Party. It's also at this crucial moment in the class struggle that the comrades of the ‘tendency' have chosen to disperse the existing revolutionary forces. They can say all they like in IP about the ‘decisive importance of the intervention of revolutionaries at the present time'; their actions give the lie to their words. What they are proving in reality is that for them their interests as a circle and sect take precedence over the general interests of the working class. Faced with the demands that the present period is making on revolutionaries, they are displaying a much greater irresponsibility than that which the ICC has always denounced in other groups.

The perspectives for the ‘fraction'

Marx observed in the l8th Brumaire that if history repeats itself, the first time is as tragedy, the second as farce. The events of 1903 in the RSDLP were a tragedy for the workers' movement. The adventures of the ‘tendency' look much more like a farce, if only because of the extreme numerical weakness of this formation. There are so many resemblances between the approaches of the ‘tendency' and that of the Mensheviks that one can't avoid saying that we are looking at a permanent danger in the workers' movement. But at the same time there's not much danger that the ‘Fraction' will one day play a role comparable to that of the Mensheviks: transform itself into the last rampart of the bourgeoisie during the course of the revolution, ally itself with the White Armies. It's very likely that at the moment of the revolution, the ‘Fraction' will have disappeared, that its militants will have long since dispersed in demoralisation or that having understood their errors, some of them will have returned to responsible revolutionary activity (as was the case with Trotsky who in 1903 had lined up with. the Mensheviks). But in the meantime, the ‘Fraction' will play an essentially pernicious role in front of the class.

On the one hand, because of its sectarianism, it will tend to reinforce the very strong distrust towards revolutionary organisations that exists within the working class, including its most combative elements.

On the other hand, in pretending to defend the ICC platform, it will do real harm to the ideas in this platform. A sectarian and irresponsible defence of clear and coherent revolutionary principles is much worse that a consistent defence of revolutionary positions that are less coherent or elaborated. It can only put off from this clarity and coherence elements moving towards revolutionary positions, who will become disgusted by the irresponsible behaviour of those who claim to be the representatives of revolutionary clarity. Furthermore, experience shows that sooner or later an irresponsible defence of principles always has repercussions on the principles themselves, as was the case with the Mensheviks who progressively turned their back on the programme they had adopted before their split with the Bolsheviks.

Finally, the comparisons the EFICC makes between itself and the Left Fraction of the Communist Party of Italy can only serve to discredit the enormous contribution this organism made to the workers' movement. Up until the Second World War, Bilan, Prometeo and Communisme were an example of firmness in revolutionary principles faced with the successive betrayals of other proletarian organisations under the pressure of the counterrevolution. They were thus an example of seriousness and of a sense of responsibility at the highest possible level. The ICC has always tried to develop its militant activity on the same basis, and by following their example. The Left Fraction fought to the bitter end within the degenerating Communist Party in the attempt to redress it. It did not leave it but was expelled, like the great majority of revolutionary fractions in history. In particular, it made an inestimable contribution on the question of the struggle, the role of a communist fraction. It's precisely these fundamental teachings that the EFICC is throwing out the window in the way it has left the ICC. It has usurped the term ‘fraction', creating this historical novelty of an ‘external fraction' (fraction means part of something) without ever having developed the work of an internal fraction or even of a real tendency. We have often written in our Review that the caricature of a party represented by the PCI - Programma made the very idea of a party look ridiculous. The EFICC's caricature of a fraction makes the very idea of a fraction look ridiculous.

From the standpoint of the interests of the working class, the EFICC has no reason for existence. On the contrary. Concerning the ‘Communist Bulletin Group', which left the ICC in 1981 and kept some of its funds, we wrote: "What does (the CBG) represent in the proletariat? A provincial version of the ICC platform minus the coherence and plus the stealing." (International Review n° 36)

For the EFICC, the stealing isn't there, but there is all the weight of sectarianism and irresponsibility. What we said about the CBG goes for the EFICC: "Another group whose existence is politically parasitical" (ibid) - The best thing we could hope for, both for the working class and the comrades who comprise it, is that the EFICC disappears as quickly as possible.

FM

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[1] International Review n°44, in the article devoted to the Sixth Congress of the ICC, deals with the departure of these comrades and their constitution of a ‘Fraction'. The reader can refer to this, as well as to the articles published in International Review n°s 40-43 reflecting the evolution of the debate within the ICC.

The text which follows is composed of extracts from the section on the economic crisis of the report on the international situation to the 6th Congress of the ICC. This report was written in mid-1985; the most recent figures it contains thus date from then. However, the analyses and orientations which it defends have been amply confirmed since that time.

In the last few months, the world market has suffered a number of jolts:                

-- The fall of the dollar has accelerated and one year after reaching records heights (10.61 Francs on 28.2. ‘85), King dollar has now gone back to its October I977 level (6.19 Francs and 2.20 DM on 28.2. ‘86);                                                         

-- Since the beginning of 1986 the price of oil has plunged downwards, the price of a barrel going from $28 to $14, is a reduction by half in the price of black gold;

-- The prices of raw materials in general have fallen and since autumn the London Metal Exchange has been shaken by the collapse in tin prices, which went down in 24.10. 85 without recovering since;                              

-- Stock exchange speculation has become increasingly acute and everywhere indices have risen: New York, London, Paris, Tokyo, etc ... but this situation is fragile and in January the New York stock exchange sounded a serious alarm when the Dow Jones index went through its most marked downward trend since Black Thursday of 1929.

This list, which could be extended, illustrates the increasingly powerful ravages which the crisis of generalised overproduction is bringing to the world economy; it, expresses the acceleration of the crisis and the growing instability of the world market.

But despite all this, the ruling class keeps telling us that ‘all is well!': politicians of all stripes arc still promising that things will get better tomorrow, and the technocrats try to reassure us that they're in control of the situation. The workers can rest easy: despite the record-breaking levels of unemploy­ment in Europe, despite the poverty spreading over the world, we shouldn't worry because our governments have got the situation in hand!

1n fact, the destabilization of the world economy is producing a growing anxiety, and the empty speeches of the bourgeoisie are no more than a litany with which it tries to convince itself. The fall in the dollar is presented as a way of ‘reviving' the world economy, the fall in oil prices as no more than a ‘hitch'. The reality, however, is much more disturbing, because behind all this the recession is looming up. It's this perspective, whose consequences no one in the ruling class is able to calculate, which is giving rise to such anxiety in the bourgeoisie.

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The fall of the dollar after the first meeting of the Group of Five (USA, Japan, Germany, Britain, France) might have given the impression that the great powers have a perfect mastery of currency exchanges. In fact this fall expressed an imperious necessity for the American economy ‑ the need to regain competivity on the world market. It expressed the failure and abandonment of the Reagan government's policy of ‘recovery'. The bourgeoisie's mastery is capable only of provisionally limiting the effects of the crisis. It may be able to slow down the deterioration of the world economy - but it can't stop it. The decline goes on ineluctably.

The consequences of the decline of the dollar are catastrophic for Europe and Japan who are seeing their own competivity being undermined and are facing the specter of recession. In the face of such a situation the second meeting of the Group of Five had the aim of posing the need for a concerted reduction in interest rates in order to relaunch production and domestic markets. This meeting was presented as a failure, because a too-strong and rapid reduction in the American rate of interest would have been too risky for the dollar, resulting in:

-- a crisis of confidence among speculators all over the world

-- an accelerated revival of inflation.

However, it's certainly no accident that right after this meeting there was a brutal fall in oil prices. This fall isn't in itself decided by the bourgeoisie: it is first and foremost the expression of the crisis of overproduction. However, it comes at a moment when it can give a shot of oxygen to the most developed count­ries. Not only does it make it possible to lower inflation, but above all, it makes it possible to reduce by half the first import of the main developed countries, to make substantial, savings, especially in Europe and Japan. Here are the funds to finance a mini-recovery!

The bourgeoisie of the Western bloc has had a conjunctural interest in accelerating the fall of oil prices. But this ‘policy' expresses the fact that; the bourgeoisie's margin for maneuver is shrinking all the time, since it is now reduced to such expedients to gain a few months respite. In fact, the fall in oil prices signifies a further contraction of the world market, which will be expressed in a new fall in trade, and thus a fall in the exports of the industrial countries, and thus, in turn, of their production. In other words, the recession.

Whatever the reasoning of capitalist propaganda, however much the bourgeoisie maneuver, the crisis is there, it's becoming more and more acute, and all the so-called economic successes only express the growing incapacity of the ruling class to cope with it. Irresistibly, the recession is on the horizon, and the present shivers on the world market herald the future storms which await it.

JJ 23 February, 1986