We are publishing below the second part of an orientation text submitted for discussion in the ICC in the summer of 2001, and adopted by our organisation’s Extraordinary Conference in March 2002.[1] The first part of this text was published in International Review n°111 [1], and dealt with the following points:

-     The effects of the counter-revolution on the self-confidence and the traditions of solidarity of today’s proletarian generations.

-     The effects within the ICC of weaknesses in confidence and solidarity.

-     The role of confidence and solidarity in the rise of humanity.

4. The dialectic of the self-confidence of the working class: Past, present, future.

Since the proletariat is the first class in society with a conscious historical vision, it is understandable that the bases of its confidence in its own mission are also historical, incorporating the entirety of its process of coming to being. This is why, in particular, this confidence is based to a decisive degree on the future, and thus on a theoretical understanding. And this is why the strengthening of theory is the privileged weapon in overcoming the ICC’s congenital weaknesses on the question of confidence. Confidence by definition is always confidence in the future. The past cannot be changed; therefore there is no question of confidence being directed towards it.

Every ascendant, revolutionary class bases confidence in its specific mission not only on its present strength, but also on its past experiences and achievements, and on its future goals. Nevertheless, the confidence of the revolutionary classes of the past, and the bourgeoisie in particular, was mainly rooted in the present - in the economic and political power it had already gained within the existing society. Since the proletariat can never possess such a power within capitalism, there can never be such a predominance of the present. Without the capacity to learn from its past experience, and without a real clarity and conviction in relation to its class goal, it can never gain the self-confidence to overcome class society. In this sense the working class is, more than any other before it, an historical class in the full sense of the word. The past, present and future are the three indispensable components of its self-confidence. No wonder therefore that Marxism, the scientific weapon of the proletarian revolution, was called by its founders historical or dialectical materialism.

a) This pre-eminent role of the future does not at all eliminate the role of the present in the dialectic of the class struggle. Precisely because the proletariat is an exploited class, it needs to develop its collective struggle for the class as a whole to become aware of its real strength and future potential. This necessity for the whole class to gain confidence is a completely new problem in the history of class society. The self-confidence of the revolutionary classes of the past, which were exploiting classes, was always based on a clear hierarchy within that class and within society as a whole. It was based on the capacity to command, to submit other parts of society to their own will, and thus on the control over the productive and the state apparatus. Indeed, it is a characteristic of the bourgeoisie that even in its revolutionary phase it got other social strata to do the fighting for it, and that once in power it “delegates” more and more of its tasks to paid servants.

The proletariat cannot delegate its historic task to anybody. This is why the class must develop its self-confidence. And it is why confidence in the proletariat is always necessarily confidence in the class as a whole, never just in one part of the class.

Because it is an exploited class the proletariat’s confidence has a fluctuating and even erratic character, ebbing and flowing with the movement of the class struggle. Moreover, revolutionary political organisations are themselves profoundly affected by these ups and downs, to the extent that the way they organise, regroup and intervene in the class largely depends on this movement. And as we know, in periods of profound defeat only tiny minorities have been able to maintain their confidence in the class.

But these fluctuations in confidence are not only linked to the vicissitudes of the class struggle. As an exploited class, the proletariat may fall victim to a crisis of self-confidence at any moment, even in the heat of revolutionary struggles. The proletarian revolution “constantly interrupts itself in its own course, coming back to what apparently has already been achieved, in order to begin with it again” etc. In particular it “always shrinks back again and again in face of the undefined enormity of its own intention” as Marx said.A

The Russian Revolution of 1917 shows clearly that not only the class as a whole, but also the revolutionary party can be affected by such waverings. In fact, between February and October 1917, the Bolsheviks went through several crises of confidence in the capacity of the class to fulfil the tasks of the moment. Crises which culminated in the panic which gripped the Bolshevik Central Committee in the face of the insurrection.

The Russian Revolution is thus the best illustration of why the deepest roots of the confidence of the proletariat, as opposed to that of the bourgeoisie, can never lie in the present. During those dramatic months, it was above all Lenin who embodied the unswerving confidence in the class without which no victory is possible. And he did so because he never for a moment abandoned the theoretical and historical method that is the hallmark of Marxism.

Nevertheless, the mass struggle of the proletariat is an indispensable moment in the development of revolutionary confidence. At the present moment it is the key to the whole historical situation. By permitting a re-conquest of class identity, it is the precondition for the class as a whole to re-assimilate the lessons of the past and redevelop a revolutionary perspective.

Therefore, as with the question of class consciousness, with which it is intimately linked, we must distinguish two dimensions of this confidence: the historical, theoretical, programmatic and organisational accumulation of confidence, represented by revolutionary organisations, and, more broadly, by the historic process of subterranean maturation within the class, and the degree and extension of self confidence in the class as a whole at any given moment.

b) The contribution of the past to this confidence is no less indispensable. Firstly because history contains irrefutable proofs of the working class’ revolutionary potential. The bourgeoisie itself understands the importance of these past examples for its class enemy, which is why it unceasingly attacks this heritage, and above all the October Revolution of 1917.

Secondly, one of the factors most likely to reassure the proletariat after a defeat, is its  capacity to correct past errors and to draw the lessons of history. As opposed to the bourgeois revolution, which goes from one victory to the next, the final victory of the proletariat is prepared through a series of defeats. The proletariat is thus able to transform past defeats into elements of confidence in the future. This was one of the main bases of the confidence that Bilan maintained in the depth of the counter-revolution. Indeed, the deeper confidence in the class is, the more courage revolutionaries have to mercilessly criticise their own weaknesses and those of the class, the less need they have of consoling themselves, the more they are characterised by sober lucidity and the absence of senseless euphoria. As Rosa Luxemburg repeated again and again, the task of revolutionaries is to say what is.

Thirdly, continuity, the capacity to pass on lessons from one generation to the next, has always been fundamental for the cultivation of mankind’s self-confidence. The devastating effects of the counter-revolution of the 20th century on the proletariat is the negative proof of this. It is therefore all the more important for us today to study the lessons of history, in order to pass on our own experience and that of the whole working class to the generations of revolutionaries who will follow us.

c) But it is the future perspective that offers the most profound basis for our confidence in the proletariat. That might seem paradoxical. How is it possible to base confidence on something that does not yet exist? But this perspective does exist. It exists as a conscious goal, as a theoretical construction, in the same way as the building to be constructed already exists in the head of the architect. Before building it in practice, the proletariat is already the architect of communism.

We have already seen that together with the proletariat as an independent force in history there appeared the perspective of communism: the collective ownership, not of the means of consumption, but of the means of production. This idea was the product of the separation of the producers from the means of production through wage labour, and of the socialisation of labour. In other words it was a product of the proletariat, of its position in capitalist society. Or as Engels put it in Anti-Dühring, the main contradiction at the heart of capitalism is that between two social principles, a collective one at the basis of modern production, represented by the proletariat, and an individual, anarchic one based on the private ownership of the means of production, represented by the bourgeoisie.

The communist perspective already arose before the proletarian struggle had revealed its revolutionary potential. What these events therefore clarified was that only the workers’ struggles can lead to communism. But the perspective itself existed beforehand. It was not mainly based either on the past or present lessons of the proletarian combat. And even in the 1840s, when Marx and Engels began to transform socialism from a utopia to a science, the class had not given much proof of its revolutionary might.

This means that from the onset theory was itself a weapon of the class struggle. And until the defeat of the revolutionary wave, as we have said, this vision of its historical role was crucial in giving the class the confidence to confront capital.

Thus, alongside the immediate struggle and the lessons of the past, revolutionary theory is an indispensable factor of confidence, of its development in depth in particular, but in the long run also in its extension. Since the revolution can only be a conscious act, it cannot be victorious unless revolutionary theory conquers the masses.

In the bourgeois revolution, the perspective was not much more than a projection of the mind of the past and present evolution: the gradual conquest of power within the old society. To the extent that the bourgeoisie developed theories of the future, they turned out to be crude mystifications which mainly had the task of inflaming revolutionary passions. The unrealistic character of these visions did not damage the cause they served. For the proletariat on the contrary, the future is the point of departure. Because it cannot gradually build its class power within capitalism, theoretical clarity is a most indispensable weapon.

“Classical idealist philosophy always postulated that humanity lives in two different worlds, the material world, in which necessity rules, and the world of the mind or the spirit, in which freedom reigns.

Notwithstanding the necessity to reject the assumption of the two worlds to which, according to Plato and Kant, humanity belongs, it is nevertheless correct, that human beings live simultaneously in two different worlds (...) The two worlds, in which humanity live, are the past and the future. The present is the border between them. His whole experience lies in the past. (…) There is nothing in it he can change; all he can do is accept its necessity. Thus the world of experience, the world of recognition is also the world of necessity. It is different with the future. I do not have the least experience of it. It lies apparently free ahead of me, as a world which I cannot explore on the basis of knowledge, but in which I have to assert myself through action. (..) Acting always means choosing between different possibilities, and even if only between acting or not acting, it means accepting and rejecting, defending and attacking. (…) But not only the feeling of freedom is a precondition of action, but also given aims. If the world of the past is governed by the relation between cause and effect (causality), that of action, of the future, by purposefulness (teleology).”B

Already before Marx, it was Hegel who theoretically resolved the problem of the relation between necessity and freedom, between the past and the future. Freedom consists in doing what is necessary, Hegel said. In other words, it is not by revolting against the laws of motion of the world, but through understanding them and employing them to his own ends that man enlarges his sphere of freedom. “Blind is necessity only to the extent that it is not understood”.C Similarly, it is necessary for the proletariat to understand the laws of motion of history in order to be able to fulfil its class mission. It is Marxist theory, this science of the revolution, which gives the class the means, and with it the confidence, to understand and thus fulfil this mission. Thus, if the science, and with it the confidence, of the bourgeoisie was to a large extent based on a growing understanding of the laws of nature, the science and the confidence of the working class is based on the understanding of society and history.

As MC[2] showed in one a classic defence of Marxism on this question, it is the future which must predominate over past and present in a revolutionary movement, because this is what determines its direction. The predominance of the present invariably leads to vacillations, creating an enormous vulnerability for the influence of the petty bourgeoisie, the personification of vacillation. The predominance of the past leads to opportunism and thus the influence of the bourgeoisie as the bastion of modern reaction. In both cases, it is the loss of the long-term view that leads to the loss of revolutionary direction.

As Marx said: “The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future”.D

From this we must conclude that immediatism is the main enemy of confidence in the proletariat, not only because the road to communism is long and torturous, but also because this confidence is rooted in theory and the future, whereas immediatism is capitulation to the present, the worship of the immediate facts. Throughout history, immediatism has been the leading factor in the disorientation of the workers movement. It has been at the root of all the tendencies to put “the movement before the goal” as Bernstein put it, and thus to abandon class principles. Whether it takes the form of opportunism, as with the revisionists at the turn of the century or with the Trotskyists in the 1930s, or of adventurism as with the Independents in 1919 and the KPD in 1921 in Germany, this petty bourgeois political impatience always amounts to betraying the future for a bowl of lentils, to use the biblical image. At the root of this folly there is always a loss of confidence in the class.

In the historical ascent of the proletariat, past, present and future form a unity. At the same time, each of these “worlds” warn us of a specific danger. The danger concerning the past is that its lessons can be forgotten. The danger of the present is that of falling victim to the immediate, the surface appearances. The danger regarding the future is that of the neglect and the weakening of theoretical efforts.

This reminds us that the defence of and development of the theoretical arms of the working class is the specific task of revolutionary organisations, and that the latter have a particular responsibility to safeguard historical confidence in the class.

5. Confidence, Solidarity and the Party Spirit are never definitive acquisitions.

As we have said, clarity and unity are the main bases of confident social action. In the case of the international proletarian class struggle, this unity is of course but a tendency, which may some day be realised through a world wide workers council. But politically, the unitary organisations, which arise in struggle, are already the expression of this tendency. Even outside of these organised expressions, workers solidarity - even when expressed at an individual level - also manifests this unity. The proletariat is the first class within which there are no conflicting economic interests, and in this sense, its solidarity announces the nature of the society it is fighting for.

However, the most important and permanent expression of class unity is the revolutionary organisation and the programme it defends. It is consequently the most developed embodiment of confidence in the proletariat - and also the most complex.

As such, confidence is at the very heart of the construction of such an organisation. Here, confidence in the proletarian mission is directly expressed in the confidence in the political programme of the class, in the Marxist method, in the historic capacity of the class, in the role of the organisation towards the class, in its principles of functioning and in the confidence of the militants and the different parts of the organisation in themselves and in each other. In particular, it is the unity of the different political and organisational principles which it defends, and the unity between the different parts of the organisation which are the most direct expressions of confidence in the class: unity of purpose and of action, of the class goal and of the means of its achievement.

The two main aspects of this confidence are political and organisational life. The first aspect is expressed through loyalty to political principles, but also through the capacity to develop Marxist theory in response to the evolution of reality. The second aspect is expressed through loyalty to the principles of proletarian functioning and the capacity to develop a real confidence and solidarity within the organisation. The result of a weakening of confidence at either of these two levels will always be to put in question the unity - and thus the existence - of the organisation.

At the organisational level, the most developed expression of this confidence, solidarity and unity is what Lenin called the party spirit. In the history of the workers movement there are three famous examples of the achievement of such a party spirit: The German Party in the 1870s and 80s, the Bolsheviks from 1903 to the Revolution, and the Italian Party and the Fraction which emerged from it after the revolutionary wave. These examples will help to show us the nature and dynamic of this party spirit, and the dangers which menace it.

a) What characterised the German Party at this level was that it based its mode of functioning on the organisational principles worked out by the First International in the struggle against Bakuninism (and Lassalleanism); that these principles were anchored throughout the party through a series of organisational struggles; and that in the combat for the defence of the organisation against state repression a tradition of solidarity between the militants and the different parts of the organisation was forged. In fact, it was during this “heroic” period of clandestinity that the German party developed the traditions of uncompromising defence of principles, of theoretical study and organisational unity which made it the natural leader of the international workers movement. The daily solidarity within its ranks was a powerful catalyst for all of these qualities. But by the turn of the century, this party spirit was almost completely dead, so that Rosa Luxemburg could declare that there is more humanity in any Siberian village than in the whole of the German party.E Indeed, long before its programmatic betrayal, the disappearance of this solidarity announced its coming betrayal.

b) But the banner of the party spirit was carried on by the Bolsheviks. Here again we find the same characteristics. The Bolsheviks inherited their organisational principles from the German Party; anchored them in each section and each member through a series of organisational struggles; forged a living solidarity through years of illegal work. Without these qualities, the Party could never have stood the test of the revolution. Although between August 1914 and October 1917 the party suffered a series of political crises, and even had to react repeatedly to the penetration of openly bourgeois positions within its ranks and its leadership (i.e. support for the war in 1914 and after February 1917), the unity of the organisation, its capacity to clarify divergences, to correct its errors and to intervene towards the class was never put in question.

c) As we know, long before the final triumph of Stalinism the party spirit was in full retreat within the Party of Lenin. But once again, the banner was carried forward, this time by the Italian Party, and afterwards by the Fraction in the face of the Stalinist counter-revolution. The party became the inheritor of the organisational principles and traditions of Bolshevism. It developed its vision of party life in the struggle against Stalinism, later enriching it with the vision and method of the Fraction. And this was done under the most terrible objective conditions, in the face of which once again a living solidarity had to be forged.

At the end of World War II, the Italian Left in turn abandoned the organisational principles that had been its hallmark. In fact, neither the semi-religious parody of collective party life developed by post-war Bordigism, nor the federalist informalism of Battaglia Comunista, have anything to do with the organisational life of the Italian Party under Bordiga. In particular, the whole conception of the Fraction has been abandoned.

It was the French Communist Left which took up the heritage of these organisational principles, and of the struggle for the party spirit. Today it falls to the ICC to perpetuate this heritage and to give it life.

d) The party spirit is never a definitive achievement. Those organisations and currents of the past that best embodied it, each went on to completely and definitively lose it. (…)

In each of the examples given, the circumstances under which this party spirit disappeared were very different. The experience of the slow degeneration of a mass party, or of the integration of a party into the state apparatus of an isolated workers’ bastion, may never be repeated. But there are nonetheless general lessons to be drawn. In each case:

-      The party spirit disappeared at an historical turning point: in Germany between ascendant and decadent capitalism, in Russia with the retreat of the revolution, and for the Italian Left between revolution and counter-revolution. Today it is the entry into the phase of decomposition which threatens the existence of the party spirit.

-      The illusion that past achievements can be definitive prevented the necessary vigilance. Lenin’s Infantile Disorder is a perfect example of this illusion. Today the overestimation of the ICC’s organisational maturity contains the same danger.

-      It was immediatism and impatience that opened the door to programmatic and organisational opportunism. The example of the Italian Left is particularly striking, since it is historically closest to us. It was the desire to at long last extend its influence and to recruit new members which prompted the Italian Left in 1943-45 to abandon the lessons of the Fraction, and the Bordigist ICP in 1980-81 to abandon some of its programmatic principles. Today the ICC in turn is faced with similar temptations linked to the evolution of the historic situation.

-      This abandonment was the expression, at the organisational level of a loss of confidence in the working class, which inevitably expressed itself at the political level also (loss of programmatic clarity). This has never to date been the case with the ICC as such. But it has always been the case with the different “tendencies” which split off from it (like the EFICC or the “Paris circle”, which have abandoned the analysis of decadence).

In the past months, it is above all the simultaneity of a weakening of our theoretical efforts and vigilance, a certain euphoria in relation to the progress of the organisation and thus a blindness towards our failings, and the resurgence of clanism which reveal the danger of the loss of the party spirit, of organisational degeneration and theoretical sclerosis. The undermining of confidence within our ranks and the inability to make decisive steps forward in the development of solidarity have been leading factors in this tendency, which potentially can eventually lead to the programmatic betrayal or to the disappearance of the organisation.

6. No Party Spirit without Individual Responsibility

After the struggle of 1993-96 against clanism, attitudes of suspicion towards the political and social relationships between comrades outside of the formal framework of meetings and mandated activities began to emerge. Friendships, love relationships, social ties and activities, gestures of personal solidarity, political and other discussions between comrades were sometimes treated in practice as necessary evils, in fact as the privileged terrain of the development of clanism. As opposed to this, the formal structures of our activities began to be considered as in some way offering a kind of guarantee against the return of clanism.

Such reactions against clanism themselves revealed an insufficient assimilation of our analysis, and a disarming in the face of this danger. As we have said, clanism partly emerged as a false response to the real problem of lack of confidence and solidarity within our ranks. Moreover, the destruction of the relations of mutual confidence and solidarity between comrades that did exist was largely the work of clanism, and the precondition for its further development. It was first and foremost clanism which undermined the spirit of friendship: real friendship is never directed against third persons, and never excludes mutual criticism. Clanism destroyed the indispensable tradition of political discussions and social links between comrades by converting them into “informal discussions” behind the back of the organisation. By increasing atomisation and demolishing confidence, by irresponsibly and excessively intervening in the personal lives of comrades while socially isolating them from the organisation, clanism undermined the natural solidarity which must be expressed in the organisation’s “duty to concern itself” with its militants’ personal difficulties.

It is impossible to fight clanism using its own weapons. It is not suspicion towards the full development of political and social life outside of the formal framework of section meetings, but real confidence in this tradition of the workers movement that makes us more resilient against clanism.

Underlying this unjustified suspicion of the “informal” life of a workers organisation is the petty bourgeois utopia of a guarantee against the circle spirit, which can only lead to the illusory dogma of a catechism against clanism. Such an approach tends to convert the statutes into rigid laws, the right of view into surveillance, and solidarity into an empty ritual.

One of the ways in which the petty bourgeois fear of the future expresses itself is through a morbid dogmatism that appears to offer protection against the danger of the unforeseen. This was what led the “old guard” of the Russian Party constantly to accuse Lenin of abandoning the principles and traditions of Bolshevism. It is a kind of conservatism that undermines the revolutionary spirit. Nobody is exempt from this danger, as is shown by the debate in the Socialist International on the Polish Question, where not only Wilhem Liebknecht, but, to some extent, Engels also adopted this attitude when Rosa Luxemburg asserted the necessity of calling into question the old position of support for Polish independence.

In reality, clanism, precisely because it is an emanation of unstable, intermediary layers without any future, is not only capable, but actually condemned to take on ever changing forms and characteristics. History shows that clanism not only takes the form of the informalism of the boheme and the parallel structures much loved by the declassed, but is equally capable of using the official structures of the organisation and the appearance of petty bourgeois formalism and routinism in order to promote its parallel policies. Whereas in an organisation where the party spirit is weak and the spirit of contestation is strong, an informal clan has the best chance of success, in a more rigorous atmosphere, where there is a strong confidence in the central organs, a formalistic appearance and the adaptation of the official structures can perfectly correspond to the needs of clanism.

In reality, clanism contains both sides of this coin. Historically, it is condemned to vacillate between these two apparently mutually exclusive poles. In the case of Bakunin’s policy we find both of them contained in a “higher synthesis”: the absolute individual anarchist freedom proclaimed by the official Alliance, and the blind confidence and obedience demanded by the secret Alliance:

“Like the Jesuits, but with the goal, not of the servitude but of the emancipation of the people, each of them has renounced his own will. In the Committee, as in the whole organisation, it is not the individual which thinks, wants and acts, but the whole”, writes Bakunin. What characterises this organisation, he continues, is “the blind confidence offered it by known and respected personalities”.F

It is clear which role social relationships are called on to play in such an organisation: “All feelings of affection, the mollycoddling sentiments of closeness, friendship, love, thankfulness have to be suffocated in him through the sole cold passion of the revolutionary task.”G

Here, we see clearly that monolithism is not an invention of Stalinism, but is already contained in the clannish lack of confidence in the historic task, collective life and proletarian solidarity. For us, there is nothing new or surprising in this. It is the well known petty bourgeois fear of individual responsibility which nowadays drives countless highly individualistic existences into the arms of diverse sects, where they can cease to think and act for themselves.

It is truly an illusion to believe that one can combat clanism without the individual members of the organisation taking up their responsibilities. And it would be paranoiac to think that “collective” surveillance could substitute for individual conviction and vigilance in this combat. In reality, clanism incorporates the lack of confidence both in real collective life and in the possibility of real individual responsibility.

What is the difference between discussions between comrades outside of meetings, and the “informal discussions” of clanism? Is it the fact that the former, but not the latter is reported to the organisation? Yes, although it is not possible to formally report every discussion. More fundamentally, it is the attitude with which such a discussion is conducted, which is decisive. This is the party spirit that we all have to develop, because no one will do it for us. This party spirit will always remain a dead letter if militants cannot learn to have confidence in each other. Equally there can be no living solidarity without a personal commitment of each militant at this level.

If the struggle against the circle spirit depended solely on the health of the formal collective structures, there would never be a problem of clanism in proletarian organisations. Clans develop because of the weakening of vigilance and the sense of responsibility at the individual level. This is why part of the Orientation Text of 1993[3] is devoted to the identification of the attitudes against which each comrade must arm him or herself. This individual responsibility is indispensable, not only in the struggle against clanism, but for the positive development of a healthy proletarian life. In such an organisation, the militants have learnt to think for themselves, and their confidence is rooted in a deep theoretical, political and organisational understanding of the nature of the proletarian cause, not in the loyalty to or fear of this or that comrade or central committee.

“The new course must begin with everyone in the apparatus - from the simple functionary to the highest ones - feeling that nobody anymore can terrorise the party. Our youth must conquer the revolutionary slogans, absorb them into their flesh and blood. They have to conquer their own opinion and a face of their own, and be able to fight for their own opinion with a courage flowing from a deep conviction and an independent character. Out of the party with passive obedience, the mechanical orientation towards those in charge, with un-personality, crawling and careerism! A Bolshevik is not only a disciplined being, no, he is a person who goes to the roots of things and forms his own solid opinion and defends it in struggle not only against the enemy, but also in his own party”.H 

And Trotsky adds: “The greatest heroism in military affairs and in the revolution is the heroism of truthfulness and of responsibility”.I

Collective and individual responsibility, far from being mutually exclusive, depend on and condition each other.

As Plekhanov argued, the elimination of the role of the individual in history is connected to a fatalism that is incompatible with Marxism.

“While some subjectivists, out to endow the ’individual’ with the greatest possible role in history, have refused to recognise mankind’s historical development as a law-governed process, some of their more recent opponents, who have tried to bring out in higher relief the law-governed nature of that development, have evidently been prepared to forget that history is made by people and that the activities of individuals cannot therefore but be significant in history”.J

Such a rejection of individual responsibility is also connected to petty bourgeois democratism, to the wish to replace our principle of “from each according to his ability” with the reactionary utopia of the equalisation of members in a collective body. This project, already condemned in the 1993 Orientation Text, is a goal neither of the organisation today, nor of the future communist society.

One of the tasks we all have is to learn from the example of all the great revolutionaries (the famous ones and all the nameless combatants of our class) who did not betray our programmatic and organisational principles. This has nothing to do with any cult of the personality. As Plekhanov concluded in his famous essay on the role of the individual:

“It is not only to the ‘Beginners’ alone and not only to ‘great’ men that a broad field of activity lies open. It awaits all those who have eyes to see, ears to hear and hearts to love their fellow men. The concept of greatness is a relative one. In the moral sense, any man is great who, to quote from the New Testament, ‘lays down his life for his friends’”.J

By way of conclusion

From this it follows that the assimilation and deepening of the questions we began to discuss more than a year ago is a major priority today.

The task of consciousness is to create the political and organisational framework best favouring the cultivation of confidence and solidarity. This task is central to the construction of the organisation, this most difficult art or science. At the basis of this work is the strengthening of the unity of the organisation, this most “sacred” principle of the proletariat. And as with every collective community, its precondition is the existence of common rules of behaviour. Concretely, the statutes, the texts of 1981 on the function and functioning of the orgnisation, and of 1993 on the organisational tissue already give the elements of such a framework. It is necessary to come back repeatedly to these texts, but above all when the unity of the organisation is in danger. They must be the point of departure of a permanent vigilance. It is necessary to more deeply assimilate them, their spirit and the method they represent.

At this level, the main misconception which must be overcome within our ranks is the idea that these questions are easy and straightforward. According to this approach, it is enough to declare confidence for it to already exist. And since solidarity is a practical activity, it is enough to “just go and do it”. Nothing could be further from the truth! The construction of the organisation is an extremely complicated and even delicate enterprise. And there is no other product of human culture as difficult and as fragile as confidence. Nothing else is harder to construct and easier to destroy. This is why, in the face of this or that lack of confidence by this or that part of the organisation, the first question that must always be posed is what must be done collectively to reduce distrust or even fear within our ranks. As for solidarity, although it is “practical” and also “natural” to the working class, this class lives in bourgeois society and is surrounded by factors working against such solidarity. Moreover, the penetration of alien ideology leads to aberrant conceptions on these questions, such as the recent attitude of considering the refusal to publish the texts of comrades to be an expression of solidarity, or to consider a “home-grown psychological” explanation of the origins of certain political divergences in the personal lives of comrades[4] (…)

In particular in the struggle for confidence, our watchword must be prudence and once again prudence.

Marxist theory is our principle weapon in the struggle against loss of confidence. In general, it is the privileged means of resisting immediatism and defending a long-term vision. It is the only possible basis of a real, scientific confidence in the proletariat, which in turn is the basis of the confidence of all the different parts of the class in themselves and each other. Specifically, only a theoretical approach allows us to go to the deepest roots of organisational problems, which must be treated as theoretical and historical issues in their own right. Similarly, in the absence of a living tradition on this question, and of the absence to date of the ordeal by fire of repression, the ICC must base itself on a study of the past workers movement in the conscious and voluntary development of a tradition of active solidarity and social life within its ranks.

If history has made us particularly vulnerable to the dangers of clanism, it has also given us the means to overcome it. In particular, we must never forget that the international character of the organisation, and the instalment of information commissions are the indispensable means of restoring mutual confidence in moments of crisis when this confidence has been damaged and lost.

The old Liebknecht said about Marx that he approached politics as a subject to be studied.K As we have said, it is the enlargement of the zone of consciousness in social life which frees humanity from the anarchy of blind forces, making confidence, making solidarity, making the victory of the proletariat possible. In order to overcome the present difficulties, and solve the questions posed, the ICC must study them. Because, as the philosopher said: “Ignorantia non est argumentum” (“Ignorance is not an argument”, from Spinoza: Ethics)

ICC, 15/06/2001.

Notes from the original

A. Marx: 18th Brumaire.

B. Kautsky: ibid.

C. Hegel: Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences.

D. Marx: 18th Brumaire.

E. Rosa Luxemburg: Correspondence with Konstantin Zetkin.

F. Bakunin: Appeal to the Officers of the Russian Army.

G. Bakunin: The Revolutionary Catechism.

H. Trotsky: The New Course.

I. Trotsky: On Routinism in the Army and Elsewhere.

J. Plekhanov: On the Individual’s Role in History.

K. Wilhelm Liebknecht: Karl Marx.

On 28th June 1914, the Archduke Franz-Ferdinand of Austria, nephew of the emperor Franz-Joseph and inspector-general of the Austro-Hungarian army, was assassinated in Sarajevo by Gavrilo Princip, a young Serbian nationalist. For Austria, the opportunity was too good to be missed. The Austrians had already laid hands on Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908, their imperialist appetites whetted by the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. The assassination provided Austria with the perfect pretext to attack Serbia, which it suspected of encouraging the nationalities under Austrian rule in their desires for independence. The declaration of war followed without the slightest negotiation. What ensued is common knowledge: Russia rushed to Serbia’s rescue, fearing to see Austria dominate the Balkans; Germany gave its support to its Austro-Hungarian ally; France in turn supported Russia, while Britain followed; in total, the war that resulted left almost ten million dead, six million mutilated, and Europe in ruins, not to mention the consequences of the war such as the 1918 flu epidemic, which caused more deaths than the war itself.

On 11th September 2001, the 3,000 deaths in the Twin Towers provided the USA with the pretext for their invasion of Afghanistan, along with the installation of military bases in the three bordering ex-Soviet republics. They were also a pretext for preparing a war aimed at eliminating the government of Saddam Hussein, to be followed by a long-term occupation of Iraq itself. Today’s historical conditions mean that for the moment the consequences of 11th September have been less bloody than the 1914-18 war. Nonetheless, this extension of the USA’s direct military presence is heavy with menace for the future.

Despite the similarities between these two events – in each case, a great imperialist power has used a terrorist attack to justify its own warmongering – terrorism in 2001 has nothing to do with that of 1914.

On the one hand, Gavrilo Princip’s act had its roots in the traditions of the 19th century struggle of populist and terrorist organisations against Tsarist absolutism, which expressed the impatience of a petty bourgeoisie unable to understand that history is made by classes, not by individuals. At the same time, this attack prefigured what was to become a characteristic of terrorism during the 20th century: its use by nationalist movements, and the manipulation of the latter by the bourgeoisie of the great powers. In some cases, these nationalist movements were too weak, or arrived too late on the stage of history, to make a place for themselves in a capitalist world already shared out among the great historical nations: the ETA in Spain is a typical example, since an independent Basque state would be completely non-viable. In other cases, terrorist groups have been a part of a wider movement leading to the creation of a national state: we can cite the example of the Irgun, a Jewish terrorist movement which fought the British in Palestine before and after World War II, and carried out both attacks on “military” targets such as the British army HQ at the King David hotel, and massacres among the civilian population, such as the slaughter wreaked on the Arab villagers of Deir Yassine. We should remember that Menachem Begin, the Israeli Prime Minister awarded the Nobel peace prize following the signature of the Camp David peace agreement with Egypt, was one of the Irgun’s leaders.

In some ways, the example of the IRA and Sinn Fein in Ireland[i] summarises what terrorism was to become during the 20th century. Following the crushing of the 1916 Easter Rising, one of the executed Irish leaders was none other than James Connolly, a great figure of the Irish workers’ movement. His death marked the end of an epoch, which had in reality already closed with the outbreak of World War I, an epoch where the workers’ movement could still, in certain cases, support struggles for national independence. In the new period of decadent capitalism that was just opening, such support could only turn against the proletariat.[ii] It was the fate of Roger Casement that symbolised what nationalist and terrorist movements were to become in decadence: arrested (and later shot) by the British as soon as he landed from a German submarine, with the mission to accompany a shipload of German weapons to arm the Easter Rising.

The career paths of Menachem Begin – Prime Minister of Israel – and Gerry Adams – not yet prime minister, but nonetheless a respectable politician received in Downing Street and the White House – are also indicative of the fact that, for the bourgeoisie, there is no firm line of demarcation between terrorism and respectability. The only difference between the statesman and the terrorist leader is that the latter is still in a position of weakness, his only weapons being the terrorist outrage, whereas the latter disposes of all the weaponry of a modern state. Throughout the 20th century, especially during the period of “decolonisation” after World War II, there are numerous examples of terrorist groups (or nationalists using terrorist methods) being transmogrified into the armed forces of a new state: the members of the Irgun absorbed into the new Israeli armed forces, the FLN in Algeria, the Vietminh in Vietnam, Yasser Arafat’s PLO in Palestine, etc.

This kind of armed struggle is also choice ground for the intervention of the bourgeois state, in its own inter-imperialist conflicts. This got going on a large scale during World War II, when the “democratic” bourgeoisie made extensive use of resistance movements against German occupying forces, particularly in France, Greece, and Yugoslavia, while the German Nazi bourgeoisie – though with a good deal less success – tried to use certain independence movements in the British Empire (notably in India). During the Cold War, with the intensification of the confrontation between Russia and the USA, nationalist formations ceased to be mere terrorist groups, and were transformed into veritable armies: this was the case in the Vietnam war, with hundreds of thousands of fighters in the field and millions of deaths, and in Afghanistan where – let us remember – the Taliban and their predecessors in the struggle against the Russian occupation were trained and armed by the United States.

Terrorism – the struggle of an armed minority – thus became a terrain for the interventions and manoeuvres of the great powers. This is obviously the case in the armed confrontations in the so-called “Third World” countries, but it is no less true of the shady dealings that go on within the great powers themselves. Because terrorist action must by definition be prepared in secret, it offers “a choice terrain for the underhand dealings of the police and the state, and in general for the most unexpected manipulations and intrigues”.[iii] A striking example of this kind of manipulation, combining misguided idealists (who even imagined themselves to be acting in the interests of the working class), gangsterism, and the secret services of the great powers, is the kidnapping of Aldo Moro by a Red Brigades commando (which acted with military efficiency), and his assassination on 9th May 1978 after the Italian government refused to negotiate his liberation. Aldo Moro in fact represented a fraction of the Italian bourgeoisie that favoured the Italian Communist Party’s inclusion in the government majority, an option vigorously opposed by the United States. The Red Brigades were equally opposed to Aldo Moro’s “historic compromise” between the Christian Democrats and the CP, and thus were openly playing the same game as the American state. When we consider that the Red Brigades were heavily infiltrated both by the Italian secret service and by the Gladio network,[iv] it is clear that terrorism was already a weapon in imperialist conflicts by the end of the 1970s.[v]

Terrorism: a weapon and a justification for imperialist war

During the 1980s, the proliferation of terrorist attacks (like the ones in Paris in 1986) carried out by groups of fanatics remote controlled by Iran, introduced a new phenomenon. These were no longer, as at the beginning of the 20th century, armed actions executed by minority groups aimed at the formation or the national independence of a state: states themselves were now organising and using terrorism as a weapon of war against other states.

The fact that terrorism has become directly a state weapon of war marks a qualitative evolution in the nature of imperialism. The fact that these attacks were controlled by Iran (or by Syria or Libya in other cases, such as the destruction of the Pan Am jet over Lockerbie) is also a significant example of a phenomenon that was to spread with the collapse of the blocs after 1989 and the disappearance of the discipline that had previously been imposed by the bloc leaders: third rate regional powers like Iran tried to throw off the tutelage of the US and Russian blocs. Terrorism had become the poor man’s nuclear bomb.

More recently, the two major military powers – Russia and America – have used terrorism to justify their own military interventions. The media have revealed that the bomb attacks in Moscow in the summer of 1999 used explosives reserved for the military, and that Vladimir Putin – head of the FSB (ex-KGB) at the time – was probably behind them. These attacks provided the pretext for the invasion of Chechnya by Russian troops. After the latest attack, and the seizure of 700 hostages in a Moscow theatre, both the Russian and the international press have raised the question of how it was possible for a group of fifty heavily armed men to enter a public space in a town where a Chechen can be routinely stopped and checked several times a day.

One hypothesis put forward by the 16th November edition of Le Monde is that either the commando was directly infiltrated by the Russian secret service, or that the latter knew what was being planned and did nothing to stop it, in order to justify an intensification of the war in Chechnya. According to some sources, secret service agents had informed their superiors months in advance of the preparation of the Moscow attack by the Movsar Baraev group, but the information “got lost as always in the meanders of the higher ranks”. And yet it is hard to imagine this kind of information being “lost”. The 29th October issue of Moskovski Komsomolets quotes an anonymous FSB informer to the effect that the Chechen commando had long since been infiltrated by the Russian secret service, which directly controlled four of its members.

The commando was led by the Baraev clan, whose henchmen have already distinguished themselves in the Chechen war. Its previous leader (assassinated two years ago), and uncle to the hostage-takers’ commander, despite his appearance as a radical defender of Islam, nonetheless had close ties to the Kremlin. His troops were the only ones to be spared during the bombardments and killings carried out by the Russian army. He made possible the massacre of the main Chechen nationalist military leaders surrounded in Grozny, by sending them straight into an ambush prepared by the Russians.

As for the 11th September, even if the US state was not directly behind it, the idea that the secret services of the world’s greatest power were caught unawares like some vulgar banana republic, is simply not credible. It seems clear enough that the American state let the events take place, sacrificing the Twin Towers and 3,000 lives.[vi] They were the price that US imperialism was ready to pay to reassert its world leadership by unleashing “Operation Unlimited Justice” on Afghanistan. This deliberate policy of letting events take their course in order to justify military intervention is not something new.

It was already used in December 1941 during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor[vii] in order to justify US entry into World War II, and more recently when Saddam Hussein’s troops invaded Kuwait in August 1990, in order to justify the Gulf War fought under American control.[viii]

The method of using already planned terrorist attacks to justify the extension of an imperialist influence via a military (or police) intervention, seems to be catching on. The information available seems to suggest that the Australian government was aware of the threat of an attack in Indonesia and did nothing about it, even encouraging its citizens to continue travelling to Bali. What is certain, is that Australia has seized on the opportunity of the 12th October attack to increase its influence in Indonesia, both on its own behalf and on that of its US ally.[ix]9

But this policy of “letting things happen” is no longer, as in 1941, simply a matter of letting the enemy attack first, according to the classic laws of wars between states.

This is no longer a war between rival states, with its rules, its flags, its preparations, its uniformed troops, its battlefields and its armies, that serve as a pretext for the massive intervention of the great powers. Today, the great powers use blind terrorist attacks by kamikaze fanatics, aimed directly at the civilian population, to justify the unleashing of imperialist barbarism.

The world’s small states – Iran, Libya, or others in the Middle East – are no longer alone in their use and manipulation of terrorism. It has become a weapon in the arsenal of the planet’s great powers.

The ideology of fear and death

It is indicative of capitalist society’s increasing ideological disintegration, that those who carried out the attacks in Moscow, New York, and Bali (whatever the motives of those behind them) were not moved by ideologies with even a semblance of progressive rationality, such as the creation of new national states. On the contrary, they draw on ideologies that were already outdated and hopelessly reactionary in the 19th century: mystical and religious obscurantism. Capitalism’s decomposition is summed up in the fact that, for part of today’s youth, the best hope that life can offer is not life, nor even struggle in the service of a great cause, but death in the shadow of feudal obscurantism, and in the service of cynical operators whose very existence they do not even suspect.

In the developed countries, the terrorism for which they themselves bear the prime responsibility serves the bourgeois state as a means of propaganda towards its own population, in an effort to convince the latter that in a world of horrors like the 11th September, the only solution is to seek protection in the state. The situation in Venezuela shows what we can expect if the working class lets itself be drawn onto a terrain that is not its own through support for this or that fraction of the ruling class. The Chavez government came to power with wide support among the working class and the poor, having succeeded in making them believe that its national-populist and anti-American programme could protect them against the increasingly intolerable effects of the crisis. Today, the poor masses and the working class are divided, under the control of the forces of the ruling class: either behind Chavez and his military clique, or enrolled in a trade union “general strike” which even includes the judiciary, and which is viewed with a friendly eye by the bosses! Nor is this danger limited to capitalism’s periphery as we can see from the monster demonstration in Paris on 1st May 2002, where the “citizens” were invited to take the side of one bourgeois clique against another (the “other” being that caricature bogey-man Le Pen).

If the world working class fails to reassert its own class independence, in the struggle first for its own interests and then for the revolutionary overthrow of this rotting society, then we can expect nothing else but the generalisation of confrontations between bourgeois cliques and states, using even the most barbaric methods – including in particular the daily use of the weapon of terror.

Arthur, 23rd December 2002

The following notes on the history of the revolutionary movement in Japan illustrate with some concrete details the international nature of the development of the working class and its revolutionary vanguard; the fundamental unity of its interests and struggle across the globe to overthrow world capitalism.

This international characteristic doesn’t express itself identically with the same chronology in every country taken separately but has evolved in an uneven and reciprocal way. For various historical reasons Western Europe is the fulcrum of the world communist revolution.[1] The history of the revolutionary movement in Japan indeed notes on several occasions how this movement lagged behind developments in the Western Hemisphere.

However this is in no sense a moral judgement, a result of “Euro-centrism” nor does it express a desire to award points to the country with the most advanced proletarian movement. On the contrary this history will further reveal the unbreakable link that exists between the proletarian revolutionary movement here and in the rest of the world. Through this analytical framework, we can better understand the dynamic of the world revolution of the future, and the vital, irreplaceable role that a section of the proletariat in a country like Japan must play within it.

When we study the history of the Japanese workers’ movement, we cannot help being struck by the profound similarities between the issues and answers developed in Japan, and those confronted by the proletariat elsewhere in the world. Indeed, these similarities are all the more striking given Japan’s relative isolation from the rest of the industrial world, and even more so given the extraordinary rapidity of Japan’s industrial development. This only began in the 1860s after the US Commodore Perry with his “black ships”, followed by the European powers, forcibly opened Japan to outside influence and commerce. Until then, Japan had been frozen in a hermetic feudalism totally cut off from the rest of the world. In only thirty years – barely a generation – it rose to become the last major industrial power to make an entry into the imperialist arena. This it did in the most striking manner imaginable, by annihilating the Russian fleet at Port Arthur in 1905.

For the proletariat, this meant that the experience and ideas which European workers developed over a century or more had to be compressed into a quarter of the time. The Japanese proletariat was born at a time when marxism had already established a profound influence in the European workers’ movement (notably in the 1st International), and yet the first Japanese translations of Marx’s work only became available in 1904.

The first regroupment of revolutionaries

Until the last decades of the 19th century, the ideas in the workers movement were largely influenced by traditional Confucianism where social harmony was paramount and individual activity was placed in the service of the community.[2]

In May 1882 the Socialist Party of the East (Toyo Shakaito) was founded, which based itself on utopian socialism and anarchism. A short time later it was dissolved.

The 1880s were marked by the appearance of circles which set themselves the task of appropriating socialist classics and familiarising the movement with the struggles and debates of the workers’ movement in Europe such as in “Friends of the People” (Kokumin-no tomo) or the “Society for exploring social problems” (Shakai mondai kenkyukai). Their activities were not based on a permanent organisation and they had not yet established links with the 2nd International founded in 1889.

In 1890 for the first time migrant workers of Japanese origin regrouped in the USA in the “Brave Society of Workers” (Shokko gijukai). This group was also rather a study circle with the goal of studying workers’ questions in different countries of western Europe and the USA. The American Trades Unions had a strong influence on this group.

In 1897 the “Society for the preparation of the foundation of unions” was founded (Rodo kumiai kiseikai), which was to report a membership of 5,700. For the first time in the history of the workers’ movement in Japan they had a paper of their own: Rodo sekai – published every two months and edited by S. Katayama. The goals of this movement were the formation of unions and co-operatives. Two years later this union association already counted 42 sections with 54,000 members. The statutes and positions of the unions were based on the models in Europe. The train drivers’ union developed a campaign for the introduction of general voting rights and declared in March 1901, that “socialism is the only definitive answer to the workers’ situation”.

On October 18th 1898, a small group of intellectuals met in a Tokyo Unitarian Church and founded Shakaishugi Kenkyukai (Association for the Study of Socialism), which started to meet once a month. Five of its six founders still considered themselves to be Christian Socialists.

After Katayama’s trip to England and the USA he contributed to the foundation of the Socialist Association (Shakaishugi kyokai) in 1900, which counted some 40 members. It was decided to send a delegate for the first time to the Paris Congress of the 2nd International, but financial problems prevented them from doing so.

The first “machine-breaking” phase of the workers’ struggle (corresponding to some degree to the “Luddism” of English workers at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries) was only superseded at the end of the 1880s, opening the way to a wave of strikes that erupted between 1897-1899. In particular, metalworkers, machinists and railway workers tested their combativity. Due to the Chinese-Japanese war (1894-1895) there was a new push of industrialisation, so that by the mid 90s a workforce of 420,000 had developed. Some 20,000 workers - or 5% of the modern industrial labour force - were unionised, most of the unions were small, having fewer than 500 members. But the Japanese bourgeoisie reacted from the very beginning with the most atrocious violence against an increasingly combative workforce. In 1900 it adopted a law on “the protection of public order” based on the model of the anti-socialist laws of Bismarck which banned the SPD[3] in Germany in 1878.

On May 20th 1901 the first Social Democratic Party (Shakai Minshuto) was founded, which put forward the following demands:

- “abolish the gap between rich and poor and secure a victory for pacifism in the world by means of genuine socialism and democracy;

- world wide fraternity overcoming racial or political differences;

- world peace and the abolition of arms;

- equal & just distribution of wealth;

- equal access to political power for the whole population”.

These demands are entirely characteristic of the situation in which the Japanese workers’ movement found itself at the time, combining as they do:

- a somewhat naïve “a-classist” vision typical of the earliest phases of the workers’ struggle;

- an insistence on the end to inequalities based on race, which must certainly reflect the experience of Japanese immigrant workers in the USA;

- a democratic and pacifist phraseology similar to that of the revisionist wing of the 2nd International.

Shakai Minshuto (Social Democratic Party) proclaimed to respect the law; anarchism and violence were rejected explicitly; it supported participation in parliamentary elections. By defending the interests of the masses of the people, by overcoming classes, by liquidating economic inequality, by fighting for general voting rights for all workers, the party hoped to make a contribution to establishing world peace.

Although it put parliamentary activities high on the agenda the party was immediately forbidden. The attempt to set up a political party failed. The level of organisation could not yet supersede the level of discussion circles. Moreover repression led to a big setback. The publication of newspapers was continued without an organisation behind them. Thus the main thrust of the activities was still holding conferences, organising meetings and publishing texts.

The struggle against war

On April 5/6th 1903 at the Socialist Conference of Japan in Osaka the participants demanded the socialist transformation of society. While the demand for “liberty, equality and fraternity” was still raised, the demand for the abolition of classes and any type of oppression as well as the prohibition of wars of aggression was raised as well. At the end of 1903 the Commoners’ Society (Heiminsha) became the centre of the anti-war movement: Japan was then expanding into Manchuria and Korea and was on the verge of a war with Russia. Its paper was printed in 5,000 copies. Again, it was a paper without any major organisational framework behind it. D. Kotoku was one of the most famous speakers of this grouping.

Katayama,[4] who left Japan from 1903-1907, attended the Amsterdam Congress of the 2nd International in 1904. When he shook hands with Plekhanov this was seen as an important symbolic act in the midst of the Japanese-Russian war, which lasted from February 1904 until August 1905.

From the outset, Heiminsha clearly opposed the war. It did so in the name of humanitarian pacifism. The strive for profit of the armaments sector was denounced.

On March 13th 1904 the Heimin Shimbun published an open letter to the Russian RSDLP,[5]5 calling for unity with the socialists of Japan against the war. Iskra n°37 published their response. At the same time Japanese socialists spread socialist literature amongst Russian prisoners of war.

In 1904 39,000 leaflets against the war were distributed and some 20,000 copies of Heimin were sold.

Thus the intensive imperialist activities of Japan (the wars with China in the 1890’s, the war with Russia in 1904-05) forced the proletariat to take up position on the question of war. Even if the rejection of imperialist war was not yet based on a solid Marxist footing and still marked by a pacifist orientation, the working class developed a tradition of internationalism.

The first translation of the Communist Manifesto was also published by Heimin in 1904. Until that time the classics of Marxism were not accessible in Japanese.

As soon as the government exercised repression against revolutionaries, putting many of them on trial, Heimin ceased publication and the paper Chokugen (“Free speech”), which was to follow it, was still dominated by a strong pacifism.

Capital had to lay the costs of war on the shoulders of the working class. Prices doubled, then tripled. The state, which inaugurated a policy of undertaking debts to pay for the war, had to impose a lot of taxes on the working class.

Much the same as in Russia in 1905, the drastic worsening of workers’ living conditions in Japan led to the outbreak of violent protests in 1905 and to a series of strikes in the shipyards and the mines in 1906 & 1907. The bourgeoisie never hesitated for one moment and sent its troops against the workers and once again declared any workers organisation illegal.

While there was still no organisation of revolutionaries, but only a revolutionary tribune against the war, the Japanese-Russian war led at the same time to a strong polarisation. A first delineation between Christian socialists around Kinoshita, Abe and the wing around Kotoku (who since 1904-05 had taken a strong anti-parliamentarian stand) and the wing around Katayama Sen and Tetsuji occurred.

DA

Correspondence with the International Communist Group (Russia)

We are publishing below a letter received from the Russian group International Communist Union (ICU).[1] Their letter is itself a response to previous correspondence from the ICC; it contains numerous quotes from our letter, which appear in italics.

Dear comrades,

We apologise that we could not answer quickly enough. We are a very small group, and we have a lot of work, including a large volume of correspondence. And all foreigners don’t write in Russian.

Concerning the platform, there seems to be a high level of agreement with a number of key positions: the perspective of socialism or barbarism, the capitalist nature of the Stalinist regimes, recognition of the proletarian character of the Russian revolution of 1917

It’s not so simple. In the Russian revolution of 1917 two crises were incorporated: the internal crisis, which should have permitted a bourgeois-democratic revolution, and the world crisis, which put on the order of the day an attempt at world socialist revolution. The proletariat of Russia, argued Lenin, was to undertake the initiative in both revolutions: it should head the bourgeois revolution in Russia and, simultaneously, with the help of this revolution, kindle socialist revolution in Europe and in other countries. Therefore we consider it incorrect to broach the question of the nature of the Russian revolution without specifying where these two revolutions derive from: internal or international. But, certainly, in Russia both these revolutions were headed by the proletariat.

What we’re less sure about is whether you agree with the ICC on the historical framework which gives substance and coherence to many of these positions: the conception that capitalism has, since 1914, been a decadent, declining social system.

Certainly, we do not agree. The transition to one higher economic formation is the result of the development of the previous formation, instead of destruction. If the old formation has been exhausted, it constantly derives social crisis and social forces aspiring to proceed to the new formation. This is not happening. Moreover, for many decades capitalism has ensured relative stability of development, during which the revolutionary forces not only did not grow, but on the contrary, broke up. And (capitalism) really develops, not only creating qualitatively new productive forces, but also creating new forms of capitalism. The study of this development can give the answer when there will come a new crisis, such as the crisis of 1914-45, and hence what transitional forms to socialism there should be. The theory of decadence denies the development of capitalism and makes it impossible to study it, leaving us as simple dreamers trusting in the bright future of mankind.

As to destruction, destruction, war, violence etc. are not just integral features of capitalism, but a necessity of its existence. Both in Marx’s time and in the 20th century.

To give a precise illustration of the problem we are raising: in your statement you argue against ‘fronts’ with the bourgeoisie on the grounds that all bourgeois factions are equally reactionary. And we agree. But this position has not always been valid for marxists. While capitalism today is a decadent system, i.e. one in which the social relations have become a permanent fetter on the productive forces and thus on human progress, it has, like previous forms of class exploitation, also known an ascendant period when it represented progress in relation to the previous mode of production. This is why Marx did support certain fractions of the bourgeoisie, whether the northern capitalists against the southern slaveholders in the American civil war, the Risorgimento movement in Italy for national unification against the old feudal classes, and so on. This support was based on the understanding that capitalism had not yet exhausted its historical mission and that the conditions for the world communist revolution had not yet fully matured.

Historically speaking, in relation to the struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, the proletarian party has considered all fractions of the bourgeoisie to be reactionary. But it is not only when capitalism had historical resources that it was possible to speak about the progressiveness of this or that fraction of the bourgeoisie. It was necessary that the appropriate fraction was capable of carrying out the historical tasks facing it. Thus, for example, the Russian bourgeoisie was not capable of heading the bourgeois revolution, and so was reactionary in 1917, though the bourgeois-democratic transformations of the Russian revolution were certainly progressive. Today we confirm that no fraction of the bourgeoisie is capable of carrying out necessary bourgeois modernisation without world war for the violent association of mankind. For this reason, it is senseless to support any of these fractions. But this does not mean that there are no more bourgeois tasks. The liquidation of national borders and the creation of the world market is only a bourgeois task, but it is impossible here to trust the bourgeoisie, and it is necessary to use the future crisis to ensure that this task is executed by the proletariat and from here proceeds to socialist tasks. To put it briefly, the question of the exhaustion of the historical tasks of capitalism and the question about whether its different fractions are progressive or not, are two different questions. Therefore the proletariat should always take the revolutionary initiative on itself. Including when it is necessary to undertake bourgeois tasks, trying to expand the movement so that it is possible to proceed to socialist tasks. We consider such an approach to be the Marxist one.

In your view, national struggles have been a source of considerable progress, and the demand for national self-determination still has validity, if only for the workers of the more powerful capitalist countries in relation to the countries oppressed by their own imperialism. You then appear to argue that national struggles have lost their progressive character since the advent of “globalisation”. These statements call for a number of comments on our part.

Our position on the decadence of capitalism is not our own invention. Based on the fundamentals of the historical materialist method (in particular when Marx talks about “epochs of social revolution” in his Preface to the Critique of Political Economy), it was concretised for the majority of revolutionary marxists by the outbreak of the First World War, which showed that capitalism had already “globalised” itself to the point where it could no longer overcome its inner contradictions except through imperialist war and self-cannibalisation. This was the position of the Communist International at its founding congress, although the CI was not able to draw all the consequences for this as regards the national question: the theses of the second congress still saw a “revolutionary” role of some kind for the bourgeoisie of the colonial regimes. But the left fractions of the CI were later on able to take this analysis to its conclusion, particularly following the disastrous results of the CI’s policies during the revolutionary wave of 1917-27. For the Italian left in the 1930s, for example, the experience of China in 1927 was decisive. It showed that all factions of the bourgeoisie, no matter how “anti-imperialist” they claimed to be, were equally counter-revolutionary, equally compelled to massacre the proletariat when it struggled for its own interests, as in the Shanghai uprising of 1927. For the Italian left this experience proved that the theses on the national question from the second congress had to be rejected. Moreover, this was a confirmation of the correctness of Rosa Luxemburg’s views on the national question as against those of Lenin: for Luxemburg, it had already become clear during the First World War that all states were inevitably part of the world imperialist system.

All the questions here are jumbled together. The Comintern politics of Stalin and Bukharin during the Chinese revolution of 1925-27 is completely different from the politics of Lenin and the Bolsheviks which determined the first years of the Comintern. You again argue that if there are bourgeois tasks, we should support this or that bourgeois fraction. The Mensheviks and the Stalinists said the same. The method of Marx and Lenin consists in not refusing the tasks of the moment when all fractions of the bourgeoisie are equally reactionary, and in carrying out these tasks by the method of the proletarian revolution, trying to execute bourgeois tasks to the maximum depth and proceeding to the socialist tasks. The Chinese revolution has shown the correctness of this approach, instead of the correctness of the left. All the same the bourgeois revolution did win in China, though leaving enormous numbers of victims. This revolution has made it possible to create the most numerous proletariat in the world and powerful, quickly developing productive forces. The same result was given also by tens of other revolutions in the countries of the east. We see no sense in denying their historically progressive role: due to them our revolution has a strong class basis in many countries of the world, which in 1914 were almost completely agricultural.

What has changed from the time of the beginning of “globalisation”? The opportunity of the national revolution has disappeared. You say that capitalism has always had a global character. Yes, this has been the case since its origins, with the period of great geographic expansion. But the level of this “globalisation” was qualitatively different. Till the 1980s the national revolutions could still ensure the growth of the productive forces, therefore they should still have been supported, trying, if possible, to transfer management of them into the hands of the revolutionary proletariat. It was because there was an objective opportunity for national development, due to the efforts of the national state. Now this historical stage for national development is finally exhausted. This concerns all states, including the advanced ones. The reforms by Reagan or Thatcher, which in the 1950s and 60s would have resulted in terrible crises, have now given relative and temporary, but positive results. For these reforms included their countries in the “globalization” of the economy (in the modern sense of this word).

Now the national struggle has lost its progressive character, because historical national tasks have exhausted themselves – the national state, even if the revolution will win under the direction of proletariat, cannot ensure further development. This again does not mean that everywhere bourgeois tasks have disappeared. There are still countries with feudal vestiges, there is still national oppression. But the national revolution cannot bring even their temporary solution. The proletariat of the backward countries should aspire to begin the chapter of revolutions in the countries, but now these revolutions (unlike in the 1950s and 60s) cannot basically lead to any results (even from the bourgeois point of view) if they do not result directly in the international proletarian revolution. For this reason we say that with the beginning of globalisation national revolutions have lost their progressive meaning.

As to support for movements of national independence, the unique sense here, both yesterday, and today, is to pull the struggle against national oppression from the hands of the bourgeoisie and to transfer it into the hands of proletariat. To transform independence movements into part of the world socialist revolution. It cannot be done by refusing to recognize the right of nations to self-determination, i.e. by not recognizing the necessity of finishing the historical tasks of the bourgeoisie. Otherwise, we shall leave the national proletariat under the direction of the national bourgeoisie. This Leninist approach has resulted in vast interest in Marxism on the part of a huge quantity of the inhabitants of the backward countries precisely because it could correctly pose the national question. And it was not the fault of Bolshevism, that the leadership of the Comintern was taken over by the Stalinist bureaucracy. Only the revolution in the west could have prevented this, but this did not happen because at that time capitalism still had historical opportunities. Through two world wars it temporarily got round its contradictions.

Now these contradictions again accrue, but to understand why they will result in new crisis, it is necessary to study the development of capitalism, instead of just repeating the incantation that it is decadent and decomposed. In Russia the latter thesis causes especially malicious sneers after decades in which the Stalinists have gone on about “rotting” capitalism.

Supporting one nation against another always meant supporting one imperialist constellation against another, and all the national liberation wars of the 20s century have reinforced this view. What the Italian left made absolutely explicit was that this also applied to colonial bourgeoisies, to capitalist factions seeking to establish a new ‘independent’ state: they could only hope to attain their ends by subordinating themselves to the imperialist powers which had already divided up the planet. As you say in your platform, the 20th century has been one of incessant imperialist wars for the domination of the planet: for us, this is both the surest confirmation that capitalism is a senile and reactionary world order, and that all forms of “national” struggle are entirely integrated into the global imperialist game.

Once again: 1) “continuous wars “ are the constant companion of capitalism at any stage, that is why they cannot be the proof either of its progressiveness, nor its decline; 2) the growth of productive forces and a numerous proletariat in the Third World has unequivocally shown the progressive character of national revolutions up to the mid-1970s; 3) the purpose of support for national movements was not “support of one nation against another”, but drawing the workers towards the party of revolution.

Luxemburg also made a very rigorous critique of the slogan of “national self-determination” even before the First World War, arguing that it was an illusion of bourgeois democracy – in any capitalist state, it is not the “people” or the “nation” who are “self-determined” but the capitalist class alone. Marx and Engels made no secret of the fact that when they called for national independence, it was to further and support the development of the capitalist mode of production in a period in which capitalism still had a progressive role to play.

We also, as well as Marx, do not hide the fact that the progressive character of the national revolutions only makes sense from the point of view of the development of capitalism.

With brotherly congratulations

ICU, 20th February 2002

Our reply

In a series we wrote in the late 1980s and early 90s in defence of the idea that capitalism is a social system in decline, we noted that “the more capitalism sinks into decadence, the more it exhibits its advanced decomposition, the more the bourgeoisie needs to deny reality and promise the world a bright future under the sun of capital. This is the essence of the present campaigns in response to the very visible collapse of Stalinism: the only hope, the only future, is capitalism” (“The real domination’ of capital, and the real confusions of the proletarian milieu”, International Review n°60, winter 1990).

There is nothing surprising in the bourgeoisie being in denial about the inevitable demise of its social system; indeed, the closer its death approaches, the more you would expect it to run away from the truth and retreat into fantasy. It is after all an exploiting class, and no exploiting class has been able to face the truth that it is an exploiting class, still less that its days are historically numbered. And if any of its representatives do finally admit to its oncoming doom, none of them can envisage a human world beyond the rule of capital without clutching at visions of a mythical past or a messianic future.

Of course one would expect better from those who claim to speak for the exploited proletariat and to be looking ahead to a communist revolution. But we should never underestimate the ideological power of the dominant system, its capacity to derail and distort any striving for a clear and lucid understanding of the real situation and prospects of the current world order. There are just too many examples of those who have lost sight of the fundamental theoretical premises of the communist movement since Marx and Engels first framed them in scientific terms; who have lost confidence in the proposition that capitalism, like all the other systems of exploitation that came before it, is but a passing phase in mankind’s historical evolution, doomed to extinction by its own inherent contradictions. This is the phenomenon we observed in the 80s and – as we noted in the first part of this article in IR 111 we are seeing it even more explicitly today. The more rotten capitalism has become, the more it passes from simple decline to outright disintegration, the more we are seeing those in and around the revolutionary movement running hither and thither, desperately seeking some ‘new’ discovery that will hide the awful truth. Capitalism decomposing? No, no, it’s recomposing! Capitalism at an impasse? But what about…the internet, globalisation, Asian dragons…..?

This is the general atmosphere of confusion in which the new proletarian currents in Russia and the ex-USSR are emerging; as we pointed out in the previous article, despite their differences, all of them seem to have difficulty in accepting the conclusion upon which the Communist International was founded and which provided the groundrock for the work of the communist left: that world capitalism has been in historical decline or decadence since the first world war.

As we said in the last article, we are going to focus on the arguments of the comrades of the International Communist Union in this discussion. This is how they explain their arguments against the notion of decadence:

“The transition to one higher economic formation is the result of the development of the previous formation, instead of destruction. If the old formation has been exhausted, it constantly derivates social crisis and social forces aspiring to proceed to the new formation. It does not occur. Moreover, for many decades capitalism has ensured relative stability of development, during which the revolutionary forces not only did not grow, but on the contrary, broke up…And (capitalism) really develops, not only creating qualitatively new productive forces, but also creating new forms of capitalism. The study of this development can give the answer when there will come a new crisis, such as the crisis of 1914-45, and hence what transitional forms to socialism there should be. The theory of decadence denies the development of capitalism and makes it impossible to study it, leaving us as simple dreamers trusting in the bright future of mankind” (letter to the ICC, 20th February 2002).

No doubt the comrades have in mind here the arguments of Marx in his famous Preface to the Critique of Political Economy where he deals with the material conditions for the transition from one mode of production to another, saying that “No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed and new, higher relations of productions never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself”.1

Naturally we adhere to Marx’s arguments here, but we don’t think he meant them to imply that a new society could not emerge out of the old until the very last technical or economic innovation had been developed. Such a vision might have seemed compatible with previous modes of production where technical discovery took place at a very slow pace; it would hardly be possible under capitalism which cannot live without constantly, indeed daily, developing its technological infrastructure. The problem here is that the ICU seem to refer to this passage without assimilating the preceding part, where Marx outlines the preconditions for the opening up of a period of social revolution, which is the key to our understanding of capitalism’s decadence, its epoch of wars and revolutions as the CI put it. We are referring to the passage where Marx says that “at a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces come into conflict with the existing relations of production, or – what is but a legal expression of the same thing – with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution”.

Forms of development become fetters; in the dynamic view which is proper to marxism, this does not mean that society comes to a complete halt but that its continued development becomes increasingly irrational and catastrophic for humanity. And indeed we have on many occasions clearly rejected the view that decadence means a complete halt in the productive forces. The first time was in our pamphlet The Decadence of Capitalism, originally written in the early 1970s, where an entire section is devoted to precisely this point. Refuting Trotsky’s assertion in the 1930s that “the productive forces of humanity have ceased to grow” we affirmed that “according to the marxist view, the period of a society’s decadence cannot be characterised by a total and permanent halt in the growth of the productive forces but by the definitive slackening of this growth. Absolute halts in the growth of the productive forces do, in fact, appear during the phases of decadence. But these stoppages appear only momentarily in the capitalist system because the economy cannot function without a constantly increasing accumulation of capital. They are the violent convulsions which regularly accompany the progression of decadence (…)

From an economic standpoint, what characterises the decadence of a given social form is therefore:

- an actual slowing down of the growth of productive forces, which would have been technically and objectively possible without the obstacle of the relations of production. This slow-down must have an inevitable and irreversible character. It must be caused specifically by the perpetuation of the relations of production which hold the society together. The discrepancy between actual development and possible development of the productive forces can only widen. This discrepancy appears increasingly clearly to the social classes;

- the appearance of increasingly profound and widespread crises. These crises create the subjective conditions necessary for the social revolution. In the course of these crises the power of the ruling class is profoundly weakened, and through the objective intensification of the necessity for its intervention, the revolutionary class finds the preliminary bases for its strength and unity”.2

Elsewhere (“The study of capital and the foundations of communism”, International Review n°75), we pointed out that our conception was no different from that of Marx in the Grundrisse, where he writes:

“Considered ideally, the dissolution of a given form of consciousness sufficed to kill a whole epoch. In reality, this barrier to consciousness corresponds to a definite degree of development of the forces of material production and hence of wealth. True, there was not only a development on the old basis, but also a development of this basis itself. The highest development of this basis itself (the flower into which it transforms itself; but it is always this basis, this plant as flower; hence wilting after the flowering and as a consequence of the flowering) is the point at which it is itself worked out, developed, into the form in which it is compatible with the highest development of the forces of production, hence also the richest development of individuals. As soon as this point is reached, the further development appears as decay, and the new development begins from a new basis” (emphasis in the original).

More than any previous social system, capitalism is synonymous with “economic growth”, but contrary to the quack-doctors of the bourgeoisie growth and progress are not the same: capitalism’s growth in its epoch of decay is more akin to that of a malignant tumour than that of a healthy body progressing from infancy to adulthood.

The material conditions for capitalism’s “healthy” development ended at the beginning of the 20th century when it effectively established a world economy and thus laid the essential foundations for the transition to communism. This did not mean that capitalism had rid itself of all remnants of pre-capitalist modes of production and classes, that it had exhausted the last pre-capitalist market, or even that it had effected the final transition from the formal to the real subsumption of labour in every corner of the planet. What it did mean was that henceforward global capitalism could less and less move into what Marx called “the outlying fields” of expansion and was compelled to grow through increasing self-cannibalisation and the cheating of its own natural laws of motion. We have already devoted considerable space to these forms of “development as decay” and will merely summarise here:

- the organisation of gigantic “state capitalist trusts” at the national level, and even at the international level through the formation of imperialist blocs, devoted to the regulation and control of the market, and thus to preventing the “normal” operation of capitalist competition from finding their real level and exploding in gigantic and open crises of overproduction on the model of 1929;

- the resort (largely via the intervention of these state capitalist behemoths) to credit and deficit spending, no longer as a stimulus to the development of new markets but more and more as a replacement for the real market; thus economic growth on an increasingly speculative and artificial basis which paves the way for devastating “adjustments” such as the collapse of the Asian tigers and dragons, or indeed what is now beginning to take place in the USA after the frenzied but drugged growth of the 90s;

- militarism and war as a mode of survival for the system – not only as a further artificial market which actually becomes a mounting burden on the world economy, but as the only means for nation states to defend their national economy at the expense of their rivals. The comrades of the ICU might reply that capitalism has always been a warlike system but as we also explained in an article in our series ‘Understanding the decadence of capitalism’(see in particular part V in IR 54) there is a qualitative difference between the wars of capitalism’s ascendancy - which were generally of short duration, local in scale, involving mainly professional armies and opening up genuinely new possibilities of economic expansion - and the wars of its decline, which have taken on a near permanent character, have been increasingly axed round the indiscriminate slaughter of millions of conscripts and civilians, and have thrown the wealth produced by centuries of labour into a bottomless abyss. Capitalism’s wars once provided the basis for the establishment of a world economy and thus for the transition to communism; but from this point on, far from laying the bases for future social progress they have increasingly threatened the very survival of humanity;

- the gigantic waste of human labour power represented by war and production for war also highlights another aspect of capitalism in its senile phase: the enormous weight of non-productive expenditures and activities, not only through the military sphere, but also through the need to maintain vast apparatuses of bureaucracy, of marketing, and so on. In the official record books of capital, all these spheres are defined as expressions of “growth”, but in reality they are testimony to the degree to which capitalism has become a barrier to the qualitative development of man’s productive powers which have become both necessary and possible in this epoch;

- a further dimension of “development as decay” which was only glimpsed in Marx’s day is the ecological threat that the blind drive to accumulate poses to the very life support system of the planet. Although this question has become increasingly obvious in the last few decades, it is intimately connected to the question of decadence. It is the historical constriction of the world market which has more and more compelled each nation state to pillage or mortgage its natural resources; this process has been building up throughout the 20th century even if it is reaching its paroxysm today; and at the same time a successful proletarian revolution in 1917-23 would not have been faced with the same immense problems now posed by the damage that capitalism’s diseased growth has done to the natural environment. At this level it is immediately obvious that capitalism is the cancer of the planet.

When did the epoch of bourgeois revolutions come to a close?

Following Marx’s writings on the Paris Commune, Lenin considered that 1871 marked the end of the period of bourgeois revolutions in the main centres of world capitalism. At the same time it marked the beginnings of the phase of imperialist expansion from these centres.

During the last third of the 19th century, the marxist movement considered that bourgeois revolutions were still on the agenda in the areas dominated by the colonial powers. This was a perfectly valid approach at the time; but by the end of the century it had become increasingly clear that the very dynamic of imperialist expansion, which required the colonies to develop only to the point that they served as passive markets and sources of raw materials, was inhibiting the emergence of new independent national capitalisms, and thus of a revolutionary bourgeoisie. This question was the subject of particularly fierce debates within the revolutionary movement in Russia; in his writings on the Russian peasant commune, Marx had already expressed the hope that a successful world revolution might spare Russia the necessity to pass through the purgatory of capitalist development. Later on, as it became obvious that imperialist capital was not going to leave Russia to its own devises, the focus of the question shifted to the problem of the inherent weakness of the fledgling Russian bourgeoisie. The Mensheviks, interpreting the marxist method in a very rigid and mechanistic way, argued that the proletariat had to prepare to support the inevitable bourgeois revolution in Russia; the Bolsheviks, on the other hand, recognised that the Russian bourgeoisie lacked the spine to carry out its revolution, and concluded that this task would have to be taken up by the proletariat and the peasantry (the formula of the “democratic dictatorship”). In fact, it was the position of Trotsky which came closer to reality, since it was immediately posed not in “Russian” terms but in a global and historical framework, and it started from the recognition that capitalism as a whole was moving towards the epoch of the world socialist revolution. The working class in power would not be able to stop at the bourgeois tasks of the revolution but would be compelled to make the “revolution in permanence” – to spread the revolution onto the world arena, where it could only take on a socialist character.

In the April Theses of 1917 Lenin effectively came over to this position, sweeping aside the objections of conservative Bolsheviks (who had in fact been flirting with Menshevism and the bourgeoisie) that he was abandoning the perspective of the “democratic dictatorship”. And in 1919 the Communist International was formed on the basis that capitalism had indeed entered its epoch of decline, the epoch of the world proletarian revolution. But while proclaiming that the emancipation of the colonial masses was now dependent on the success of the world revolution, the CI was not yet able to take this argument to its logical conclusion: that the epoch of national liberation struggles was now at a close, although Rosa Luxemburg and others had already seen it. It was above all the disastrous attempts of the Bolsheviks to forge alliances with the so-called “anti-imperialist” bourgeoisie in such regions as Turkey, the former Tsarist empire, and above all China which enabled the communist left (in particular the Italian Fraction) to question the CI’s theses on the national question, which held out the possibility of temporary alliances between the working class and the colonial bourgeoisie. The left fractions had recognised that each one of these “alliances” ended with the massacre of the working class and the communists at the hand of the colonial bourgeoisie, which in doing so did not hesitate to put itself at the service of one or another gang of imperialists.

The ICU, in their platform, claim that they owe their origins to the work of the left communist fractions who split with the degenerating CI (see World Revolution n°254). But on this question they are with the “official” view of the CI against that the of the left: “The Comintern politics of Stalin and Bukharin during the Chinese revolution of 1925-27 is completely different from the politics of Lenin and the Bolsheviks which determined the first years of the Comintern. You again argue that if there are bourgeois tasks, we should support this or that bourgeois fraction. The Mensheviks and the Stalinists said the same. …the method of Marx and Lenin consists in not refusing the tasks of the moment when all fractions of the bourgeoisie are equally reactionary, and in carrying out these tasks by the method of the proletarian revolution, trying to execute bourgeois tasks to the maximum depth and proceeding to the socialist tasks. The Chinese revolution has shown the correctness of this approach, instead of the correctness of the left. All the same the bourgeois revolution did win in China, though leaving enormous numbers of victims. This revolution has made it possible to create the most numerous proletariat in the world and powerful, quickly developing productive forces. The same result was given also by tens of other revolutions in the countries of the east. We see no sense in denying their historically progressive role: due to them our revolution has a strong class basis in many countries of the world, which in 1914 were almost completely agricultural”.

Of course we agree that Lenin’s position, the position outlined in the theses on the national and colonial question from the Second Congress of the CI in 1920, was by no means the same as Stalin’s in 1927. In particular, the 1920 theses had insisted on the necessity for the proletariat to remain strictly independent even from the “revolutionary nationalist” forces; Stalin called on the insurrectionary Shanghai workers to hand their arms over to the butchers of the Kuomingtang. But as we have shown in our series of articles on the origins of Maoism (International Review n°81, 84, 94), this experience confirmed not only that the Stalin clique had abandoned the proletarian revolution in the interests of the Russian national state; it also finally dashed all hopes of finding a sector of the colonial bourgeoisie which would not prostrate itself at the feet of imperialism, and which would not slaughter the proletariat at the first available opportunity. The “revolutionary nationalist” or “anti-imperialist” sectors of the colonial bourgeoisie simply did not exist. It could not be otherwise in a historical epoch – the decadence of world capitalism – in which there was no longer the slightest coincidence of interests between the two major classes.

The ICU and the “bourgeois revolution” in China

The ICU position on China seems to us to contain a profound ambiguity. On the one hand, they argue that in Russia in 1917 the bourgeoisie was already reactionary, which is why the proletariat had to carry through the tasks of the bourgeois revolution; according to their view, in China and “tens of other” unspecified eastern countries, a successful bourgeois revolution seems to have been carried out. Does this mean that the bourgeoisies in these countries were still progressive after 1917? Or does it mean, in the case of China in particular, that the faction which allegedly carried out the “bourgeois revolution” – Maoism – had something proletarian about it, as the Trotskyists argue? The ICU needs to make their thinking crystal clear on this point.

In any case, let us consider whether what happened in China corresponds to the marxist understanding of a bourgeois revolution. From the latter point of view, the bourgeois revolutions were a factor of historical progress because they cleared away the remnants of the old feudal mode of production and laid the foundations for the future revolution of the proletariat. This process had two basic dimensions:

- at the most material level, the bourgeois revolution threw off the feudal fetters that were blocking the development of the productive forces and the expansion of the world market. The formation of new nation states was an expression of progress in this sense: that they broke out of the limitations of feudal localism and constituted the building blocks of a world economy;

- the development of the productive forces is also, of course the material development of the proletariat, but what was also key to the bourgeois revolutions is that that they created the political framework for the “ideological” development of the working class, its capacity to identify and organise itself as a distinct class within and ultimately against capitalist society.

The so-called Chinese revolution of 1949 does not correspond to either of these aspects. To begin with, it was a product not of an expanding world economy but of one that had reached a historical impasse. This can be seen straight away when we grasp that it was born not out of a struggle against feudalism or Asiatic despotism, but out of a bloody struggle between bourgeois gangs, all of whom were linked to one or other of the great imperialist powers that dominated the globe. The Chinese “revolution” was the fruit of the imperialist conflicts that wracked China in the 30s and above all of their culminating point – the second world imperialist war. This is not altered by the fact that at different moments the contending Chinese factions had different imperialist backers (Maoism, for example, was supported by the US during the second world war, and then by Russia at the start of the “Cold War”). Nor does the fact that China embarked on an “independent” imperialist orientation for a brief period in the 60s prove that there are “young” bourgeoisies which can escape the grip of imperialism in this epoch. Rather the contrary: the fact that even China, with its immense territory and resources, was only able to chart an independent course for a such a brief period amply confirms Rosa Luxemburg’s arguments in the Junius Pamphlet: that in the epoch opened up by the first world war, no nation can “hold aloof” from imperialism because we live in a period in which imperialism’s domination of the entire planet can only be overcome by the world communist revolution.

China’s economic development also contains all the features of “development as decay”: thus it occurs not as part of an expanding world market, but as an attempt at autarkic development in a world economy which has already reached the fundamental limits of its capacity to expand. Hence, as in Stalinist Russia, the huge preponderance of the military sector, of heavy industry at the expense of the production of consumer goods, of a hideously swollen state bureaucracy. Hence also the periodic convulsions such as the “Great Leap Forward” and the “Cultural Revolution” in which the ruling class sought to mobilise the population behind campaigns to intensify its exploitation and its ideological submission to the state. These campaigns were a desperate response to the chronic stagnation and backwardness of the economy: witness the state’s demand during the “Great Leap Forward” that pig iron forges be set up in every village, using whatever bits of scrap metal came to hand.

Of course the Chinese working class is bigger today than it was in 1914. But to judge whether this is in itself a factor of progress for mankind we have to look at the situation of the proletariat in global, not national terms. And what we see at this level is that capitalism has proved incapable of integrating the majority of the world population into the working class. As a percentage of the world population, the working class remains in a minority.

Progress for the Chinese proletariat in this past century would have been the success of the world revolution in 1917-27, which would have permitted the balanced and harmonious development of industry and agriculture on a world scale, not the frenzied and historically unnecessary struggle of each national economy to survive on a glutted world market. Instead, the Chinese working class has spent the best part of the century under the odious heel of Stalinism. Far from being the product of a belated bourgeois revolution, Stalinism is the classic expression of the bourgeois counter-revolution, the awful revenge of capital after the proletariat has tried and failed to overthrow its rule. The fact that it based on a total lie – its claim to represent the communist revolution – is in itself a typical expression of a decadent mode of production: in its ascendant, self-confident phase capitalism had no need to garb itself in the clothes of its mortal enemy. Furthermore, this lie has had the most negative effects on the capacity of the working class – on a world scale, and particularly in the countries ruled by Stalinism – to understand the real communist perspective. When we consider as well the terrible toll of repression and massacre that Stalinism has extracted from the working class – the numbers who have perished in Maoism’s prisons and concentration camps is still unknown, but probably runs into the millions - it becomes evident that the so-called “bourgeois revolution” in China has totally failed to deliver what the authentic bourgeois revolutions were able to deliver in the 18th and 19th centuries: a political framework that enabled the proletariat to develop its self-confidence and consciousness of itself as a class. Stalinism has been an unmitigated disaster for the world proletariat; and even in its death throes it continues to poison its consciousness via the bourgeois campaigns that equate the demise of Stalinism with the end of communism. Like all the so-called “national revolutions” of the 20th century, it is testimony to the fact that capitalism is no longer laying down the foundations for communism, but is more and more ripping them apart.

Communists and the national question: no room for ambiguity

According to the ICU, communists could in some sense support national revolutions until the 1980s; now, with the advent of globalisation, this is no longer possible: “What has changed from the time of the beginning of ‘globalisation’? The opportunity of the national revolution has disappeared. Till the 1980s the national revolutions could still ensure the growth of the productive forces, therefore they should still have been supported, trying, if possible, to transfer management of them into the hands of the revolutionary proletariat…Now this historical stage for national development is finally exhausted”.

The first point to be made about this position is that if the communist left had defended it up until the 1980s, there would be no communist left today. Since the death of the Communist International at the end of the 20s, the communist left has been the only political current which has consistently opposed the mobilisation of the proletariat for imperialist war, above all when these wars were justified in the name of some belated bourgeois revolution or the “struggle against imperialism”. From Spain and China in the 30s, through the second world war, and in all the proxy conflicts that characterised the Cold War (Korea, Vietnam, Middle East, etc) the communist left alone has stood for proletarian internationalism, rejecting any support for any nation state or national factions, calling on the working class to defend its autonomous class interests against the appeals to dissolve itself into the war fronts of capital. The terrible consequences of straying from this path were illustrated very graphically by the implosion of the Bordigist current in the early 80s: its ambiguities on the national question opened the door to the penetration of out and out nationalist factions who sought to drag the main Bordigist organisation onto the terrain of support for the PLO and states like Syria in the war in the Middle East. There was resistance to this on the part of the proletarian elements in the organisation, but it paid a terrible price in the loss of militant energies and the further fragmentation of the entire current. Had the nationalists succeeded, they would have ended up annexing this historic offspring of the Italian left to the left wing of capital alongside the Trotskyists and the Stalinists. If the political ancestors of other groups such as the ICC and the IBRP had followed a policy of support for the so-called “national revolutions”, they would have suffered a similar fate, and there would be no left communist current for the newly emerging Russian groups to relate to.

Secondly, it seems to us that, despite the ICU concluding that now at last is the time for a truly independent proletarian position on the national movements, the comrades remain wedded to formulations that are at best ambiguous and at worst can lead to an open betrayal of class principles. Thus, they still talk about the possibility of transferring the national struggle from the bourgeoisie to the proletariat, still cling to the slogan of “national self-determination”: “As to support for movement of national independence, the unique sense here, both yesterday, and today, is to pull the struggle against national oppression from the hands of the bourgeoisie and to transfer it into the hands of proletariat. To transform independence movements into part of the world socialist revolution. It cannot be done by refusing to recognize the right of nations to self-determination, i.e. by not recognizing the necessity of finishing the historical tasks of the bourgeoisie. Otherwise, we shall leave the national proletariat under the direction of the national bourgeoisie”. But the working class cannot take over the national struggle; even to defend its class interests in the most basic and immediate way, it finds itself in opposition to the national bourgeoisie and all its ambitions. Class war and national war are diametric opposites both in their form and content. As for national self-determination, the comrades themselves recognise that this is an impossibility under the conditions of present day capitalism, even if they consider that this has only been the case since the 1980s. They therefore argue in favour of the slogan in similar terms to Lenin - as a means to avoid “antagonising” or offending the proletarians of the backward countries and winning them away from bourgeois influence. But comrades, communism cannot help being offensive to the misguided nationalist sentiments which exist within the working class. By the same token communists should avoid the criticism of religion because many workers are influenced by religious ideology. Of course we don’t go out to provoke or insult workers because they have confused ideas. But as it says in the Communist Manifesto, communists disdain to hide their views. If national liberation and national self-determination are impossible, then we must say so in the clearest possible terms.

The appearance of groups like the ICU is an important gain for the world proletariat. But their ambiguities on the national question are very serious and put into question their capacity to survive as an expression of the proletariat. History has shown that, because it connects to the profound antagonism between the proletariat and imperialist war, ambiguities on the national question above all can easily turn into betraying the internationalist interests of the working class. We therefore urge them to reflect profoundly on all the texts and contributions which the communist left has made on this vital issue.

CDW

History of US foreign policy since World War II

The world has come a long way since the collapse of the bipolar division of the world that characterized the 45-year period of the Cold War. The era of peace, prosperity and democracy that the world bourgeoisie promised with the collapse of the Russian bloc in 1989 has of course never materialized. Indeed the decomposition of capitalist society, which was a consequence of the stalemate in class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie after two decades of open economic crisis and triggered the collapse of Stalinism, has relentlessly spiraled deeper and deeper into chaos, violence, death and destruction, as humanity is brought closer and closer to a future of barbarism. At the time of the writing of this article, President George W. Bush has just announced that the United States was ready to invade Iraq, with or without international support, even in the face of a failure to get a Security Council sanction for its military action. The breach between Washington and the capitals of major European countries, and even China, on the question of this imminent war is palpable. It is particularly appropriate at this conjuncture to examine the roots of American imperialist policy since the end of World War II, so as to better understand the current situation.

The dominant position of American imperialism at the end of World War II

As the second imperialist world war drew to a close in 1945, the global imperialist terrain had been vastly altered. “Before World War II there were six great powers: Great Britain, France, Germany, the Soviet Union, Japan, and the United States. By the end of the war, the United States stood alone, easily the most powerful nation in the world, its power greatly increased by its mobilization and war effort, its rivals defeated, and its allies exhausted” (D.S. Painter, Encyclopedia of US Foreign Policy, p.273). The imperialist war “destroyed the old balance of power, leaving Germany and Japan crushed and impotent and reducing Great Britain and France to second or even third-rate powers” (George C. Herring, Encyclopedia of American Foreign Policy, p. 112).

During the war the US, with over 12 million men under arms, had doubled its Gross National Product, and by the end of the war it accounted for “half of the world’s manufacturing capacity, most of its food surpluses, and almost all of its financial reserves. The United States held the lead in a wide range of technologies essential to modern warfare and economic prosperity. Possession of extensive domestic oil supplies and control over access to the vast oil reserves of Latin America and the Middle East contributed to the US position of global dominance” (Painter, op. cit). America possessed the world’s most powerful military. Its Navy dominated the seas, its air forces the skies, its army occupied Japan, and part of Germany, and it enjoyed a global monopoly on atomic weapons, which it had shown at Hiroshima and Nagasaki that it would not shrink from using to advance its imperialist interests. American strength was favoured by advantages accruing from America’s relative geographic isolation. Distant from the epicentre of both world wars, the American homeland had suffered none of the massive destruction of the means of production that the European nations had experienced, and its civilian population had been spared the terror of air raids, bombardments, deportations, and concentration camps that led to the death of millions of non-combatants in Europe (more than 20 million civilians in Russia alone).

Russia, devastated by the war, suffered perhaps 27 million military and civilian deaths, and a massive destruction of its manufacturing capacity, its agriculture and mining resources, and its transport infrastructure. It had an economy only one-fourth the size of the US. However, it benefited greatly from the total destruction of Germany and Japan, both of whom had historically checked Russian expansion in the west and east respectively. Great Britain was completely drained by six years of war mobilization. It had lost a quarter of its pre-war wealth, was deeply in debt, and “was in danger of slipping from the ranks of the great powers” (ibid). France, defeated easily early in the war, damaged by German occupation, and divided by collaboration with Germany occupation forces “no longer counted as a great power” (ibid).

Even before the end of the war the American bourgeoisie was already preparing for the formation of a military bloc for the anticipated future confrontation with Stalinist Russia. For example, some bourgeois commentators (Painter, Herring) have argued that the civil war in Greece in 1944 was a precursor of the future US-Russian confrontation. This preoccupation with a future confrontation with Russian imperialism could be seen in the bickering and delays over the Allied invasion of Europe to relieve pressure on Russia by opening a second front in the west. Originally Roosevelt promised an invasion in 1942, or early 1943, but it didn’t come until June 1944. The Russians complained that the Allies were “deliberately holding back assistance to weaken the Soviet Union, thus allowing themselves to dictate the terms of the peace” (Herring, op cit, p. 112). The same preoccupation also explains the use of nuclear weapons against Japan in August 1945, even as that country sent out feelers for a negotiated surrender, which was designed a) to win the war before Russian imperialism could enter the war in the East, and stake a claim for territory and influence in the region, and b) to give a warning to the Russians as to the true scale of American military might as the post war era began to dawn.

However, if the US anticipated confrontation with Moscow in the post-war era, it would be wrong to imply that they understood completely, or accurately, the precise contours of that competition, or Moscow’s imperialist designs. Roosevelt in particular seemed to cling to outdated, 19th century conceptions of imperialist spheres of influence, and hoped for Russian cooperation in building a new world order in the post war period, with Moscow in a subordinate role (Painter, op. cit., p.277). In this sense, Roosevelt apparently believed that granting Stalin a buffer zone in Eastern Europe to provide safeguard against its historic German adversary would satisfy Russia’s imperialist appetites. However, even at Yalta where much of this framework was laid out there were disputes over British and American participation in the determination of the future of the Eastern European nations, including especially Poland.

In the 18 months after the end of the war, President Truman confronted a more alarming picture of Russian expansionism. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania had already been reabsorbed by Russia by the end of the war; puppet regimes had been established in Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria and in the part of Germany controlled by Russian forces. In 1946, Russia delayed its withdrawal from Iran, supported dissident forces there, and tried to extract oil concessions. Pressure was put on Turkey to grant increased Russian access to the Black Sea and Stalinist guerrillas resumed their civil war in Greece after disputed elections. And at the United Nations, Moscow rejected an American plan on the control of atomic weapons, which would have granted the US the right to maintain its nuclear monopoly, thus signaling its own plans to join the nuclear arms race.

In February, 1946, George Keenan, a young State Department expert stationed in Moscow, drafted his famous “long telegram” which presented a view of Russia as an “intractable” foe, bent on an expansionist policy to spread its power and influence, which became the basis of American Cold War policy. The alarm sounded by Keenan seemed to be confirmed by Moscow’s growing influence throughout the world. Stalinist parties in France, Italy, Greece and Vietnam seemed posed to take power. European nations faced immense pressure to de-colonise their pre-war empires, particularly the Near East and Asia. The Truman administration embraced a strategy of containment to block any further spread of Russian power.

The containment of “communism”

In the initial aftermath of the war, the primary strategic goal of American imperialism was the defence of Europe, to prevent any nations beyond those already ceded to Russian imperialism at Yalta from falling to Stalinism. The doctrine was called “containment,” and it was designed to resist the further spread of Russia imperialism’s tentacles in Europe and the Near East. This doctrine emerged as a counter measure to Russian imperialism’s post war offensive. Beginning in 1945/46, Russian imperialism aggressively staked imperialist claims in two theatres of traditional Russian interests in Eastern Europe, and the Near East that had alarmed Washington. In Poland, Moscow disregarded Yalta’s guarantee of “free” elections and imposed a puppet regime, the civil war in Greece was rekindled, pressures were brought to bear on Turkey, and Moscow refused to withdraw its troops from northern Iran. At the same time, Germany and Western Europe remained a shambles, with efforts to begin reconstruction and to negotiate to formally settle the war at a standstill due to big power bickering, while the Stalinist parties enjoyed tremendous influence in the devastated countries of Western Europe, especially France and Italy. Defeated Germany was another focal point for confrontation: Russian imperialism demanded reparations and guarantees that a reconstructed Germany would never again pose a threat.

In order to contain the spread of Russian “communism” the Truman administration responded in 1946 by supporting the Iranian regime against Russia, assuming previous British responsibilities in the eastern Mediterranean by providing massive military aid to Turkey and Greece in early 1947, and by initiating the Marshall Plan in June 1947 to begin the reconstruction of Western Europe. While it is beyond the scope of this article to go into detail about the nature and mechanisms involved in the economic revitalization of Western Europe, it is important to understand that economic assistance was a critical factor in combating Russian influence. Economic assistance was supplemented by a policy of fostering pro-Western (i.e. pro-Washington) institutions and organizations, creating anti-Communist trade unions and political organizations, with AFL[1] operatives working hand in glove with the CIA to make Western Europe safe for American capitalism. The Force Ouvrière trade union in France and the left-wing New Statesman review in Britain are two prominent examples of American gold being showered upon non-communists in post war Europe. “US assistance allowed moderate governments to devote massive resources to reconstruction and to expand their countries’ exports without imposing politically unacceptable and socially divisive austerity programs that would have been necessary without US aid. US assistance also helped counteract what US leaders saw as a dangerous drift away from free enterprise and toward collectivism. By favoring some policies and opposing others the United States not only influenced how European and Japanese elites defined their own interests but also altered the internal balance of power among the decision-making groups. Thus US aid policies facilitated the ascendancy of centrist parties, such as the Christian Democrats in West Germany and Italy and the more conservative Liberal Democratic Party in Japan” (Painter, op cit, p. 278)

The economic revitalization of Western Europe was followed quickly by the foundation of the NATO alliance, which in turn prompted the formation of the Warsaw Pact, and hence set the strategic confrontation that would prevail in Europe until the collapse of Stalinism at the end of the 1980s. Despite the fact that both military pacts were supposed to be mutual security alliances, each was in fact totally dominated by the bloc leader.

The creation of a bipolar world order

Despite the confrontations described above, the creation of the bipolar imperialist world order that characterized the Cold War did not emerge instantaneously with the end of World War II. While the US was clearly the dominant leader, France, Great Britain, and other European powers still had illusions of independence and power. While American policy makers talked privately of creating a new empire under their control, in public they maintained the fiction of mutual co-operation and partnership with Western Europe. For example, four power summits, with the heads of state of the US, Russia, Britain and France in attendance continued throughout the 1950s, eventually shriveling into nothingness as American imperialism consolidated its dominance. From the 1960s until the end of the Cold War, the summits were limited just to the US and Russia, with the European “partners” often totally excluded even from consultation in advance of the meetings.

After the war Great Britain was the world’s third greatest power – a distant third at that – but in the early days of the Cold War, there was a tendency to substantially overestimate British capabilities. There was still a remnant of US imperialist rivalry with Britain, and even perhaps a tendency to want to use Russia to counter balance the British, while at the same time a belief that Britain could be counted upon to hold the line in Europe against Russian expansionism. In this sense responsibility for blocking Russia in Greece was handed over to the British as the predominant European power in the eastern Mediterranean. However, this led to a rude awakening in 1947, when the British had to call the US to come to the rescue. Thus it took some time for the US to see more clearly the precise role they would have to play in Europe, and for the bipolar division of the world to occur.

Despite their enormous military and economic importance, the European countries were dragged kicking and screaming into submission to the will of their imperialist master. Pressure was put on reluctant European powers to give up their colonies in Africa and Asia, in part to strip them of the vestiges of their past imperialist glories, in part to counter Russian inroads in Africa and Asia, and in part to give American imperialism more opportunity to exert influence in the former colonies. This of course did not stop the Europeans from trying to convince the Americans to pursue mutually agreeable policy orientations, as for example when the British tried to get the Americans to support their policy towards Egypt’s Nasser in 1956. French and British imperialism, acting in concert with the Israelis, attempted the last overt act of independent imperialist initiative by playing their own card in the Suez Crisis of 1956, but the US showed the British that they would not allow themselves to be used. Britain was given a lesson that it could not presume to negotiate from a position of American strength, and incurred a swift disciplinary intervention by the US. France, however, stubbornly tried to maintain the illusion of its independence of American domination by withdrawing its forces from NATO command in 1966, and insisting that any NATO offices be removed from French territory by 1967.

The unity and continuity in American imperialist policy during the Cold War

Isolationism as a serious political current within the American ruling class was completely neutralized by the events at Pearl Harbor in 1941, which were used by Roosevelt to force isolationists, as well as pro-German elements within the American bourgeoisie, to abandon their positions. Since World War II isolationist viewpoints within the bourgeoisie have essentially been confined to elements of the fringe right and are not a serious factor in foreign policy formulation. The Cold War against Russian imperialism was clearly a unified policy of the bourgeoisie. Whatever divergences that appeared to surface were largely window dressing for the democratic charade, with the exception of the divergences over the Vietnam War after 1968, which will be discussed in the next article in this series. The Cold War began under Truman, the Democrat who came to power with the death of Roosevelt in 1945. It was Truman who dropped the atomic bomb, undertook efforts to block Russian imperialism in Europe and the Near East, introduced the Marshall Plan, initiated the Berlin airlift, formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), and committed American troops to war in Korea.

In the 1952 election campaign, conservative Republicans, it is true, criticized Truman’s policy of containment, as a concession to “communism,” a form of appeasement that tacitly or explicitly accepted Russian domination of countries already under their influence or control and only opposed the spread of Russian imperialism to new countries. Instead these conservative elements called for “rollback,” an active policy of pushing back Russian imperialism towards its own borders. But despite the fact that the Republican Eisenhower came to power in 1952, and ruled through the height of the 1950s Cold War in Europe, there was in fact no attempt at rollback ever undertaken by American imperialism. US strategy remained one of containment. Thus in 1956, during the Hungarian uprising, American imperialism made no intervention, except propagandistic, implicitly acknowledging Russia’s prerogative to suppress rebellion in its own sphere of influence. On the other hand, under Eisenhower, US imperialism clearly continued the strategy of containment, moving into the breach in Indochina, following the defeat of French imperialism in the region, by undermining the Geneva Accords, to block eventual unification of Vietnam by bolstering the regime in the South, by maintaining the division of Korea and turning South Korea into a showplace for western capitalism in the Far East, and by moving to oppose Fidel Castro’s regime and its overtures towards Moscow. The continuity of this policy can be seen in that it was the conservative Republican Eisenhower administration that planned the Bay of Pigs invasion, but it was the liberal Democrat Kennedy, whose administration carried it out.

It was the liberal Democrat Johnson, who first began to develop the notion of détente – he called it “building bridges” and “peaceful engagement” – in 1966, but it was the conservative Nixon, a Republican, with Henry Kissinger at his side, who presided over the flowering of détente in the early 1970s. And it was the Democrat Carter, not Reagan, who began the process of dismantling détente and reviving the Cold War. Carter made human rights a cornerstone of his foreign policy, which while it forced certain changes in the antiquated military dictatorships that dominated Latin America, also alienated Moscow and revived anti-Russian propaganda. In 1977, NATO adopted three Carter proposals: 1) détente with Moscow had to be based on a position of strength (based on the Harmel Report adopted in 1967); 2) a commitment to standardization of military equipment within NATO and further integration of NATO forces on the operational level; 3) revival of the arms race, through what came to be known as the Long-Term Defense Program (LTDP), which started with a call for beefing up conventional weaponry in NATO countries. In response to the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, Carter switched to fully-fledged Cold Warrior stance, essentially ending détente, refusing to submit the Salt II treaty to the Senate for ratification, and organising the American boycott of the 1980 Olympics in Moscow. In December 1979, under Carter’s leadership, NATO adopted a “dual track” rearmament strategy – negotiating with Moscow to cut or eliminate Russia’s intermediate range nuclear SS20 missiles aimed at Western Europe by 1983, but at the same time preparing to deploy equivalent US missiles (464 cruise missiles in the UK, Holland, Belgium and Italy and 108 Pershings in West Germany) in the event that agreement with Moscow were not reached. In this sense, Reagan’s support to the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan, acceleration of the arms race, and deployment of intermediate range missiles in Europe 1983-84, which triggered so much protest in Europe, was in complete continuity with American policy initiatives undertaken on Carter’s watch rather than a divergence from it. The strategic goal of preventing the rise of a rival power in Asia or Europe that might challenge the US was developed at the end of the first Bush administration, continued through the Clinton administration, and is now at the heart of Bush the younger’s policy. Even the much ballyhooed war against Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda unleashed by the Bush administration after 9/11 is a continuation of a policy begun under the Clinton administration, even if it is elevated to a higher level of open combat, designed primarily to establish and solidify the American presence in Central Asia. Likewise, the necessity for US imperialism to be prepared to take unilateral action militarily was developed in the Clinton administration, and taken up by the current Bush regime. The overarching continuity in American imperialist policy is a reflection of the central characteristic of state capitalist policy-making in decadent capitalism, where the permanent bureaucracy, not the legislature, is the locus of political power. This is of course not to deny that sometimes that are significant policy divergences within the bourgeoisie in the US that stand in sharp contrast to the overall unity. The two most glaring examples were Vietnam and the China policy in the late 1990s that led to the impeachment of Clinton, both of which will be discussed below.

The Korean War: containment in action in the Far East

While East-West tensions in Western Europe, especially in Germany and Berlin, and in the Near East had preoccupied American imperialist policy makers in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, events in the Far East soon rang alarm bells. With a US military government in place in Japan, and a friendly nationalist regime in China, which would also serve as a permanent member of the Security Council, the US had anticipated a dominant role in the Far East. The fall of the nationalist regime in 1949 raised the spectre of Russian expansionism in the Far East. Even though Moscow had done plenty to alienate Mao’s leadership during the war years, and had a working relationship with the nationalists, Washington feared a rapprochement between Beijing and Moscow as a real challenge to US interests in the region. The blockage of a Russian led attempt to win UN recognition for Red China in the UN, led Moscow to walk out of the Security Council, boycotting that body for seven months, until August 1950.

Moscow’s Security Council boycott would have a profound impact in June 1950, when North Korean forces invaded South Korea. Truman immediately ordered American forces in the battle to defend the pro-western regime in South Korea, a full week prior to a Security Council vote authorizing military action under US leadership, demonstrating that American imperialism’s predisposition to take unilateral action is not a recent invention. Not only did American troops enter battle in Korea before the UN authorization, but even after it became a UN-endorsed operation, and 16 other nations sent forces to participate in the “police action,” the American commander reported directly to Washington, not to the UN. Had Moscow been present in the Security Council it could have exercised a veto to bloc UN military intervention, prompting an earlier version of the same drama we have witnessed in the past few months as to what degree American imperialism would go it alone to defend its imperialist interests.

Some bourgeois analysts suggest that the Russian boycott was in fact motivated by a desire to avoid the possibility of an early acceptance of Mao’s regime by the UN in a new vote and instead to use the time to cement relations between Moscow and Beijing. Zbigniew Brzezinski even suggested that it was “a calculated move deliberately designed to stimulate American-Chinese hostility…the predominant US inclination prior to the Korean War was to seek some sort of an accommodation with the new government on the Chinese mainland. In any case, the opportunity to stimulate a head-on clash between America and China must have been welcomed by Stalin, and deservedly so. The ensuing 20 ears of American-Chinese hostility were certainly a net gain for the Soviet Union” (“How the Cold War Was Played,” Foreign Affairs, 1972, p.186-187).

Cuban Missile Crisis and the brink of nuclear war

Fidel Castro’s overthrow of the US-supported dictator Battista in 1959 posed a serious dilemma within the bipolar Cold War confrontation and brought the superpowers to the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. The character of Castro’s revolution was at first unclear. Draped in an ideology of democratic populism, with a certain romanticisation of the guerrilla thrown into the sauce, Castro was not a member of the Stalinist party, and his links to it were quite strained. However, his nationalisations of American-owned properties in the initial moments after taking power, quickly alienated Washington. American animosity only operated to push Castro into the arms of Moscow for foreign aid and military assistance. The CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961, originally planned under Eisenhower and executed by Kennedy, demonstrated American commitment to the overthrow of the Russian-backed regime. For the US, the existence of a regime in its own backyard, linked to Moscow was intolerable. Ever since the Monroe Doctrine, promulgated in 1823, the US had maintained a position that the Americas were off-limits to European imperialisms. To have its Cold War adversary establish a beachhead just ninety miles from American territory in Florida was absolutely unacceptable to Washington.

By the fall of 1962, Castro and the Russians expected an imminent American invasion, and in fact under Robert Kennedy’s instigation, in November 1961, Washington had begun Operation Mongoose, which planned for a military operation against Cuba in mid-October 1962, conducted under the umbrella of a US-inspired decision of the Organisation of American States to exclude Cuba from membership and to prohibit arms sales to Castro. “On 1 October, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara ordered military preparations for a blockade, an air strike, an invasion, with ‘maximum readiness’ for the last two actions to be achieved by 20 October” (B.J. Bernstein, Encyclopedia of US Foreign Relations, p.388). At the same time the US had installed 15 Jupiter missiles in Turkey, near Russia’s southern border, aimed at targets in Russia, which Moscow found unacceptable.

Moscow sought to counter both threats through one measure: the deployment of nuclear missiles aimed at the United States in Cuba. The Kennedy administration miscalculated Moscow’s intentions, and considered that the deployment of the missiles was an offensive, not defensive, measure, and demanded the immediate dismantling and withdrawal of the missiles already deployed, and that any other missiles en-route to Cuba be returned to Russia. Because a naval blockade of Cuban waters would have been an act of war under international law, the Kennedy administration announced a “quarantine” of Cuban waters, and prepared to stop Russian vessels suspected of carrying missiles on the high seas, in international waters. The whole crisis occurred on the eve of the midterm Congressional elections in November 1962, in which Kennedy apparently feared a rightwing Republican triumph if he appeared weak in confrontation with Khrushchev, though it is difficult to believe, as some historians claim, that Kennedy was motivated more by domestic political considerations than foreign policy and defense strategies. After all because of their proximity to the US, the Russian missiles in Cuba increased Moscow’s capacity to hit the continental US with nuclear warheads by 50%, constituting a major alteration in the balance of terror of the Cold War. In this context the administration pushed hard and brought the world to the brink of direct nuclear confrontation, especially when the Russians successfully shot down a U2 spy-plane in the middle of the crisis. triggering demands from the Joint Chiefs of Staff for an immediate attack on Cuba. At one point, Robert Kennedy “suggested looking for a pretext – ‘sink the Maine or something’ and go to war with the Soviets.[2] Better then, than later, he concluded” (Bernstein, p. 390). Finally a behind the scenes deal was reached with Khrushchev when the Americans offered to secretly remove the Jupiter missiles from Turkey in return for the withdrawal of the Russian missiles from Cuba. Because the American concession was kept secret Kennedy was able to claim a complete victory in forcing Khrushchev to back down. The huge propaganda coup for the US may have severely undermined Khrushchev’s authority within the Russian ruling circles and contributed to his removal shortly thereafter. The members of the Kennedy inner circle maintained the fiction for nearly two decades, lying in their various memoirs. It wasn’t until the 1980s that the facts surrounding the Cuban Missile Crisis and the secret agreement that ended it were revealed (Bernstein, op cit.). Sobered by coming so close to the brink of nuclear war, Moscow and Washington agreed to establish a “hotline” means of communication between the White House and the Kremlin, reached agreement on a nuclear test ban treaty, and focused more on confrontation through proxies for the rest of the Cold War.

Proxy wars during the Cold War

Throughout the Cold War Russian and American imperialism never confronted each other directly in armed combat, but rather through a series of proxy wars, which were confined to the peripheral countries, never involving the metropoles of world capitalism, never posing a danger of spiralling out of control into a world war or a nuclear conflagration, with the exception of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. Most often these peripheral conflicts involved proxies representing both sides, usually a client government backed by American imperialism, and a national liberation movement backed by Moscow. Less frequently the conflicts involved either Russia or the US fighting a proxy for the other, as when the US fought in Korea, or Vietnam, or when the Russians fought the US-backed and supplied Mujahadeen in Afghanistan. In general the insurgents were supported by the weaker bloc (i.e., the so-called wars for national liberation supported by Stalinism throughout the Cold War). Notable exceptions, were Angola and Afghanistan where the rebels were supported by the US. In general advances achieved in this deadly imperialist chess game by Russian proxies, brought a larger and more devastating response from US proxies, for example the Middle East wars where Israel pushed back Russian supported Arab offensives repeatedly and overwhelmingly. Despite the numerous liberation struggles it backed throughout four decades, Russian imperialism was seldom successful in establishing a lasting beachhead outside its existing sphere of influence. Various states in the third world would play the two blocs off against each other, flirt with Moscow, accepting its military supplies, but never completely or permanently integrating into its orbit. Nowhere was the inability of Russian imperialism to spread permanently its influence more glaring than in Latin America, where it was never able to expand its influence beyond Cuba. In fact unable to spread Stalinism to Latin America Cuba was forced to repay its aid from Russia by sending shock troops to Angola in the service of Moscow.

(to be continued)

J. Grevin

1. With the massive US offensive against Iraq, we enter a new stage in capitalism’s descent into military barbarism, which is set to aggravate all the other areas of open hostilities or simmering tensions around the globe. Even apart from the awful devastation which is being heaped on the hapless population of Iraq, the war can only have the effect of stoking up imperialist tensions and military chaos everywhere else. The preparations for the war have already given rise to the first open split between America, on the one hand, and the only other power which could pose as the candidate to lead a new anti-American bloc – Germany. The divisions between the great powers over Iraq have sounded the death knell of NATO, while at the same time revealing that Europe, far from being such a bloc already, is riven with profound divergences on the key issues of international relations. It has prompted another pole of the ‘axis of evil’, North Korea, to play its own hand in the crisis, with the danger that this will in the medium term extend the theatre of war to the far east. Meanwhile the third pole of the axis – Iran – is also playing the nuclear card. In Africa, France’s pretensions to being a ‘pacifist’ power are exposed by the increasing involvement of its troops in the bloody war in the Ivory Coast. The aftermath of war in Iraq, far from creating a new Middle Eastern ‘West Germany’ as some of the more facile bourgeois commentators have predicted, can only serve to create a huge zone of instability which will have immediate consequence of aggravating the Israel/ Palestine conflict and generating new terrorist attacks around the globe. The war against terrorism is spreading terror all over the planet - not only through the massacres it perpetrates on its immediate victims in the front lines of imperialist rivalry, but more widely in the shape of growing popular anxiety about what the future holds in store for the whole of mankind.

2. It is no accident that the racking up of military tensions ‘coincides’ with a new plunge into the world economic crisis. This has been manifested not only in the overt collapse of weaker (but still economically significant) economies like Argentina, but above all in the return of open recession to the US economy, whose debt-fuelled growth in the 1990s  - portrayed as the triumph of the ‘new economy’ - was the great white hope of the entire world economic system, in particular the countries of Europe. These glorious years are now definitively at an end as the US economy is wracked by explicitly rising unemployment, a fall in industrial production, a decline in consumer spending, stock market instability, corporate scandals and bankruptcies, and the return of the Federal budget deficit.

 A measure of the seriousness of the current economic situation is given by the state of the British economy, which of all the major European countries was presented as being best placed to weather the global storms emanating from the US. In fact almost immediately after Chancellor Brown declared that “Britain remains better placed than in the past to cope with the world economic downturn”, official figures were released showing that British manufacturing –in hi-tech as well as more traditional industries –was at its lowest point since the 1991 recession, and that 10,000 jobs are disappearing every month in this sector

 Coupled with the sacrifices demanded by the spiralling increase in military budgets, the slide into open recession is already generating a whole new round of attacks on working class living standards (redundancies, ‘modernisation’, cuts in benefits, especially pensions, etc).

3. The situation facing the working class is thus one of unprecedented gravity. For over a decade, the working class has been experiencing the most prolonged retreat in its struggles since the end of the counter-revolutionary period in the late 60s. Confronted with the twin assaults of war and economic crisis, the working class has experienced considerable difficulties in developing its own struggles, even on the most basic level of economic self-defence. On the political level its difficulties are even more pronounced, as its general consciousness of the huge historical responsibility weighing on its shoulders has suffered blow after blow in the last decade and more. And yet the very forces whose first task is to combat the political weaknesses in the proletariat - the forces of the communist left -are in a more dangerous state of disarray than at any time since the re-emergence of revolutionary forces at the end of the 60s. The immense pressures of a decomposing capitalist order have tended to reinforce the long-standing opportunist and sectarian weaknesses in the proletarian political milieu, resulting in severe theoretical and political regressions which tend to underestimate the seriousness of the situation faced by the proletariat and its revolutionary minorities, and indeed to obscure any real understanding of the nature and dynamic of the entire historical epoch.

The crisis of US leadership  

4. Faced with the collapse of the rival Russian bloc at the end of the 80s, and with the rapid unravelling of its own western bloc, US imperialism formulated a strategic plan which has, in the ensuing decade, revealed itself more and more openly. Confirmed as the only remaining superpower, the USA would do everything in its power to ensure that no new superpower – in reality, no new imperialist bloc – could arise to challenge its ‘New World Order’. The principal methods of this strategy were demonstrated forcefully by the first Gulf war of 1991:

• a massive display of US military superiority, using Saddam’s regime as a whipping boy
• the press-ganging of the other powers into a coalition that would give an air of legitimacy to the US operation, as well as providing a considerable portion of the enormous funds required. Germany in particular – the only real candidate to the leadership of a new anti-American bloc – was to pay the most. 

5. If the Gulf war’s primary aim was to issue an effective warning to all who would challenge US hegemony, it must be judged a failure. Within a year, Germany had provoked the war in the Balkans, with the aim of extending its influence to a key strategic crossroads of Europe and the Middle East. It would take the best part of the decade before the US – through the war in Kosovo – could impose its authority in this region, having been opposed not only by Germany (which gave underhand support to Croatia) but also by France and its supposedly loyal ally Britain, who secretly backed Serbia. The chaos in the Balkans was a clear expression of the contradictions faced by the US: the more it sought to discipline its former allies, the more it provoked resistance and hostility, and the less able it was to recruit them for military operations which they knew were ultimately aimed against them. Thus the phenomenon of the US being increasingly obliged to ‘go it alone’ in its adventures, relying less and less on ‘legal’ international structures such as the UN and NATO, which have more and more functioned as obstacles to the US’s plans.

6. After September 11 2001 – almost certainly carried out with the complicity of the US state – the USA’s global strategy shifted onto a higher level. The ‘war against terrorism’ was immediately announced as a permanent and planet-wide military offensive. Faced with an increasing challenge from its principal imperialist rivals (expressed in rows over the Kyoto agreement, the European military force, manoeuvres over the policing of Kosovo, etc), the USA opted for a policy of much more massive and direct military intervention, with the strategic goal of the encirclement of Europe and Russia by gaining control of Central Asia and the Middle East. In the Far East, by including North Korea in the ‘axis of evil’, and by renewing its interest in the ‘struggle against terrorism’ in Indonesia following the Bali bombing, US imperialism has also declared its intention to intervene directly in the backyard of China and Japan.

7. The aims of this intervention are by no means limited to the question of oil considered uniquely as a source of capitalist profits. Control of the Middle East and central Asia for geo-strategic reasons was a matter of intense inter-imperialist rivalry long before oil became a vital element in the capitalist economy. And while there is a clear necessity to control the huge oil producing capacities of the Middle East and the Caucasus, US military action there is not carried out on behalf of the oil companies: the oil companies are only allowed to get their pay off provided they fit in with the overall strategic plan, which includes the ability to shut off oil supplies to America’s potential enemies and thus throttle any military challenge before it begins. Germany and Japan in particular are far more dependent on Middle East oil than the USA.

8. The USA’s audacious project of building a ring of steel around its main imperialist rivals thus provides the real explanation for the war in Afghanistan, the planned assault on Iraq, and the declared intention to deal with Iran. However, the upping of the stakes by the US has called forth a commensurate response from its main challengers. The resistance to US plans has been led by France, which threatened to use its veto on the UN Security Council; but even more significant is the open challenge issued by Germany, which hitherto has tended to work in the shadows, allowing France to play the role of declared opponent of US ambitions. Today however, Germany perceives the US adventure in Iraq as a real menace to its interests in an area which has been central to its imperialist ambitions since before the first world war. It has thus issued a far more open challenge to the US than ever before; furthermore, its resolute ‘anti-war’ stance has emboldened France, which until quite close to the outbreak of war was still hinting that it might change tack and take part in the military action. With the outbreak of the war, these powers are adopting a fairly low profile, but historically a real milestone has been marked. This crisis has pointed to the demise not only of NATO (whose irrelevance was shown over its inability to agree on the ‘defence’ of Turkey just before the war) but also of the UN. The American bourgeoisie is increasingly regarding this institution as an instrument of its principal rivals, and is openly saying that it will not play any role in the ‘reconstruction’ of Iraq. The abandonment of such institutions of ‘international law’ represents a significant step in the development of chaos in international relations.

9. The resistance to US plans by an alliance between France, Germany, Russia and China shows that, faced with the massive superiority of the US, its main rivals have no choice but to band together against it. This confirms that the tendency towards the constitution of new imperialist blocs remains a real factor in the current situation. But it would be a mistake to confuse a tendency with an accomplished fact, above all because in the period of capitalist decomposition, the movement towards the formation of new blocs is being constantly obstructed by the counter-tendency for each country to defend its own immediate national interests above all else - by the tendency towards every man for himself; The powerful divisions between the European countries over the war in Iraq has demonstrated that “Europe” is very far from forming a coherent bloc, as some elements of the revolutionary movement have tended to argue. Furthermore, such arguments are based on a confusion between economic alliances and real imperialist blocs, which are above all military formations oriented towards world war. And here two other important factors come into play: first, the undeniable military dominance of the US, which still makes it impossible for any openly warlike challenge to be mounted against the US by its great power rivals; and secondly, the undefeated nature of the proletariat, which means that it is not yet possible to create the social and ideological conditions for new war blocs.Thus the war against Iraq, however much it has brought imperialist rivalries between the great powers into the open, still takes the same basic form as the other major wars of this phase: a “deflected” war whose real target is hidden by the selection of a “scapegoat” constituted by a third or forth rate power, and in which the major powers take care to fight using only professional armies;

10. The crisis of US leadership has placed British imperialism in an increasingly contradictory position. With the end of the special relationship, the defence of Britain’s interests requires it to play a ‘mediating’ role between America and the main European powers, and between the latter powers themselves. Although presented as the poodle of the US, the Blair government has itself played a significant role in bringing about the current crisis, by insisting that America could not go it alone over Iraq, but needed to take the UN route. Britain too has been the scene of some of the biggest ‘peace’ marches, with large fractions of the ruling class – not only its leftist appendages – organising the demonstrations; The strong ”anti-war” sentiments of parts of the British bourgeoisie express a real dilemma for the British ruling class, as the growing schism between America and the other great powers is making its “centrist” role increasingly uncomfortable. In particular, Britains arguments that the UN should play a central role in the post-Saddam settlement, and that this must be accompanied by significant concession to the Palestinians, are being politely ignored by the US. Although as yet there is no clear alternative, within the British bourgeoisie, to the Blair line in international relations, there is a growing unease with being too closely associated with US adventurism. The quagmire now developing in Iraq can only strengthen this unease.

11. Although the US continues to demonstrate its crushing military superiority to all the other major powers, the increasingly open character of its imperialist ambitions is tending to weaken its political authority. In both world wars and in the conflict with the Russian bloc, the US was able to pose as the principal rampart of democracy and the rights of nations, the defender of the free world against totalitarianism and military aggression. But since the collapse of the Russian bloc the US has been obliged to itself play the role of aggressor; and while in the immediate aftermath of September 11 the US was still able to some extent to present its action in Afghanistan as an act of legitimate self-defence, the justifications for the current war in Iraq have shown themselves to be completely threadbare, while its rivals have come forward as the best defenders of democratic values in the face of US bullying.

The first weeks of the military action have served mainly to create further difficulties for US political authority. Initially presented as  a war that would be both quick and clean, it appears that the war plan drawn up by the current administration seriously underestimated the degree to which the invasion would provoke sentiments of national defence among the Iraqi population. Although the omnipresence of Saddams special units has certainly played a role in stiffening the resistance of the regular army through their habitual methods of coercion and terror, there has been a much more general reaction of hostility to the American invasion, even if this is not accompanied by any great enthusiasm for Saddams regime. Even the Shiite organisations, who were being counted on to lead an “uprising” against Saddam, have declared that the first duty of all Iraqis is to resist the invader. The prolongation of the war can only serve to aggravate the misery of the population, whether through hunger and thirst or the intensification of the bombing; and the indications are that all this will tend to increase popular hostility towards the US.

Moreover, the war is already exacerbating the divisions in Iraqi society, in particular between those who have allied themselves with the USA (as in the Kurdish regions) and those who have fought against the invasion. These divisions can only serve to create disorder and instability in post-Saddam Iraq, further undermining the USA claim that it will be the bearer of peace and prosperity in the region. On the contrary, the war is already stoking up tensions throughout the region, as demonstrated by Turkeys incursion into northern Iraq,  the anti-American position adopted by Syria, and the renewal of sabre-rattling between India and Pakistan.     

Thus, far from resolving the crisis of American leadership, the current war can only take it new levels

Decadence and decomposition

12. The plunge into militarism is the expression par excellence of the impasse facing the capitalist mode of production - of its decadence as a mode of production. As with the two world wars, and the cold war between 45 and 89, the wars of the period inaugurated since 89 are the most crying manifestation of the fact that capitalist relations of production have become an obstacle to human progress. Not only does this terrifying record of  destruction (and production of the means of destruction) represent a staggering waste of human labour power in a period when the productive forces are objectively capable of liberating man from all forms of economic drudgery and scarcity, it is the product of and active factor in a dynamic that threatens the very survival of humanity. This dynamic has aggravated throughout the period of decadence: we only have to compare the levels of death and destruction brought about by the first and second world wars, as well as the global extent of each conflict, to understand this. In addition, while the third world war between the Russian and American blocs – a war that would almost certainly have led to the extinction of humanity – never took place, the proxy wars fought between them over four decades in themselves caused as many deaths as the two world wars combined. These are not merely mathematical or technological facts; they testify to a qualitative deepening of capitalism’s tendency towards self-destruction.

13. It is evident to any observer of the international scene that 1989 marked the beginning of a radical new phase in the life of capitalism. In 1990, Bush senior promised a new World Order of peace and prosperity. And for the intellectual apologists of the ruling class, the end of the ‘Communist experiment’ meant a new upsurge of capitalism, now at last a truly ‘global’ system, and armed with wondrous new technologies that would make its economic crises a thing of the past. Neither would capitalism be troubled by the contradiction between bourgeoisie and proletariat, because in the ‘new economy’ the working class and its struggles had ceased to exist. So evident was the dawning of the new age of globalisation, that even its most publicised opponents – the ‘global anti-capitalist movement shared practically all of the basic assumptions of its apologists. For marxism, however, the collapse of the Stalinist bloc was the collapse of a part of an already global capitalist system; and the period ushered in by this seismic event did not represent any flowering or rejuvenation of capitalism; but on the contrary, it could only be understood as the terminal phase of  capitalist decadence - the phase we refer to as decomposition, the ‘flowering’ only of all the accumulated contradictions of an already senile social order.  

14. The return of the open economic crisis in the late 1960s had in effect already opened a final chapter in the classical cycle of capitalist decadence - crisis, war, reconstruction, new crisis. Henceforward it would be virtually impossible for capitalism to reconstruct after a third world war, which would probably mean the annihilation of humanity or at best a regression of incalculable proportions. The historic choice now facing humanity was not merely revolution or war, but revolution or the destruction of humanity.

15. 1968 saw the historic revival of proletarian struggles in response to the emergence of the crisis, opening up a course towards massive class confrontations. Without defeating this resurgent proletariat, the ruling class would not be able to lead society towards war, which, even if it would certainly signify the self-destruction of capitalism, remained the ‘logical’ outcome of the system’s fundamental contradictions. This new period of workers’ struggles was manifested in three international waves (68-74, 78-81, 83-89); but the collapse of the eastern bloc in 1989, with its attendant campaigns about the fall of communism and the end of the class struggle,  brought an important break with the whole of this period. The working class had not suffered a major historic defeat and the threat of a third world war, which had already been held at bay by the revival of the class struggle, was put even lower down history’s agenda by new objective barriers to the reconstitution of imperialist blocs, in particular the strength of the tendency towards ‘every man for himself’ in the new period. Nevertheless,  the working class, whose struggles in the period 69-89 had prevented the bourgeoisie from imposing its ‘solution’ to the economic crisis, now more and more faced the consequences of its own failure to raise its struggles to a higher political level and offer an alternative for humanity. The period of decomposition, the result of this ‘stalemate’ between the two major classes, does not bring any positive fruits to the exploited class. Although the combativity of the class has not been wiped out in this period, and a process of subterranean maturation of consciousness could still be detected, especially in the form of ‘searching elements’, small politicised minorities, the class struggle overall went into a retreat which is still with us today. The working class in this period has been faced not just with its own political shortcomings but with the danger of losing its class identity under the weight of a disintegrating social system.

16. This danger is not fundamentally the result of the reorganizations of production and the division of labour necessitated by the economic crisis (eg the shift from secondary to tertiary industries in many of the advanced countries, computerisation, etc); it results first and foremost from the most ubiquitous tendencies of decomposition – the accelerated atomisation of social relations, gangsterisation, and most important of all, the systematic attack on the memory of historical experience and the proletariat’s own perspective that has been mounted by the bourgeoisie in the wake of the ‘collapse of communism’. Capitalism cannot indeed function without a working class, but the working class can lose, in time, any real awareness of its existence as a class. This process is daily reinforced by decomposition at a spontaneous and objective level; but it does not prevent the ruling class from consciously using all the manifestations of decomposition to further atomise the class. The recent rise of the extreme right, capitalising on popular fears of being overwhelmed by flood of desperate refugees from the countries most hit by crisis and war, is an example of this, as is the use of  fears about terrorism to strengthen the repressive arsenal of the state.

17. Although capitalism’s decomposition results from this historic ‘stand-off’ between the classes, this situation cannot be a static one. The economic crisis, which is at the root both of the drive towards war and of the proletariat’s response, continues to deepen; but in contrast to the 68-89 period, when the outcome of these class contradictions could only be world war or world revolution, the new period opens up a third alternative: the destruction of humanity not through an apocalyptic war, but through the gradual advance of decomposition, which could over a period of time undermine the proletariat’s capacity to respond as a class, and could equally make the planet uninhabitable through a spiral of regional wars and ecological catastrophes. To wage a world war, the bourgeoisie would first have to directly confront and defeat the major battalions of the working class, and then mobilise them to march with enthusiasm behind the banners and ideology of new imperialist blocs; in the new scenario, the working class could be defeated in a less overt and direct manner, simply by failing to respond to the crisis of the system and allowing itself to be dragged further and further into the cesspool of decay. In short, a much more dangerous and difficult perspective confronts the class and its revolutionary minorities.

18. The necessity for marxists to understand there has been a major shift in the scenario confronting humanity is underlined by the growing threat that the mere continuation of capitalist production poses to the natural environment.  More and more scientists are expressing alarm over the possibilities of ‘positive feedback’ in the process of global warming – for example, in the case of the Amazon, where the combined effects of logging and other encroachments as well as rising temperatures are dramatically accelerating the rate of destruction. If the destruction goes on unabated, this would release into the atmosphere further massive amounts of carbon dioxide, thus greatly increasing the overall rate of warming. In addition to this, the intensification of ecological dangers can only have massive destabilizing effects on the structure of society, the economy, and on inter-imperialist relations. In this domain, the working class can do little to halt the slide until it has won political power on a world scale, and yet the longer its revolution is delayed, the more the proletariat faces the danger of being overwhelmed, and the very bases for a social reconstruction undermined.  

19. Despite its mounting dangers, the majority of the groups of the communist left do not accept the concept of capitalist decomposition, even if they can see its outward manifestations in the growing chaos at the international and social level. In fact, far from having a clear view of the perspective confronting the working class, the new and unprecedented period of decomposition has created a real theoretical disarray. The Bordigist groups have never had a firm theory of decadence, even if they recognize the drive towards imperialist war in this epoch, and are still capable of responding to it on an internationalist terrain. Neither have they been able to take on board the concept of the historic course elaborated by the Italian Fraction during the 1930s – the notion that imperialist world war requires the prior defeat and active mobilization of the proletariat. They thus lack the two basic theoretical building blocks of the concept of decomposition. The IBRP, while accepting the notion of decadence, has also rejected the Italian left’s concept of the historic course. Moreover, recent pronouncements by this current show that their grasp on the concept of decadence itself is slipping.  A polemic with the ICC’s conception of decomposition reveals quite plainly the incoherence of the positions they are now tending to adopt:

“The tendency towards decomposition, which the ICC’s apocalyptic vision detects everywhere, would indeed imply capitalist society were on the brink of breakdown if it were true. However, this is not the case and if the ICC were to examine the phenomena of contemporary society more dialectically this would be apparent. While on the one hand, old structures are collapsing, new ones are arising. Germany, for example, could not be reunited without the collapse of the German Democratic Republic and the collapse of the Russian bloc. The countries of Comecon could not join the EU without the dissolution of Comecon etc. The process of collapse is at the same time one of reconstruction, decomposition is part of the process of recomposition. While the ICC does recognize that there is a tendency towards re-composition, they regard it as insignificant in the face of the predominant tendency towards decomposition and chaos.  …..The ICC has failed to demonstrate how this tendency springs from the capitalist infrastructure. The difficulty it faces in doing this, springs from the fact that it is the tendency towards recomposition which springs from the forces of the capitalist infrastructure. In particular the continuing economic crisis, derived from reduced profitability of capital, is forcing weaker capitals into trading blocs, and these trading blocs are the skeletons on which future imperialist blocs are being built” (Revolutionary Perspectives no°27).

Faced with this hypothesis, it is necessary to make the following points:

• Marxism has always insisted that the onset of the epoch of capitalism’s decline poses the historical alternative between socialism or barbarism. Before waxing ironic about the “apocalyptic” visions of the ICC, the comrades of the IBRP need to consider whether they are underestimating the gravity of the world situation, and the destructive dynamic imposed on capital by its historic impasse.
  The question is not the timing of an immediate and final collapse; the tendency towards collapse is inherent in the entire decadent period, where the old framework for economic growth is absent, and the literal breakdown of the system is only held off by the necessary responses of the ruling class  - state control of the economy and the flight towards war, which itself threatens collapse on an even more devastating level than the simple clogging up of the economic machine. Furthermore, the phase of decomposition signifies a real acceleration of this downward momentum. This is perhaps most evident at the level of imperialist relations where international competition is at its most ruthless and anarchic; at the economic level the ruling class is more able to mitigate the danger of untrammelled competition between national capitals (cf the US bourgeoisie’s recognition of the need to shore up its main economic rival, Japan);
• in the decadent period there is no ‘dialectical’ harmony between recomposition and decomposition. Decomposition is only the final phase of a tendency towards chaos and catastrophe that was already identified in the first congress of the Third International.  In the decadent epoch, the war of each against all – not the invention of Hobbes, but a fundamental reality of a society based on generalized commodity production – is by no means done away with by the formation of huge ‘state capitalist trusts’ and imperialist blocs; as Bukharin already noted in 1915, these formations merely pushed the basic anarchy of capital onto a higher and more destructive level. This is the tendency that flows from the ‘capitalist infrastructure’ when it can no longer grow in accordance with its own laws. On the other hand there is in this epoch no spontaneous tendency towards recomposition. If by this the comrades mean reconstruction, this is at the cost of the tremendous physical destruction of imperialist war, and in any case is no longer a real possibility for capitalism today. On the other hand if they think that ‘recomposition’ expresses a natural and peaceful evolution of ‘modern’ capitalism this would seem to show the influence of ‘autonomist’ theories which reject the catastrophist vision that lies at the heart of marxism; by the same token, the partial acceptance of the ideology of globalisation, microchip revolution etc all point to a real concession to current bourgeois campaigns about a new ascendancy of capitalism;
• finally, if recomposition means that new imperialist blocs are already being formed, this is based on a mistaken identification between trading alliances and imperialist blocs, which are fundamentally military in character. The Iraq crisis has shown in particular that ‘Europe’ is totally divided over its relations with the US. The factors which prevent the formation of new blocs remain as valid as ever: profound divisions among potential members of a German bloc; the massive military superiority of the US; lack of ideological bases for new bloc, itself a further expression of non-defeated nature of the proletariat.

The irrationality of war in the period of decadence

20. The period of decomposition shows more clearly than ever the irrationality of war in decadence – the tendency for its destructive dynamic to become autonomous and increasingly at variance with the logic of profit. This is fully in character with the basic conditions of accumulation in the decadent period. The incapacity of capital to expand into new “outlying fields of production” more and more inhibits the ‘natural’ functioning of the laws of the market, which, left to themselves, would result in a catastrophic economic blockage. The wars of decadence, unlike the wars of ascendancy, do not make economic sense. Contrary to the view that war is ‘good’ for the health of the economy, war today both expresses and aggravates its incurable sickness. Furthermore, the irrationality of war in terms of capital’s own laws has intensified during the period of decadence. Thus, the first world war was aimed at a clearly discernible ‘economic’ goal – in essence, at grabbing the colonial markets of rival powers. To some extent this element was also present in World War II, although it had already been shown that there was no mechanical link between economic rivalry and military confrontation: thus in the early 20s the Third International was mistaken in its view that the next world imperialist conflict would be between the USA and Britain.

What created the impression that World War II had a rational function for capitalism was the long reconstruction period that followed it, leading many revolutionaries to conclude that capital’s main motive for war was to destroy capital and reconstruct it afterwards. In reality, war was not the result of a conscious aim for post-war reconstruction but was imposed on the capitalist powers by the ruthless logic of imperialist competition, demanding the total destruction of the enemy for predominantly strategic reasons.

This does not alter the fact that the drive to war is fundamentally a result of capitalism’s economic impasse. But the connection between crisis and war is not a purely mechanical one. The economic difficulties of capitalism at the time of the first world war were still only embryonic; the second world war broke out after the initial shock of the depression had begun to be absorbed. Rather the exacerbation of the economic crisis creates the general conditions for the exacerbation of military rivalries; but the history of decadence shows that purely economic rivalries and objectives have become increasingly subordinated to strategic ones. This is turn expresses the profound dead-end that capitalism has reached. After the second world war, the global conflict between the American and Russian bloc was almost entirely dominated by strategic concerns, since at no point could Russia pose as a serious economic rival to the US. And henceforward it was clear that world war would not solve capitalism’s economic problems, since this time it would lead to the final self-destruction of the entire system.  

Furthermore the manner in which the period of the blocs came to an end also demonstrates the ruinous economic costs of militarism:  the weaker Russian bloc collapsed because it was incapable of bearing the economic costs of the arms race (and was equally incapable of mobilising its proletariat for a war to break the strategic and economic stranglehold achieved by the stronger US bloc). And despite all the  predictions about how the ‘fall of Communism’ would create a bright new future for capitalist enterprise, the economic crisis has continued its ravages ever since, in the west as well as the former eastern bloc countries. 

Today, the USA’s ‘war on terrorism’ also involves the defence of the USA’s immediate economic interests at home and round the world, and US belligerence can only be increased by the rapid exhaustion of options for its economy. But it is fundamentally dictated by the USA’s strategic need to maintain and strengthen its ‘global leadership’. The immense cost of the major international operations mounted in the first Gulf war 91, Serbia 99, Afghanistan 2001 and the Gulf in 2003 refute the facile arguments about these being wars fought on behalf of the multinational oil companies or for the juicy contracts coming out of post-war reconstruction. The reconstruction in Iraq after the war will also be motivated by a political and ideological need: it will be an indispensable if not sufficient condition for an American domination of this country. Of course individual capitals can always make a buck out of war but the overall economic balance sheet is negative. The war on terrorism will bring no real reconstruction, no important new markets for the expansion of the US or any other economy.

War is the ruin of capital – both a product of its decline and a factor in its acceleration. The development of a bloated war economy does not offer a solution to the crisis of capitalism, as certain elements of the Italian Fraction thought in the 1930s. The war economy does not exist for itself but because capitalism in decadence is obliged to go through war after war after war, and to increasingly subsume the entire economy to the needs of war. This creates a tremendous drain on the economy because arms expenditure is fundamentally sterile. In this sense the collapse of the Russian bloc gives us a glimpse into the future of capital, since its inability to sustain an ever-accelerating arms race was one of the key factors in its demise. And although this was a result deliberately pursued by the US bloc, today the USA itself is moving towards a comparable situation, even if it is at a slower pace. The present war in the Gulf, and more generally the whole ‘war against terror’ is linked to a vast increase of arms spending designed to totally eclipse the arms budgets of the rest of the world combined. But the damage that this insane project will inflict on the US economy is incalculable.

21. The deeply irrational nature of war in the decadent period is also demonstrated by its ideological justifications, a reality already revealed by the rise of Nazism in the period leading up to the second world war. Thus, in Africa, country after country has submitted to ‘civil’ wars in which marauding gangs maim and kill with almost no semblance of ideological purpose, destroying the already frail infrastructure with no prospect of any post-war renaissance. The resort to terrorism by an increasing number of states, and in particular the growth of Islamic terrorism with its fantasies of suicide and death, are further expressions of a society in full putrefaction, caught up in a deadly spiral of destruction for its own sake. According to the comrades of the CWO, Al Qaida “represents an attempt to erect an independent Middle East imperialism based on Islam and the territories of the Ummayad Empire of the 8th century. It is not simply a movement expressing decomposition and chaos” (RP 27). In fact, such a reactionary and unrealistic goal is no more rational than Bin Laden’s other secret hope: that his actions will take us a step nearer to the final Day of Judgement.  Islamic terrorism is a pure culture of decomposition.

In contrast to this, the justification for war by the great democratic powers still generally presents itself in the garb of humanitarianism, democracy, and other progressive and rational goals. In fact, leaving aside the immense gulf between the justifications offered by imperialist states, and the real sordid motives and actions that lie behind them, the irrationality of the USA’s grand enterprise is also beginning to emerge through the ideological fog: a new Imperium in which one power rules without contest, forever. History, and the history of capitalism above all, has already shown the vanity of such dreams. But this has not prevented the development of a new and profoundly backward-looking ideology to justify the whole project: the concept of a new and humane colonialism, which is being taken seriously by a number of American and British ideologues today.

The class struggle

22. It is vital to understand the distinction between the historic weight of the class and its immediate influence on the situation. In the immediate, the class cannot prevent the current wars and may be in serious retreat, but this is not the same as a historic defeat. The fact that the bourgeoisie is not able to mobilize the class for direct inter-imperialist conflict between the great powers, but has to ‘deflect’ the conflict onto second and third rate states, using not conscript but professional armies, is an expression of this historic weight of the class.

 Even in the context of these ‘deflected’ wars, as the stakes involved are increased, the bourgeoisie is compelled to take preventive action against the working class. The organization of pacifist campaigns on an unprecedented scale (both in terms of the size of the demonstrations and their international coordination) testifies to the ruling class’s unease about the mounting hostility to its war drive both among the population in general and within the working class in particular. For the moment, the main thrust of the pacifist campaigns has been to emphasise their cross-class, democratic nature, their appeal to the UN and the pacifist intentions of America’s rivals. But already within the speeches being spat out from the rostrums of these protests there is a strong strain of workerist demagogy, talk about mobilizing the power of the trade union movement, of taking illegal strike action when the war breaks out, even the recuperation of classic internationalist slogans such as ‘the main enemy is at home’. Behind this rhetoric is an understanding by the bourgeoisie that the drive to war cannot avoid confronting the resistance of its main victim, the working class, even if actual class opposition to the war is currently restricted to isolated responses by workers or the activity of a small internationalist minority.

23. All this is evidence that the historic course has not been reversed even if, in decomposition, the conditions under which it unfolds have altered significantly. What has changed with decomposition is the possible nature of a historic defeat, which may not come through frontal clash between the major classes so much as a slow ebbing away of the proletariat’s ability to constitute itself as a class, in which case the point of no return will be harder to discern, coming as it would be before any final catastrophic end. This is the deadly danger faced by the class today. But we are convinced that this point has not yet been reached and that the proletariat still retains the capacity to rediscover its historic mission. To take into account the real potentialities within the proletariat, and to assume the responsibility it imposes on revolutionaries , it is all the more important not to begin from an immediatist analysis of situations.

24. Without a clear historical framework for understanding the present situation of the class, it is all too easy to fall into an immediatist attitude which can swing from moods of euphoria to the bleakest pessimism. In the recent period the main trend in the proletarian milieu has been to get carried away by false hopes about massive class movements: thus a number of groups saw the December 2002 riots in Argentina as the beginnings of a movement towards proletarian insurrection when the movement was not even posed on a basic class terrain in the first place; similarly, the firefighters’ strike in Britain has been interpreted as a focus for massive class resistance against the war drive. Or else, in the absence of open social movements, there has been a tendency to look to rank and file unionist bodies as the basis for preparing the class revival of the future. 

25. In the context of the present historic course, the perspective for the class struggle remains the  revival of massive struggles in response to the deepening economic crisis. These struggles will follow the dynamic of the mass strike, which is characteristic of the real class movement in the epoch of decadence: they are not organised in advance by a pre-existing body. It is through the tendency towards massive struggles that the class will regain its class identity, which is an indispensable precondition for the ultimate politicization of the struggle. But we should bear in mind that such movements will inevitably be preceded by a series of skirmishes which will remain under union control, and even when they assume a more massive character they will not appear straightaway in a ‘pure form’, ie openly outside of and against the unions, and organized and centralized by autonomous assemblies and strike committees. Indeed it will be more important than ever for the revolutionary minorities and advanced workers’ groups to defend the perspective of the formation of such organisms within the movements that arise.

26. There have been many such skirmishes through the 90s and they express the counter-tendency to the overall retreat. But their lack of any clear political dimension has been seized upon by the bourgeoisie to further increase the disarray in the class. A particularly important card in the 90s has been the coming to power of left governments, able to give a huge impulse to the bourgeoisie’s arsenal of democratic and reformist ideology; alongside this the unions have organized a number of pre-emptive actions to corral the growing discontent in the class. The most spectacular of these were the strikes in December 1995 in France, which even had the appearance of going beyond the unions and unifying at the base, the better to prevent this happening in substance.  Since then union campaigns have been more low key, in line with the disorientation in the class, but a return to more confrontational responses can be discerned today in examples such as the public sector strikes called or threatened in Britain, France, Spain, Germany and elsewhere.

27. Marxism has always insisted that it is insufficient to look at the class struggle only in terms of what the proletariat itself is doing; since the bourgeoisie also wages a class struggle against the proletariat and its coming to consciousness, it has always been a key element of Marxist activity to examine the strategies and tactics used by the ruling class to forestall its mortal enemy. An important part of this is the analysis of which government teams the bourgeoisie tends to put together in response to different moments in the evolution of the class struggle and of the general crisis of society.

28. As the ICC noted in the first phase of its existence, the initial response of the ruling class to the historical resurgence of class struggle at the end of the 60s was to place its left teams in power, or to divert workers’ struggles by offering left governments as a false perspective for the movement. We then saw, at the end of the 70s, in response to the second international wave of struggles, the adoption of a new strategy, in which the right was brought back to government and the left went into opposition in order to sabotage the workers’ resistance from the inside. While never automatically applied in all countries, these strategies could nonetheless be discerned in the most important capitalist countries.

After the collapse of the eastern bloc, however, given the retreat in working class consciousness, there was no longer the same need to maintain this line-up, and in a number of countries center left governments, typified by the Blair regime in Britain, were favoured as the best ruling team, both with regard to the management of the economic crisis and the need to present capitalism’s flight into militarism as a new form of humanitarianism.     

The recent rise of right wing parties to government office does not however mean that the ruling class is returning to a concerted strategy of the left in opposition The advent of right governments in a number of central capitalist countries is more the expression of the lack of coherence within the national bourgeoisies and between national bourgeoisies which is one of the consequences of decomposition. It would take a significant advance in the class struggle for the bourgeoisie to overcome these divisions and impose a more unified response – to return to the strategy of the left in opposition to deal with a serious revival of the class movement, and, as its ultimate card, the placing of an ‘extreme left’ in power in the event of a directly revolutionary threat by the working class.  

29. Even if the main development of workers’ struggles will not be in direct response to war, revolutionaries should be attentive to the class responses that do arise, bearing in mind that the question of war will more and more become a factor in the development of a political consciousness about the real stakes of the class struggle, particularly as the swelling of the war economy will increasingly bring with it the demand for sacrifices in working class living standards.  This growing connection between crisis and war will express itself first in the formation of minorities aiming to make an internationalist response to war, but it will also tend to inform the more general movement as the class recovers its confidence and no longer sees the wars being organised by the ruling class as proof only of its own powerlessness.  (pacifism)

30. The new generation of ‘searching elements’, the minority moving towards class positions, will have a role of unprecedented importance in the future struggles of the class, which will be faced much more quickly and profoundly than the struggles of 68-89 with their political implications. These elements, who already express a slow but significant development of consciousness in depth, will be called upon to assist in the massive extension of consciousness throughout the class. This process reaches its highest point in the formation of the world communist party. But this can only become a reality if the existing groups of the communist left live up to their historical responsibilities. Today in particular this means facing up to the dangers that lie in front of them. For just as a surrender to the logic of decomposition can only deprive the class of its capacity to provide an answer to the crisis facing human society, so the revolutionary minority itself risks being ground down and destroyed by the putrid ambience which surrounds it, and which penetrates its ranks in the forms of parasitism, opportunism, sectarianism, and theoretical confusion. Revolutionaries today can have confidence in the intact capacities of their class, and by the same token in the capacity of the revolutionary milieu to respond to the demands that history is placing upon its shoulders. They know that they must retain a long term vision of their work and avoid all immediatist pitfalls. But at the same time they must understand that we do not have all the time in the world, and that serious errors made today already constitute an obstacle to the future formation of the class party.   

International ICC leaflet

War has always been a test for the working class and its revolutionary minorities.

The workers are the first to suffer the consequences of a war, whether through loss of life or through increased exploitation. At the same time, the proletariat is the only force in society capable of putting an end to its barbarity by overthrowing the capitalism which lies at its root.

This new Gulf war and the serious aggravation of imperialist tensions of which it is an expression are a reminder that the survival of this historically condemned system constitutes a mortal danger for humanity, knowing as it does no other way out of its economic crisis than a headlong flight into militarism and war.

Denouncing bourgeois mystification

The working class is today unable to respond to this situation through revolutionary struggle. It is nonetheless necessary that this new eruption of barbarism should serve to develop its consciousness. Unable to hide the imperialist nature of this conflict behind the pretext of humanitarianism or the defence of international law, the bourgeoisie is doing all it can to prevent it becoming a positive factor in the development of class consciousness. To this end, every country is putting to good use a whole arsenal of ideological and media brainwashing.

Whatever the opposing imperialist interests of the bourgeoisie’s different national fractions, their propaganda has at least two common themes: first, it is not capitalism as a whole that is responsible for the barbarity of war, but this or that state, this or that regime; second, war is not an inevitable expression of capitalism, because there exist ways of ensuring peaceful relations between states.

War, like revolution, is a moment of truth for revolutionary organisations. It forces them to take position clearly for the bourgeois or the proletarian camp.

Determined intervention in the working class

Revolutionary organisations are alone capable of defending a clear class viewpoint against this war and the deluge of pacifist propaganda that accompanied it: it was their responsibility to mobilise for a determined intervention in their class. It was their responsibility to denounce, loud and clear, this war’s imperialist nature – in common with all the wars since the beginning of the 20th century – to defend proletarian internationalism, to oppose the interests of every fraction of the bourgeoisie with those of the working class, to reject any support whatever for national unity, to put forward the only possible perspective for the proletariat: the development of the class struggle world-wide, until the revolution.

As far as the ICC is concerned, we mobilised our forces in order to assume this responsibility to the best of our ability.

We intervened with our press in the pacifist demonstrations that proliferated across the world during January, and the level of our sales is testimony at least to our determination to convince as to the validity of our positions. In some countries, our sections brought out supplements to the press, or distributed calls to extraordinary public meetings. In some towns, this made it possible to open discussion with new elements who had never heard of the ICC before.

The day after the first bombs fell we began the mass distribution (relative to our modest strength) of a leaflet directed towards the working class in the fourteen countries where we have an organised presence, in some fifty towns on every continent other than Africa. In India, the distribution of the leaflet in two industrial centres meant its translation into Hindi and Bengali. Many sympathisers joined our distribution, widening its extent still further. The leaflet was also distributed more selectively in some of the pacifist demonstrations. It has been translated into Russia for distribution in that country, where the ICC is not yet present. On the first day of the bombing, the leaflet was published on the ICC’s web site in English and French. It will shortly be made available in other languages, including those of some countries where the ICC has no presence: Portuguese, Farsi, and Korean.

Call on the revolutionary milieu to live up to its responsibility

Other organisations of the Communist Left have also intervened with leaflets, notably in the pacifist demonstrations. They have set themselves apart from all the hotchpotch of leftist groups by their intransigent internationalism against the war, making no concession to any bourgeois camp.

In accord with our conception of the existence of a revolutionary milieu made up precisely by these organisations, and in accord also with our practice since the foundation of our organisation, the ICC called on these groups to undertake a common intervention against the war. We suggested two forms for such an intervention: “to draw up and distribute a common document denouncing the imperialist war and the bourgeois campaigns which accompany it”, or “to hold joint public meetings, where each group could put forward, as well as the common positions which unite us, the specific analyses which distinguish it from the others”.

We are publishing below the full text of our appeal, as well as a preliminary analysis of the replies we have received – all of them negative. This situation demonstrates that the revolutionary milieu as a whole has failed to live up to its responsibility against the war, and even more seriously in the perspective of the necessary regroupment of revolutionaries in preparation for the formation of the future class party of the international proletariat.

For a joint intervention against the war

We are publishing below two letters that we sent to the organisations of the Communist left to propose a common intervention against the war. Having received no reply to our first letter, we decided to send a second containing new, more modest, proposals which we thought they would find more readily acceptable. The organisations to which we sent our appeal were the following:

- The International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party (IBRP)

- Partito Comunista Internazionale (Il Comunista, Le Prolétaire)

- Partito Comunista Internazionale (Il Partito Comunista)

- Partito Comunista Internazionale (Il Programma Comunista).

Only the IBRP and the PCI (Le Prolétaire) have deigned to reply, which says much as to the self-satisfaction of the other two organisations.

Our letter of 11th February

Comrades,

The world is heading for a new war with all its tragic consequences: the massacre of the Iraqi civilian population and proletarians in uniform, intensified exploitation of the workers of the “democratic” countries who will bear the brunt of the enormous increase in military spending by their governments. In fact, this new Gulf War, whose objectives are far more ambitious than those of the war in 1991, is likely to out do the latter in terms of the massacres and suffering that it will provoke and in terms of the increased instability that it will create throughout the region of the Middle East, which is already particularly affected by imperialist conflict.

As always on the eve of war, today we are witness to an enormous campaign of lies in order to make the exploited accept the new crimes that capitalism is preparing to commit. On one hand, the coming war is being justified as “a necessity to prevent a bloody dictator threatening world security with his weapons of mass destruction”. On the other, we are told that “war is not inevitable and we must rely on the action of the United Nations”. Communists know very well what such speeches are worth: the main possessors of weapons of mass destruction are precisely those countries which today claim to guarantee the planet’s security, and their leaders have never hesitated to use them when they considered it useful to defend their imperialist interests. As for the states which today are calling for “peace”, we know very well that this is the better to defend their own imperialist interests which are threatened by the ambitions of the United States and that tomorrow they will not hesitate in their turn to unleash massacres if their interests demand it. Communists also learnt that there is nothing to hope from this “den of thieves”, to apply Lenin’s term for the League of Nations to its successor, the United Nations.

At the same time as the campaign is organised by the governments and their hired media, we are also witnessing the development of unprecedented pacifist campaigns, particularly under the impetus of the anti-globalisation movements. These are both far noisier and far more massive than those in 1990-91 during the first Gulf war or those of 1999 during the NATO bombardment of Yugoslavia.

War has always been a central question for the proletariat and the organisations which defend its class interests and its historic perspective of the overthrow of capitalism. Most currents which took a clear and truly internationalist position on the war at the conferences of Zimmerwald and Kienthal, were also those who would stand at the vanguard of the revolution of October 1917, of the revolutionary wave which followed it, and the foundation of the Communist International. History has also shown that during this period the proletariat is the only force in society which can really oppose imperialist war, not by lining up behind the pacifist and democratic delusions of the petty bourgeoisie, but by undertaking the combat on its own class terrain against capitalism as a whole and against the lies of pacifism. In this sense, history has also taught us that the denunciation by Communists of the imperialist slaughter and of all expressions of chauvinism must necessarily be accompanied by the denunciation of pacifism.

During the first imperialist slaughter it was the left of the Second International (and particularly the Bolsheviks) who defended most clearly a truly internationalist position. And it fell to the Communist Left of the CI (especially the Italian Left) to represent the internationalist position against the betrayal by the parties of the CI in the Second World War.

Faced with the coming war and all the campaigns of lies unleashed today, it is clear that only the organisations which spring from the historical current of the Communist Left are really capable of defending a truly internationalist position:

a) The imperialist war is not the result of a “bad” or “criminal” policy of this or that government, or of this or that sector of the ruling class; capitalism as a whole is responsible for imperialist war.

b) In this sense, the position of the proletariat and communists against imperialist war can in no way line-up, even “critically” behind one or other of the warring camps; concretely, denouncing the American offensive against Iraq in no way means offering the slightest support to this country or its bourgeoisie.

c) The only position in conformity with the interests of the proletariat is the struggle against capitalism as a whole, and therefore against all the sectors of the world bourgeoisie with a perspective not of a “peaceful capitalism” but overthrowing the capitalist system and setting up the dictatorship of the proletariat.

d) Pacifism is at best a petty bourgeois illusion which tends to turn the proletariat away from its strict class terrain; more often, it is nothing but a ploy cynically used by the bourgeoisie in order to drag the proletariat into the imperialist war in defence of the “pacifist” and “democratic” sectors of the ruling class. In this sense, the defence of the internationalist proletarian position is inseparable from the unsparing denunciation of pacifism.

The existing groups of the Communist Left all share these fundamental positions, whatever the divergences that may exist amongst them. The ICC is well aware of these divergences and has never tried to hide them. On the contrary, it has always tried in its press to point out these disagreements with the other groups and combat the analyses that we consider incorrect. This being said, and in line with the attitude of the Bolsheviks in 1915 at Zimmerwald and of the Italian Fraction during the 1930s, the ICC considers that real Communists today have the responsibility of presenting as widely as possible to the class as a whole, in the face of imperialist war and the bourgeoisie’s campaigns, the fundamental positions of internationalism. From our point of view, this presupposes that the groups of the Communist Left do not restrict themselves to their own intervention, but that they join together in order to express in common their common position. For the ICC a common intervention of the different groups of the Communist Left would have a political impact within the class which would go well beyond the sum of their respective forces which, as we all know, are only too weak at the present time. This is why the ICC is proposing to the following groups to meet in order to discuss what means could permit the Communist Left to speak with one voice in defence of proletarian internationalism, without hindering or calling into question the specific intervention of any group. Concretely, the ICC makes the following proposals to the groups cited at the end of the document:

- To draw up and distribute a common document denouncing the imperialist war and the bourgeois campaigns which accompany it.

- To hold joint public meetings, where each group could put forward, as well as the common positions which unite us, the specific analyses which distinguish it from the others.

- The ICC is of course open to any other initiative which could give the widest possible audience to internationalist positions.

In March 1999, the ICC had already sent a similar appeal to the same organisations. Unfortunately, none of them replied favourably and this is why our organisation considered it useless to renew such an appeal at the time of the war in Afghanistan at the end of 2001. If we are renewing our appeal today, it is because we think that all the groups of the Communist Left are aware of the extreme gravity of the present situation and the exceptional size of the deceitful pacifist campaigns, and therefore want to do everything they can to give the widest possible audience to the internationalist position.

We ask you to transmit your response as soon as possible by addressing it to the postbox given at the top of the page. So that it may reach us as quickly as possible we suggest that you address a copy to the postbox of the territorial sections which are closest to your own organisation or to any militants of the ICC that you may meet.

With our communist greetings.

Our letter of 24th March

Comrades,

(…) Clearly, you consider that the adoption by the different groups of the Communist Left of a common document denouncing the imperialist war and the pacifist campaigns is liable to create confusion and to hide the differences between our organisations. As you know, this is not our opinion. However, our purpose in this letter is not to change your minds on the subject, but to put forward the following proposal: the joint organisation of public meetings where each of the organisations of the Communist Left present in the meeting would be responsible for its own presentation, and for the development of its own arguments in the discussion. It seems to us that a meeting organised in this way would meet your concerns that there should be no confusion between our respective positions. At the same time, it would give the greatest possible impact (modest though this would be) to the presence of an internationalist, proletarian, and revolutionary position – which only the groups of the Communist Left are capable of defending – against the different bourgeois positions put forward today (whether they advocate support for this or that camp in the name of “democracy” or “anti-imperialism”, or whether they claim to call for “peace”, the “respect of international law”, or other such nonsense). This kind of meeting would also allow the greatest possible number of elements who are interested in the ideas and the internationalist positions of the Communist Left to meet and discuss both together and with the organisations who defend these positions. They would at the same time be able to measure as clearly as possible the extent of the disagreement amongst these organisations.

Let us be absolutely clear: our purpose is not to allow the ICC to widen its audience by speaking to elements who usually come to your organisation’s public meetings. As an earnest of our good faith, we make the following proposal: should you agree, the ICC’s public meetings planned for the months to come, which will of course be devoted to the war and the proletariat’s attitude to the war, could be converted to the kind of meeting we propose. This poses less difficulty in towns or countries where both our organisations have a presence. However, our proposal also includes other towns and countries: to be concrete, we would be glad to take part in Cologne or Zurich in a joint meeting with militants of the Communist Left from Britain, France or Italy, or in New York with IBRP comrades from Montreal or Michigan (we could ourselves also send militants to Montreal, for example, should you consider this appropriate). Needless to say, we will be glad to lodge the militants of your organisation who come to take part in these meetings, and to translate their presentation and interventions should this be necessary.

Should this proposal meet with your agreement, we ask you to let us know as quickly as possible (for example to the e-mail shown below) so that we can make the necessary arrangements. At all events, even should you reject our proposal (something we would of course regret), your organisation and its militants are cordially invited to take part in our public meetings to defend your positions.

We look forward to your reply.

Communist and internationalist greetings

IBRP reply, 28th March[1]

Dear comrades,

We have received via our comrades your “appeal” for united action against the war. We find ourselves obliged to reject it, for reasons you should be aware of and which we will summarise here.

It is almost thirty years since the First International Conference of the Communist Left, and our disagreements with the ICC have not only failed to diminish, they have on the contrary increased. The ICC has undergone the splits of which we are all aware. This means – and this should be obvious to anyone who considers the essential in this phenomenon – that we cannot consider the ICC as a valid partner in defining any kind of valid action.

It is impossible to “bring together” those who consider that an immense danger threatens the working class – a class which, having undergone extremely violent attacks on its wages, jobs, and working conditions, today runs the risk of being chained to the juggernaut of war – and those who, like the ICC, think that war did not break out between the blocs because an undefeated working class prevented it. What would we have to say together? It is obvious that, faced with the enormity of the problem, the general principles put forward in the Appeal are not enough.

Moreover, united action – against the war or on any other problem – can only be envisaged between well-defined and unequivocally identified political partners who share political positions that they both consider essential. We have already seen that our positions are antithetical on this point that we consider essential. Independently of any hypothetical convergence in the future, it is essential that the hypothetical organised unity of action between different political tendencies should be preceded by a convergence of all the components into which these tendencies are divided. In other words, there is no point in united action between parts of the different political currents while other parts remain outside with a critical and antagonistic attitude.

Well, you the ICC are part of a political tendency which is henceforth divided into several groups all of which claim to defend the orthodoxy of the ICC at the beginning, just like the Bordigist groups to which you have also addressed your Appeal.

Everything that you write in your “Appeal” with respect to the need to close revolutionary ranks in the face of war, should be valid above all within your own tendency, just as it should be within the Bordigist tendencies.

Frankly, it would be more serious if an Appeal like this were addressed to the IFICC and the EFICC, just as it would be more serious for Programme Communiste or Il Comunista-Le Prolétaire to launch a similar appeal to the numerous Bordigist groups in the world. Why would this be more serious? Because it would be a real attempt to reverse a tendency which would be ridiculous were it not so dramatic, of increasing divisions just as the contradictions of capitalism and the problems posed to the working class increase also.

But today it is obvious that this dramatic-ridiculous tendency is now a characteristic of both these currents.

This is no accident, and brings us back to the other essential question. The ICC’s political positions, its theory, its method, and its conception of organisation are obviously defective (just as were those of Programme Communiste from the outset), since these are the basis for splits every time that the problems of capitalism or class relationships are exacerbated.

If – sixty years after the formation of the Internationalist Communist Party and 58 years after the end of World War II – two of the three tendencies in the inter-war Communist Left have fallen to pieces, then there must be a reason.

We insist: the question is not one of a failure to grow or an inability to lay roots within the working class – these are both determined by the working class’ extreme difficulty in extricating itself from its historic defeat by the Stalinist counter-revolution. On the contrary, we are posing the problem of these two tendencies’ fragmentation into a constellation of groups, all laying claim to original orthodoxy. The reason – as we have said several times before – lies in the weakness of the orthodoxy, its inability to understand and explain capitalism’s dynamic and to elaborate the resulting necessary political orientations. To conclude, it seems to us that the aim of reconstituting the Italian Left in a unitary political framework is henceforth unattainable, given that two of its components manifest a notorious inability to explain events in terms that are coherent with reality, and consequently can only fragment more and more.

Obviously, this does not mean that we are closed in on ourselves. Just as we were able to take the appropriate initiative to break the ice in the far-off 1970s by starting a new dynamic in the debate within the proletarian political camp, so today we will attempt to take initiatives capable of going beyond the old political framework – which is now blocked – and to renovate the revolutionary and internationalist tradition in a new process of taking root in the class.

PCI – Le Prolétaire reply of 29th March[2]

Comrades

We have received your letter of 24th March, which also contained your previous letter of 11th February. We have already answered orally to the proposal contained in the latter during a readers’ meeting, and we will return to the subject in the columns of Le Prolétaire. Even if you seem to have given up the idea of a joint text, your new proposal springs from the same political frontism, and we can therefore only give it the same negative response.

With our communist salutations.

Is joint action possible? Our response

This is not the first time that the ICC has launched an appeal to the groups of the proletarian political milieu for a joint intervention in the face of an accelerating world situation. As our letter says, we launched just such a call in March 1999, against the military barbarism unleashed in Kosovo. The articles that we wrote in response to the refusals we received at the time[3] essentially remain perfectly adapted to the present situation. We nonetheless consider it necessary to take position briefly on the negative replies that we have once again received, to make the point that they spring from a political approach which we consider damaging to the interests of the proletariat. We will return to the subject in greater depth in a forthcoming issue. The PCI – Le Prolétaire has said that it will do the same in its own press.

We will thus limit ourselves here to answering the arguments given by the two groups for rejecting both of our proposals: the distribution of a document against the war, on the basis of our common internationalist positions, and the organisation of meetings aimed both at a joint denunciation of the war, and the confrontation of the disagreements between our organisations.

The PCI and its lowest common denominator

The very brief letter from the PCI considers that our Appeal comes down to “frontism”. This reply is in line with that given orally at the PCI’s readers’ meeting at Aix-en-Provence on 1st March, where we were also told that the ICC’s vision was to seek a “lowest common denominator” between the organisations. Moreover, these very sketchy arguments are coherent with those put forward – more fully though not more convincingly – in a polemic against us published in Le Prolétaire n°465. This will allow us to look briefly at the PCI’s organisational conceptions.

Let us say from the outset, that this article represents a step forward on the attitude of the PCI in the 1970s and 1980s. Then, we had got used to confronting an organisation which already considered itself to be the “compact and powerful party”, sole guide of the proletarian revolution, whose sole programme could only be the “invariant” one of… 1848. Today, the PCI tells us: “Far from thinking ourselves ‘alone in the world’, we defend the need for intransigent programmatic criticism and political struggle against positions we consider false and against the organisations that defend them”.

Le Prolétaire seems to think that we want to attract elements in order to form the party on the basis of a lowest common denominator. They oppose to this a method which considers that all other organisations and their positions are to be fought equally, in other words they make no distinction between organisations which hold to an internationalist position and Trotskyist or Stalinist organisations which have long since abandoned the terrain of the working class through their more or less explicit support for one or other camp in imperialist war. Such a method leads inevitably to the idea that they are the only organisation to defend the programme of the working class, and in consequence therefore the only basis for the construction of the party – and so to act in the final instance as if they were alone in the world to defend class positions.

The PCI also observes that the present situation has nothing to do with that of Zimmerwald and Kienthal, and so considers our reference to the principles of Zimmerwald to be inapplicable because based on an improper comparison. They are either unable – or unwilling – to understand what we are saying.

You hardly need to be a marxist to see that the situation today is not identical to that of 1917, nor even to that of 1915 – the year of the Zimmerwald conference. Nonetheless, both periods have this significant trait in common: the stage of history is dominated by imperialist war, and for the working class’ advanced elements, this means that one question takes precedence over all others – internationalism against this war. It is these elements’ responsibility to make their voices heard against the flood tide of bourgeois ideology and propaganda. To talk of “frontism” and a “lowest common denominator” not only does nothing to clarify the disagreements among the internationalists, it is a factor of confusion inasmuch as it places the real divergence, the class frontier that separates the internationalists from the whole bourgeoisie, from far right to extreme left, at the same level as the disagreements among the internationalists.

The accusation of “frontism” is in fact based on a profound error as to the nature of frontism, as our predecessors of the Communist Left understood and denounced it. This term referred to the tactics adopted by the Third International as it tried – but with an incorrect and opportunist method – to break the isolation of the Russian revolution. Later, as it degenerated, the Communist International became more and more a mere instrument of the Russian state’s foreign policy, and used the frontist tactic as an instrument of this policy. Frontism – for example the CI’s “workers’ united front at the base” – was thus an attempt to create a unity in action between the parties of the International which had remained faithful to proletarian internationalism, and the social-democratic parties in particular which had supported the war effort of the bourgeois state in 1914. In other words, frontism tried to create a united front between two enemy classes, between the organisations of the proletariat and those which had passed irretrievably into the hands of the bourgeoisie.

The PCI hides behind differences in historic period and the rejection of frontism in order to avoid the real questions and the responsibilities which are incumbent on internationalists today. When we appeal to the spirit of Lenin at Zimmerwald, it is at the level of principles. Whatever the PCI may think, we agree with them on the need for programmatic criticism and political struggle. We also combat ideas that we consider false, although since we understand the different nature of bourgeois and proletarian organisations, we combat the latter’s positions rather than their organisations.

“The one party which tomorrow will guide the proletariat in the revolution and the dictatorship cannot be born from the merger of heterogeneous organisations and therefore programmes, but from the clear victory of one programme over the others (…) it must have a programme which is also unique and unequivocal, the authentic communist programme which synthesises all the lessons from the battles of the past.”.[4]

We too think that the proletariat will be unable to make the revolution if it is unable to give birth to a world-wide communist party based on a single programme,[5] which synthesises the lessons of the past. But the problem is, how is this party going to appear? We do not believe that it will spring forth all ready at the revolutionary moment, like Athena from the head of Zeus: it must be prepared in advance, starting now. It was precisely this lack of preparation which was so cruelly lacking at the foundation of the Third International. Two things are necessary for this preparation: firstly, to draw a clear line between internationalist positions and all the leftist garbage which always comes down to defending this or that fraction of the bourgeoisie in imperialist war; and secondly, to allow the disagreements which exist within this internationalist camp to confront each other in the fire of open debate. To put the formation of the world party at the same level as the defense of internationalism against imperialist war today, is nothing short of idealist since it ignores what is urgently necessary in the present situation in the name of a historical perspective which can only come to fruition on the basis of a massive development of the class struggle and a prior work of clarification and decantation in the revolutionary minorities.

As for Le Prolétaire’s rejection of “organisational mergers”, it shows that this organisation has forgotten its history: do we need to remind the comrades that the call for the formation of the Third International was not addressed solely to Bolsheviks, nor even solely to Social Democrats who had remained faithful to internationalism like the Spartakus group of Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht. It was also addressed to anarcho-syndicalists like the Spanish CNT, to revolutionary syndicalists like Rosmer and Monatte in France or like the American IWW, to industrial unionists from the British shop stewards movement, and to De Leonists like John Maclean’s Scottish SLP. Only a few months before the October revolution, the Bolshevik party itself integrated Trotsky’s inter-rayon organisation, which included one-time Menshevik internationalists. Obviously, this was not an “ecumenical” merger, but the regroupment of proletarian organisations which had remained faithful to internationalism during the war around the conceptions of the Bolsheviks whose validity had been demonstrated both by the evolution of historical events and above all by the action of the working class. This historical experience shows that the PCI is wrong to say that a merger of organisations is equivalent to a merger of programmes.

Today, raising high the internationalist banner and creating an area of debate within the internationalist camp would allow elements searching for revolutionary clarity to foil the democratic, pacifist, and leftist bourgeoisie’s deceitful propaganda, and to temper themselves in political struggle. The PCI says that it wants to combat the ICC, its programme, its analyses, its politics, and “to conduct an uncompromising political struggle against all the confusionists” (including the ICC). Very well, we take up the challenge. The problem is, that for such a combat to take place (we mean of course a political combat within the proletarian camp), the opposing forces must be able to meet within a framework - and we can only regret that the PCI prefers to “combat” from the comfort of its doctoral armchair rather than confronting the rigours and the realities of open debate, on the pretext that this would be “an ecumenical democratic union”.[6] Their refusal of our proposal is not a “combat”. On the contrary, it means refusing the real and necessary combat in favour of an ideal and unreal one.

The response of the IBRP

The IBRP has given four reasons for its refusal which we can summarise as follows:

1. Because the ICC thinks that it is the working class which prevents the outbreak of world imperialist war, it cannot be considered as “a valid partner”.

2. The communist left is broken up into three tendencies (i.e. the Bordigists, the IBRP, and the ICC) of which two (the Bordigists and the ICC) are split up into different groups all of which lay claim to an original “orthodoxy”. For the IBRP, it is impossible to envisage any kind of common action between these “tendencies” until the latter have themselves reunified their different components (the ICC’s old “external fraction” and present “internal fraction” are, according to the IBRP, part of “our tendency”): “it is essential that any hypothetical organised unity of action amongst different political tendencies should see the convergence of all the components within which such tendencies are divided”. In this sense, “it would be more serious if an appeal like this were addressed precisely to the IFICC and the ex-EFICC”.

3. The fact that the ICC has undergone splits is supposedly the result of its theoretical weaknesses, hence “its inability to understand and explain the dynamic of capitalism and to elaborate the necessary political orientation switch result from this”. As a result (and given that the IBRP lumps us with the Bordigist groups), the IBRP finds itself today the only healthy survivor of the Italian left.

4. As a result of all this, only the IBRP is today able to “to take initiatives capable of going beyond the old political framework - which is now blocked - and to renovate the revolutionary and internationalist tradition in a new process of taking root in the class”.

How not to do “serious” work

Before dealing with the fundamental questions, we have to clear the ground of these “fractions” which – according to the IBRP – should be the first objects of our concern. As far as the one-time “external fraction” of the ICC is concerned, we think it would be more “serious” of the IBRP to pay some attention to the positions of this group (known today under the name of Internationalist Perspective): if they did so, they would realise that IP has completely abandoned the very foundation of the ICC’s positions – the analysis of the decadence of capitalism – no longer claims to defend our platform, and no longer calls itself a “fraction” of the ICC. But whether or not this group is politically part of our “tendency”, as the IBRP put it, is beside the point. The reasons that we have not addressed our appeal to this group have nothing to do with its political analyses, and the IBRP knows this very well. This group was founded on the basis of a parasitic approach, of denigrating and slandering the ICC, and it is on the basis of this political judgement[7] that the ICC does not consider it as part of the communist left. As for the group which claims today to be a “internal fraction” of the ICC, the situation is still worse. If the IBRP has read the IFICC’s bulletin n°14 and our territorial press (see our article “The police-like methods of the ‘IFICC’” in World Revolution n°262), then they know that revolutionary organisations can undertake no kind of common work with elements who behave like police informers to the benefit of the repressive forces of the bourgeois state. Unless the IBRP thinks that there is nothing wrong with this kind of behaviour!

What are the conditions for common work?

Let us turn now to a kind of argument which deserves a fuller reply: the idea that our political positions are too widely separated for us to be able to work together. We have already pointed out that this attitude is one million miles from that of Lenin and the Bolsheviks at the Zimmerwald conference, where the latter signed a common manifesto with other internationalist forces, despite the fact that the divisions among the participants at Zimmerwald was certainly greater than the divisions between the internationalist groups of today. To give only one example: the Social-Revolutionaries, who were not even Marxists and who for the most part ended up adopting a counter-revolutionary position in 1917, took part in the Zimmerwald conference.

It is hard to see why our analysis of the balance of class forces at a global level should be a discriminatory criterion preventing any common intervention against the war and, within this framework, an open debate on this question and others. We have already explained the basis of our position on the historic course, frequently and at length, in the pages of this Review. The method underpinning our analysis is the same as it was at the time of the international conferences of the Communist Left, initiated by Battaglia Comunista and supported by the ICC at the end of the 1970s. Our position is thus hardly a discovery for the IBRP. Indeed, at the time of the conferences, BC itself referred explicitly to Zimmerwald and Kienthal: “it is impossible to arrive either at class positions, or at the creation of a world party of the revolution, still less at a revolutionary strategy, without first resolving the need to set in motion a permanent international centre of liaison and information, which will be the anticipation and the synthesis of what will be the future International, just as Zimmerwald, and above all Kienthal, were prefigurations of the IIIrd International” (BC’s “Letter of Appeal” to the First Conference in 1976).

What has changed since then to justify a lesser unity amongst internationalists and the refusal of our proposal, which does not even have the ambition of setting up a “centre of liaison”?

The IBRP should really take a broader view of the present situation and put into perspective the importance it gives to what it considers to be our “incorrect analysis of the balance of class forces”. Because if there is one thing which has changed, and changed several times, since the period of the conferences it is the IBRP’s analysis of the balance of class forces and other factors which prevented the outbreak of a new world war before 1989. They have proposed all kinds of explanations on this subject: at one point, they imagined that the war had not broken out because the imperialist blocs were insufficiently consolidated – when in fact never in history had two blocs been so set in concrete as the American and Russian blocs. At another point, the bourgeoisie was supposed to have been too terrified by the idea of nuclear holocaust to unleash a war. And finally, the IBRP’s latest discovery, which it maintained until the disintegration of the Russian bloc under the blows of the economic crisis, was the idea that the Third World War had not broken out because... of the insufficient depth of the economic crisis!

It is worth recalling that two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the ICC asserted that the new period which was opening would be marked by the disintegration of the blocs. Two months later, we wrote that this situation would lead to a growing chaos, fed above all by the opposition of the third and second order imperialist powers to the attempts by the United States to maintain and strengthen its role as gendarme of the world (see n°60 and 61 of the International Review). The IBRP on the contrary, after talking for a while about a possible new expansion of the world economy thanks to the “reconstruction” of the Eastern Bloc countries,[8] began to defend the idea of a new bloc based on the European Union and rivalling the United States. Today it is obvious that the “reconstruction” of the countries of the old Eastern Bloc is long gone, while the outbreak of the new war in Iraq has shown that the European Union has never been so divided, so incapable of united action at the level of a common foreign policy, so far away from forming even the semblance of an imperialist bloc. This divergence between the economic level (the expansion and unification of Europe at the economic level with the creation of the Euro and the entry of new member countries) and the imperialist level (the total and obvious impotence of Europe in this domain) only emphasises this fundamental aspect of capitalism’s dynamic in its period of decadence, which the IBRP still refuses to recognise: imperialist conflicts are not the direct fruit of economic competition, but the consequence of an economic blockage at a far more global level of capitalist society. Whatever the disagreements between our organisations, we have a right to ask on what the IBRP bases its judgement that only itself, unlike the ICC, is capable of understanding “the dynamic of capitalism”.

Things are no clearer when we come to the analysis of the class struggle. The IBRP considers that the ICC overestimates the strength of the proletariat and disagrees with our analysis of the course of history. And yet it is the IBRP which has a regrettable tendency to get carried away by its enthusiasm of the moment every time that it thinks it can see something which looks like an “anti-capitalist” movement. Without going into details, let us simply recall how Battaglia Comunista greeted the movements in Romania in an article entitled “Ceaucescu is dead, but capitalism still lives”: “Romania is the first country in the industrialised regions where the world economic crisis has given birth to a real and authentic popular insurrection whose result has been the overthrow of the government (...) in Romania, all the objective conditions and almost all the subjective conditions were gathered for transforming the insurrection into a real and authentic social revolution”. During the events in Argentina in 2002, the IBRP was still mistaking inter-classist revolt against corrupt governments for proletarian and classist insurrection: “[the proletariat] descended spontaneously into the street, drawing behind it the youth, the students, and large sections of the petty bourgeoisie pauperised and proletarianised like itself. Together they vented their anger against the sanctuaries of capitalism: banks, offices, and above all the supermarkets and other shops which were overrun like the bread ovens in the Middle Ages (...) the revolt did not die down, spreading throughout the country and assuming increasingly classist characteristics. The seat of government, the symbolic monument of exploitation and financial greed, was taken by assault”.[9]

The ICC by contrast, despite our “idealist overestimation” of the strength of the proletariat, has constantly warned both that the overall historical situation endangers the proletariat’s ability to put forward its own perspective, especially since 1989, and against immediatist and short-term enthusiasm for anything that looks like a revolt. While the IBRP was working itself up over the situation in Romania, we wrote: “Faced with these attacks, the proletariat [in Eastern Europe] will fight, and will try to resist (...) But the question is: what will be the context in which the strikes occur? There can be no ambiguity as to the reply: one of extreme confusion due to the Eastern working-class’ political weakness and inexperience, which will make the workers especially vulnerable to the mystifications of democracy and trade unions, and the poison of nationalism (...) We cannot exclude the possibility that large fractions of the working-class will let themselves be enrolled and massacred for interests that are totally foreign to them, in the struggles between nationalist gangs, or between ‘ democratic ‘ and Stalinist cliques” (we cannot help thinking of Grozny, the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan...). As for the situation in the West, we wrote: “At first, the opening of the ‘Iron Curtain’ which divided the world proletariat in two will not permit the workers in the West to help their class brothers in the East profit from their experience (...) on the contrary, in the immediate and for some time to come, it will be the strong democratic illusions of the workers in the East that will spill over into the West...”.[10] One can hardly say that these perspectives have been refuted since.

We do not intend here to enter into a debate on this question – it would require a good deal more development on our part[11] – still less to claim that the IBRP is systematically mistaken, and that the ICC has a monopoly in its ability to analyse the situation: we simply want to demonstrate that the IBRP’s caricature of a hopelessly “idealist” ICC (“idealist” because its incorrect analyses are not based on the strictly economic materialism favoured by the IBRP) and an IBRP which alone is capable of “understanding and explaining the dynamic of capitalism” simply has no basis in reality. The comrades of the IBRP think that the ICC is idealist. So be it. For our part, we think that the IBRP too often gets stuck in the most banal vulgar materialism. But compared to what unites the internationalists against imperialist war, compared to the responsibility that they could assume and the impact that a common intervention could have, this frankly is secondary, and should in no way hinder them from debating, deepening, and clarifying the theoretical disagreements that separate them. Quite the contrary. We are convinced that “the synthesis of all the lessons from the battles of the past” will be vital for the proletariat to settle, and not just in theory, the validity of the theses of its political organisations. We are equally convinced that to achieve this it is necessary to mark out the internationalist camp and to make possible theoretical confrontation within that camp. Le Prolétaire refuses this confrontation for reasons of principle, however secondary these may be today. The IBRP refuses it for reasons of conjuncture and analysis. Is this “serious”?

Are splits a criterion for discrimination?

The third reason that the IBRP gives for refusing any collaboration with us is the fact that we have undergone splits: “two of the three tendencies in the inter-war Communist Left have fallen to pieces”. The IBRP hardly has an objective vision of what it calls the break-up of the “ICC tendency”, not only as far as the totally irresponsible political and militant approach of the parasitic groupings which gravitate in the ICC’s orbit is concerned, but also as regards the importance of an organised political presence on an international scale. By contrast, it is clearly true that there is a fragmentation among the organisations which can legitimately claim to have inherited the legacy of the Italian left. And as far as the attitude to be adopted towards the situation is concerned, Battaglia Comunista has carried out a 180° turn compared to their own attitude before the first conference of the groups of the Communist Left: “The Conference should also indicate how and when to open a debate on problems (...) which today divide the international Communist Left, if we want the Conference to have a positive conclusion, and be a step towards a broader objective, towards the formation of an international front of groups of the Communist Left which will be as homogeneous as possible, so that we can finally leave the political and ideological tower of Babel and avoid a dismemberment of the existing groups”[12] (2nd Letter from BC, in Proceedings of the 1st International Conference). Battaglia also considered at the time that “the gravity of the situation (...) demands the taking up of precise and responsible positions, based on a unified vision of the various currents of the international communist left” (BC’s 1st Letter). This 180° turn took place during the conferences themselves: Battaglia refused to take any position, even to take position on the divergences existing between our organisations.[13] The IBRP refuses again today. And yet the situation is far from being any less serious.

Moreover, the IBRP should explain why the fact of undergoing splits represents a disqualification for any common work amongst groups of the communist left. Without wanting to make any improper comparisons, it is worth noting that at the time of the Second International one in particular of all the member parties had a reputation for its “internal struggles”, its “conflicts of ideas” (often opaque to militants from other countries), its splits, for an extreme vehemence in its debates on the part of some of its fractions, and for endless internal debates around its statutes. It was widely held that “those Russians are incorrigible”, and that Lenin – too much the “authoritarian” and “disciplinarian” – was largely responsible for the fragmentation of the RSDLP in 1903. Things were different in the German party, which appeared to advance sure-footedly from one success to another thanks to the wisdom of its leaders, first amongst whom was none other than the “Pope of Marxism”, Karl Kautsky. We know what became of them...

What initiatives are demanded by the situation?

The IBRP thinks that it is the only organisation of the communist left capable of “taking initiatives” and “going beyond the old political framework - which is now blocked”.

We cannot develop our disagreement with the IBRP in depth here. At all events, given that it was Battaglia Comunista who took the responsibility of excluding the ICC from the international conferences, and then bringing them to an end, given that it is the IBRP which systematically refuses today any common effort by the internationalist proletarian milieu, we can only say that they have an extraordinary gall to declare today that “the old framework is blocked”.

As far as we are concerned, and despite the disappearance of the formal and internationally organised framework of the conferences, our attitude has remained unchanged:

- seeking to work in common, on the basis of internationalist positions, with the groups of the Communist Left (our call to common action during the wars in the Gulf in 1991, in Kosovo in 1999, a common public meeting with the Communist Workers Organisation on the occasion of the anniversary of October in 1997, etc);

- the defence of the proletarian milieu (in as far as our very modest means allow us to do so) against outside attack and against the infiltration of bourgeois ideology (let us mention only our defence of the PCI’s pamphlet Auschwitz and the Great Alibi against the attacks of the bourgeois press, and denunciation of the Arab nationalists of the late El Oumami who broke up the PCI and stole its funds, the publicity that we have given to the exclusion from our ranks of elements that we judge dangerous for the workers movement, our rejection of the attempts by the Los Angeles Workers Voice group (which until recently represented the IBRP in the USA) to make itself look respectable by copying and debasing elements of our platform).

By contrast the history of the IBRP since 1980 is sown with a whole series of attempts to discover “a new process of taking root in the class”. The vast majority of these attempts have ended in failure. A non-exhaustive list includes:

- the so-called “Fourth Conference” of the Communist left where the forces “seriously selected” by the IBRP were in fact limited to the Iranian crypto-Stalinists of the UCM;

- during the 1980s, the IBRP found a new recipe for “taking root”: the “Communist factory groups” which were to remain nothing but fantasies;

- the IBRP has been seized with enthusiasm for the grandiose possibilities of forming mass parties in the countries on the periphery of capitalism; nothing came from that other than the ephemeral and “uprooted” Lal Pataka;

- with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the IBRP went fishing in the old Stalinist parties of the Eastern bloc. Nothing came of that either.[14]

The IBRP should not be offended at our reminding them of this list of disappointed illusions. It gives us no pleasure, quite the contrary. But we think that the extreme weakness of communist forces in the world today is yet another reason to close our ranks in action and in the fraternal confrontation of our divergences, rather than setting ourselves up as the sole heirs of the Communist Left.

We will be there

Once again, we are forced to note the lamentable inability of the groups of the Communist Left to create together the internationalist pole of reference which the proletariat and its advanced or searching elements urgently need as the planet plunges further and further into the military chaos of rotting capitalism.

This will not make us abandon our convictions, and the day when the other organisations of the Communist Left understand the necessity for common action we will answer: present!

Jens, 7/04/2003

It is sixty years since the revolt of the Warsaw ghetto; and by a strange irony of history, exactly one hundred years before, in 1843, Karl Marx had published his On the Jewish Question, a text which marked a significant step by Marx from radical democracy towards communism. We will come back to this text in another article; here it suffices to say that, while Marx supported the abolition of all feudal constraints on the participation of Jews in civil society, he also pointed out the inherent limitations of any merely ‘political’ emancipation which was founded on the atomised citizen, and showed that real freedom could only take place on the social level, with the creation of a unified community which had overcome commodity relations, the underlying source of man’s fragmentation into competing units.

In 1843, then, ascendant capitalism posed the immediate question of ending all forms of feudal discrimination against the Jews, which had included their restriction to the boundaries of the ghetto. In 1943, the pitiful remnant of Warsaw’s Jews rose not only against the restoration of the ghetto, but against their physical extermination - a tragic reflection of capitalism’s passage from ascendancy to decay.

In 2003, as this decay reaches its most advanced phase, it seems that capitalism has still not solved the Jewish question; the imperialist conflicts in the Middle East and the resurgence of radical Islam have given new life to old anti-Semitic mythologies, while Zionism, which posed as the liberator of the Jews, has not only placed millions of them in a new death trap, but has itself become a force for racial oppression, now directed at the Arab population of Israel and Palestine.

Again, we will return to these issues in other articles. But for now we want to look at a recent artistic treatment of the Holocaust which has been widely praised: Polanksi’s The Pianist, which won the Palme d’Or at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival, the best film award at the BAFTA ceremonies in London, and several Hollywood Oscars.

A capitalist holocaust

Polanski was himself a refugee from the Krakow ghetto, and this film is clearly a statement of considerable personal significance. The Pianist is a remarkably faithful rendition of a memoir of the Warsaw ghetto by one of its survivors, the classical pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman, written immediately after the war and recently republished by Victor Gollanz in 1999 and as a paperback by Phoenix in 2002. Despite a few small pieces of embroidery, the screenplay keeps very close to Szpilman’s simple, unsentimental presentation of the horrific events he lived through, sometimes down to the last detail. It tells the story of a cultured Jewish family who elect to stay in Warsaw at the beginning of the war, and are therefore subjected to the gradual but inexorable forced-march towards the gas chambers. Beginning with smaller humiliations, such as the decree on the wearing of the Star of David, this descent passes through a stage of concentrating the entire Jewish population of the city into a newly-reconstituted ghetto, where a majority are subject to atrocious conditions of work and health, to a lingering death by starvation. However, the flourishing of a class of profiteers, and the formation of a Jewish police force and a Jewish Council entirely subservient to the occupying army demonstrate that even in the ghetto, class divisions still existed among the Jews themselves. The film, like the book, shows how during this phase, seemingly random acts of almost unbelievable cruelty by the SS[1] and other organs of Nazi rule have a ‘rationality’– that of inculcating terror and destroying the will to resist. At the same time the ‘softer’ side of Nazi propaganda encourages all kinds of false hopes and also serves to prevent any thought of resistance. This is illustrated sharply when the final process of deportation begins and thousands are being herded into the cattle trucks that are to take them to the death camps: as they wait for the trains to arrive, they still debate whether they are going to be exterminated or used for labour; it is said that such discussions took place at the very doors of the gas chambers.

There is no doubt that the Holocaust was one of the most terrible events in the whole of human history. And yet an entire ideology, aimed above all at defending the second imperialist world war as a ‘just’ war, has grown up around the supposed uniqueness of the Shoa: in the face of such unmatched evil, it must surely be necessary to support the lesser evil of democracy. It is even claimed by left-wing apologists of the war that because it introduced slave labour and harked back to pre-capitalist, pagan mythologies, Nazism was itself some kind of regression from capitalism, and that therefore capitalism was progressive in relation to it. But what is clear from this whole period was that the Nazi holocaust against the Jews was by no means unique. Not only did the Nazis murder millions of ‘untermenschen’, Slavs, gypsies, etc, as well as political opponents of all shades from bourgeois to proletarian; their holocaust took place alongside the Stalinist holocaust which was no less devastating, and the democratic holocaust which took forms such as the terror bombing of German cities, the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the deliberate starvation of the German population after the war. Nor was slave labour unique to Nazism; Stalinism in particular made tremendous use of it in the building of its war machine. Certainly all this was an expression of capitalism’s extreme degeneracy, especially in a phase when it had defeated the working class and has a free hand to unleash its inmost drives towards self-destruction. But there was still a capitalist logic behind it all, as is demonstrated in the pamphlet Auschwitz or the Great Alibi, published by the International Communist Party.

Having uncovered the most basic material reason behind Nazism’s ‘choosing’ of the Jews – the necessity to sacrifice one part of the ruined petty bourgeoisie in order to mobilise the ‘Aryan’ section of it behind capital and the war – this pamphlet’s description of the economics of the Holocaust closely mirrors the events of the Warsaw ghetto:

“In ‘normal’ times , and when it’s a question of small numbers, capitalism can allow those it has ejected from the process of production to just die on their own. But it was impossible to do this in the midst of war and for millions of people: such a ‘disorder’ would have paralysed everything. Capital had to organise their death.

“Furthermore it didn’t kill them right away. To begin with, it withdrew them from circulation, it regrouped them, concentrated them. And it put them to work while undernourishing them, ie it superexploited them to death. Killing man through labour is an old method of capital. Marx wrote in 1844: ‘to be waged with success, the industrial struggle demands numerous armies which can be concentrated in one point and copiously decimated’….These people had to subsidise the cost of their lives, as long as they were alive, and of their death afterwards. And they had to produce surplus value as long as they were capable of it. Because capitalism cannot execute the men it has condemned, if it doesn’t make any profit from putting them to death”

The Warsaw rising and the indifferenceof the great democracies

Early on in the film – it is September 1939 - we see the Szpilman family listening to the radio announcement that Britain and France have declared war on Germany. They celebrate as though their delivery is at hand. As the film progresses, and the total and utter abandonment of the Jews, of Warsaw, and indeed of Poland becomes all too evident, the hopes placed in the democratic powers prove totally unfounded.

By April 1943, the ghetto population has been reduced from nearly half a million to 30,000, many of them young people who had been selected for hard labour. By now it was long past the time when there could be any real doubts about the Nazi ‘solution’ to the Jewish problem. The film shows Szpilman’s contacts with certain figures from the underground; one, Jehuda Zyskind, is described in the book as an “idealistic socialist” who often nearly convinced Szpilman of the possibility of a better world (the book reveals that Zyskind and his entire family were shot in their own home after being discovered sorting underground literature around a table). Szpilman is an artist rather than a deeply political character; he is shown smuggling guns in sacks of potatoes but he escapes from the ghetto before the uprising. Neither he nor the film go into great detail about the political currents active in the ghetto. It seems that they were made up mainly of former proletarian organisations who were now essentially on the terrain of radical nationalism in one form or another– the extreme left wing of Zionism and social democracy, Bundists, and the official Communist Party. It was these groups who organised the links with the Polish ‘national’ resistance and managed to smuggle weapons into the ghetto, preparing the final rising in April 1943 under the umbrella of the Jewish Fighting Organisation. Despite the paltry number of arms and ammunition at their disposal, the rebels managed to hold the German army at bay for a month. This was only possible because a large proportion of the famished population joined the revolt in one capacity or another. In this sense the rising had a popular character and cannot be reduced to the bourgeois forces who organised it, but neither was it an action of a proletarian character, and it was wholly unable to call into question the society capable of generating this kind of oppression and horror. Indeed it was quite consciously a revolt without perspective, the overriding motive of the rebels being to die well, rather than go like sheep to the death camps. Similar risings took place in Vilna and other cities, and even in the camps themselves there were acts of sabotage and armed breakouts. Such revolts without hope are the classic product of an evolution where the proletariat has lost the capacity to act on its own terrain. The whole tragedy was repeated on a wider scale the following year, in the general Warsaw rebellion which resulted in the final destruction of the city, just as the ghetto had been razed to the ground in the aftermath of the Jewish revolt.

In both cases, the duplicity of the forces of democracy and of the ‘Socialist Fatherland’, who claimed that they were only fighting a war for the liberation of the oppressed from Nazi rule, can be plainly demonstrated.

In his book While six million died (Secker and Warburg, London, 1968), Arthur Morse cites one of the last proclamations of the ghetto rebels: “Only the power of the Allied nations can offer immediate and active help now. On behalf of the millions of Jews burned and murdered and buried alive. On behalf of those fighting back and all of us condemned to die we call upon the whole world…Our closest allies must at last understand the degree of responsibility which arises from such apathy in face of an unparalleled crime committed by the Nazis against a whole nation, the tragic epilogue of which is now being enacted. The heroic rising, without precedent in history, of the doomed sons of the ghetto should at last awaken the world to deeds commensurate with the gravity of the hour” (p 58). This passage illustrates very clearly both the rebels’ understanding that they were doomed and their illusions in the good intentions of the Allied powers.

What were the Allies actually doing about the Nazis’ crimes as the Warsaw ghetto burned? At that very moment – 19 April 1943 - Britain and America had organised in Bermuda a conference on the refugee problem. As Morse shows in his book, the democratic powers had been directly informed of Hitler’s memorandum of August 1942 which formalised the plan to exterminate the whole of European Jewry. And yet their representatives came to the Bermuda conference with a mandate that could only ensure that nothing would be done about it:

“The State Department drew up a memorandum for the guidance of the delegates to the Bermuda conference. The Americans were instructed not to limit the discussion to Jewish refugees, not to raise questions of religious faith or race in appealing to public support or promising US funds; not to make commitments regarding shipping space for refugees; not to expect naval escorts or safe-conducts for refugees; not to delay the wartime shipping programme by suggesting that homeward-bound, empty transports pick up refugees en route; not to bring refugees across the ocean if any space for their settlement was available in Europe; not to pledge funds, since this was the prerogative of Congress and the President; not to expect any change in the US immigration laws; not to ignore the needs of the war effort or of the American civilian population for food and money; and not to establish new agencies for the relief of refugees, since the Intergovernmental Committee already existed for that purpose” (p 52).

“The British delegate, Richard Kidston Law, added some don’ts to the long list brought by his American friends. The British would not consider a direct appeal to the Germans, would not exchange prisoners for refugees or lift the blockade of Europe for the shipment of relief supplies. Mr Law added the danger of ‘dumping’ large numbers of refugees on the allies, some of whom might be Axis sympathisers masquerading as oppressed persons” (p 55).

At the end of the conference the ‘continuation’ of its activity was passed on to an Intergovernmental Committee (a precursor of the UN) which was already well known for…doing nothing.

Neither was this an isolated expression of bureaucratic inertia. Morse narrates other episodes such as the Swedish offer to take in 20,000 Jewish children from Europe, an offer which was passed from office to office in Britain and America and finally buried. And the Auschwitz pamphlet recounts the even more striking tale of Joel Brandt, the leader of a Hungarian Jewish organisation, who entered into negotiation with Adolf Eichmann over the release of a million Jews in exchange for 10,000 trucks. But as the PCI’s pamphlet puts it, “Not only the Jews but the SS as well were taken in by the humanitarian propaganda of the Allies! The Allies didn’t want this 1 million Jews. Not for 10,000 lorries, not for 5,000, not even for nothing!” Similar offers from Romania and Bulgaria were also rejected. In Roosevelt’s words “transporting so many people would disorganise the war effort”.

This brief survey of the utter cynicism of the Allies would not be complete without mentioning the way the Red Army, which had called for the Poles to rise up against the Nazis, deliberately held its forces on the outskirts of Warsaw during the uprising of August 1944 and allowed the Nazis to massacre the insurgents. The reasons for this are explained in our article ‘The massacres and crimes of the great democracies’ in International Review 66: “Confronted with an uprising on such a scale, Stalin had decided to let Warsaw stew in its own juice, the aim being to swallow up Poland without encountering any serious resistance from the Polish population. If the Warsaw uprising had been successful, nationalism would have been considerably strengthened and would have thrown a major obstacle in the way of Russian imperialism. At the same time, Stalin was playing the role of anti-proletarian gendarme, faced with the potential threat of the working class in Warsaw”. And lest anyone think that such ruthlessness was peculiar to the evil dictator Stalin, the article points out that this tactic of ‘letting them stew in their own juice’ was first adopted by Churchill in response to the massive workers’ strikes in northern Italy in the same year: once again the Allies allowed the Nazi butchers to do their dirty work for them. Written in 1991, the article further shows that the very same tactic was used by the ‘West’ in the aftermath of the Gulf war with regard to the Kurdish and Shi’a risings against Saddam.

The survival of human solidarity

Szpilman’s survival through this nightmare was wholly remarkable, based largely on a combination of extraordinary luck and other peoples’ respect for his musicianship. He was involuntarily pulled away from the cattle trucks by a sympathetic Jewish policeman, while his parents, brother and two sisters were thrust inside and went to their doom. After being smuggled out of the ghetto he was sheltered by Polish musicians with connections to the resistance. In the end however he was totally alone and owed his life to a German officer, Wilm Hosenfeld, who fed him while he hid in an attic in the very headquarters of the by now disintegrating German occupying force. The book contains an appendix made up of extracts from Hosenfeld’s diary. We learn that he was an idealistic Catholic disgusted by the Nazi regime and that he saved a number of other Jews and victims of the terror.

There were many such small acts of bravery and humanity during the war. The Poles, for example, had a dreadful reputation for anti-Semitism, not least because Jewish fighters escaping the ghetto were even killed by partisans of the nationalist Polish resistance. But the book also points out that Poles saved more Jews than any other nationality.

These were individual acts, not expressions of a collective proletarian movement such as the strike against the anti-Jewish measures and against deportations which began in the shipyards of Amsterdam in February 1941 (cf our book The Dutch and German Communist Left, pp 316-319) But still they give us a glimpse that even amidst the most terrible orgies of nationalist hatred, there is a human solidarity which can rise above it.

At the end of the film, after the defeat of the German army, one of Szpilman’s musician friends is seen walking past a group of German prisoners of war. He goes up to the fence to shout abuse at them; but he is taken aback when one of them runs up to him and asks him if he knows Szpilman, and appeals for help. It is Hosenfeld; but the musician is ushered away by the guards before he can learn Hosenfeld’s name and details. Ashamed of his initial attitude, the musician tells Szpilman - now restored to his job as a pianist for Warsaw radio - what has happened. Szpilman spent years trying to trace his former saviour, without success, although he did befriend members of his family. And we learn that Hosenfeld perished in a Russian labour camp in the early 50s - a last reminder that barbarism was not restricted to the losing imperialism.

The Holocaust, no doubt, will continue to be exploited by the bourgeoisie to reinforce the myth of democracy and to justify war. And in the present situation, while the best artistic expressions can provide important insights into historical or social truths, they are rarely armoured with a clear proletarian standpoint that resist all efforts at recuperation. As a result the bourgeoisie will try to use honest attempts to portray such events to serve its own dishonest ends. Certainly we are witnessing today the sickening attempt to present the new imperialist offensive in the Gulf as a battle to save us all from the atrocities being prepared by the ‘new Hitler’, Saddam Hussain. But the current preparations for war are revealing with increasing clarity that it is capital as a whole which is preparing a new holocaust for humanity, and that it is the great democratic powers who are leading the charge towards the abyss. Such a holocaust would certainly dwarf anything that could have been unleashed in the 1940s, since it would almost certainly involve the destruction of humanity. But in contrast to the 1940s, the world proletariat has not been pulverised and prevented from acting on its own class terrain, which is why it is not too late to prevent capitalism from imposing its ‘final solution’ and to replace this rotting system with a genuinely human society.

Amos

It is always with the greatest caution that revolutionaries have raised the question of the period of transition. The number, the complex­ity, and above all, the newness of the problems the proletariat must solve prevent any elabora­tion of detailed plans of the future society; any attempt to do so risks being turned into a strait-jacket which will stifle the revo­lutionary activity of the class. Marx, for example, always refused to give "recipes for the dishes of the future". Rosa Luxemburg insisted on the fact that with respect to the transi­tional society we only have "sign posts and those of an essentially negative character".

If the different revolutionary experiences of the class (the Paris Commune, 1905, 1917-20), and also the experience of the counter-revolution clarify a certain number of problems that the period of transition will pose, it is essentially regarding the general framework of these problems and not the detailed manner of solving them. It is this framework that we will attempt to bring out in this text.

THE NATURE OF PERIODS OF TRANSITION

Human history is made up of different stable societies linked to a given mode of production and therefore to stable social relations. These societies are based on the dominant economic laws inherent in them. They are made up of fixed social classes and are based on appropri­ate superstructures. The basic stable societies in written history have been: slave society, Asiatic history, feudal society and capitalist society.

What distinguishes periods of transition from periods when society is stable is the decompo­sition of the old social structures and the formation of new structures. Both are linked to a development of the productive forces and are accompanied by the appearance and develop­ment of new classes as well as the development of ideas and institutions corresponding to these classes.

The period of transition is not a distinct mode of production, but a link between two modes of production--the old and the new. It is the period during which the germs of the new mode of production slowly develop to the detriment of the old, until they supplant the old mode of production and constitute a new, dominant mode of production.

Between two stable societies (and this will be true for the period between capitalism and communism as it has been in the past), the period of transition is an absolute necessity. This is due to the fact that the sapping of the basis of the existence of the old society does not automatically imply the maturation and ripening of the conditions of the new. In other words, the decline of the old society does not automatically mean the maturation of the new, but is only the condition for it to take place.

Decadence and the period of transition are two very distinct phenomena. Every period of transition presupposes the decomposition of the old society whose mode and relations of production have attained the extreme limit of their possible development. However, every period of decadence does not necessarily signify a period of transition, in as much as the period of transition represents a step towards a new mode of production. Similarly ancient Greece did not enjoy the historical conditions necessary for a transcendence of slavery; neither did ancient Egypt.

Decadence means the exhaustion of the old social mode of production; transition means the surging up of the new forces and conditions which will permit a resolution and transcen­dence of the old contradictions.

THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN COMMUNIST SOCIETY AND OTHER SOCIETIES

To delineate the nature of the period of transi­tion linking capitalism and communism and to point out what distinguishes this period from all preceding periods, one fundamental idea must be kept in mind. Every period of transition stems from the nature of the new society which is arising. Therefore, the fundamental differ­ences which distinguish communist society from all other societies must be made clear:

a) All earlier societies (with the exception of primitive communism which belongs to pre­history) have been societies divided into classes.

Communism is a classless society.

b) All other societies have been based on property and the exploitation of man by man.

Communism knows no type of individual or collective property; it is the unified and harmonious human community.

c) The other societies in history have had as their basis an insufficiency in the deve­lopment of the productive forces with respect to man's needs. They are societies of scarcity. It is for that reason that they have been dominated by blind economic, social and natural forces. Humanity has been alienated from nature and as a result from the social forces it has itself engendered.

Communism is the full development of the pro­ductive forces, an abundance of production capable of satisfying human needs. It is the liberation of humanity from the domina­tion of nature and of the economy. It is the conscious mastery by humanity of its condi­tions of life. It is the world of freedom and no longer the world of necessity which has characterised man's past history.

d) All past societies brought with them anarchronistic vestiges of past economic systems, social relations, ideas and pre­judices. This is due to the fact that all these societies were based on private prop­erty and the exploitation of the labour of others. It is for this reason that a new class society can and must necessarily be born and develop within the old. It is for the same reason that the new class society, once it is triumphant, can continue with, and accommodate, vestiges of the old defeated society, of the old dominant classes. The new class society can even associate elements of the old dominant class in power. Thus slave or feudal rela­tions could still exist within capitalism and for a long time the bourgeoisie could share power with the nobility.

The situation in a communist society is completely different. Communism retains no economic or social remnants of old society. While such remnants still exist one cannot speak of communist society: what place could there be in such a society for small producers or slave relations, for example? This is what makes the period of transition between capi­talism and communism so long. Just as the Hebrew people had to wait forty years in the desert in order to free themselves from the mentality forged by slavery, so humanity will need several generations to free itself from the vestiges of the old world.

e) All previous societies, just as they have been based on a division into classes, have also necessarily been based on regional, geographic, or national-political divisions. This is due primarily to the laws of unequal development which dictate that the evolution of society--while everywhere following a similar orientation--occurs in a relatively independent and separated fashion in differ­ent sectors with gaps of time which can last several centuries. Thus, unequal development is itself due to the feeble development of the productive forces: there exists a direct relation between the degree of development and the scale on which this development occurs. Only the productive forces developed by capitalism at its zenith, for the first time in history, permit a real inter­dependence between the different parts of the world.

The establishment of communist society imme­diately has the entire world as its arena. Communism in order to be established requires the same evolution at the same time in all countries. It is completely universal or it is nothing.

f) Based on private property, exploitation, the division into classes and into different geographical zones, production in previous societies necessarily tended towards the production of commodities with all that followed in the way of competition and anarchy in distribution and consumption solely regulated by the law of value, through the market and money.

Communism knows neither exchange nor the law of value. Its production is socialised in the fullest-sense of the term. It is univer­sally planned according to the needs of the members of society and for their satisfaction. Such production knows only use values whose direct and socialised distribution excludes exchange, the market and money.

g) Divided into antagonistic classes, all previous societies could only exist and survive through the constitution of a special organ--appearing as if above society--in order to maintain the class struggle within a framework beneficial to the conservation and the interests of the dominant class: the state.

Communism knows none of these divisions and has no need of the state. Moreover, it could not tolerate within it an organism for the government of man. In communism there is only room for the administration of things.

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE PERIODS OF TRANSITION

The period of transition towards communism is constantly tainted by the society from which it emerges (the pre-history of humanity) yet also affected by the society towards which it tends (the completely new history of human society). This is what will distinguish it from all earlier periods of transition.

a. Previous Periods of Transition

Periods of transition until now have in common the fact that they unfolded within the old society. The definitive proclamation of the new society--which is sanctioned by the leap that a revolution constitutes--comes at the end of the transitional process itself. This situation is the result of two essential causes:

1. Past societies all have the same social, economic basis--the division into classes and exploitation, which reduces the period of transition to a simple change or transfer of privileges but not to the suppression of privileges.

2. All these societies, and this forms the basis of the preceding characteristic, blindly submit to the imperatives of laws based on the low development of the pro­ductive forces (the reign of necessity). The period of transition between two such societies is thus characterised by a blind economic development.

b. The Period of Transition towards Communism

It is because communism constitutes a total break with all exploitation and all division into classes that the transition towards this society requires a radical break with the old society and can only unfold outside of the old society.

Communism is not a mode of production subject to the blind economic laws opposed to mankind, but is based on a conscious organisation of production which permits an abundance of the productive forces which the old capitalist society cannot attain by itself.

c. What Distinguishes the Period of Transition towards Communism?

1. The period of transition can only begin outside of capitalism. The maturation of the conditions of socialism requires as a pre­requisite the destruction of the political, economic and social domination of capitalism in society.

2. The period of transition to communism can only be begun on a world scale.

3. Unlike other periods of transition, in the period of transition to communism the essential institutions of capitalism-state police, army, diplomatic corps--cannot be utilised by the proletariat. They must be completely destroyed.

4. As a result, the opening of the period of transition is essentially characterised by the political defeat of capitalism and by the triumph of the political domination of the proletariat.

"In order to convert social production into a large and harmonious system of co-operative work there must be general social change, changes in the general conditions of society which can only be realised by means of the organised power of society--the state power--taken from the hands of the capitalists and the landowners and transferred to the hands of the producers themselves" (Marx, Instructions on Co-operatives to the Delegates of the General Council at the First Congress of the First International at Geneva).

"The conquest of political power has become the first task of the working class" (Marx, Inaugural Address to the First International).

d. The Problems of the Period of Transition

The world generalisation of the revolution is the first condition for the opening of the period of transition. The question of economic and social measures necessary to particularly protect isolated socialisations in one country, one region, one factory or among one group of people is subordinated to the world generalisa­tion of the revolution. Even after a first triumph of the proletariat, capitalism continues its resistance in the form of a civil war. In this period everything must be subordinated to the destruction of the power of capitalism. This is the first objective which conditions any later evolution.

One class and one class alone is interested in communism: the proletariat. Other productive and exploited classes can be drawn into the struggle that the proletariat wages against capitalism, but they can never as classes become the protagonists and bearers of communism. Because of this, it is necessary to emphasise one essential task: the necessity for the proletariat not to confuse itself with, or in dissolve itself into, other classes. In the period of transition the proletariat, as the only revolutionary class invested with the task of creating the new classless society, can only assure the completion of this task by affirming itself as an autonomous and politically dominant class in society. The proletariat alone has a communist programme that it attempts to carry out and, as such, it must retain in its own hands all political and armed force: it has the monopoly of arms. In order to accomplish its tasks the proletariat creates organised structures: the workers' councils based on factories, and the revolutionary party.

The dictatorship of the proletariat can be summarised in the following terms:

- the programme (the proletariat knows where it is going);

- its general organisation as a class;

- armed force.

The relations between the proletariat and the other classes in society are as follows:

1. Vis-à-vis the capitalist class and the old rulers of capitalist society (MPs, Congressmen, high functionaries, the army and the Church): total suppression of all civil rights and exclusion from political life.

2. As regards the peasantry and artisans, that is, independent and non-exploiting producers who constitute the major part of society, the pro­letariat cannot eliminate them totally from poli­tical life, nor at the outset, from economic life. The proletariat will necessarily be led to find a modus vivendi with these classes while at the same time pursuing a policy aimed at the dissolution and integration of these classes into the working class.

3. If the working class must take account of these other classes in economic and administra­tive life; it must not provide them with the possibility of any autonomous organisations (press, parties, etc.). These numerous classes and strata are integrated into a system of administration based on territorial soviets. They will be integrated into society as citizens, not as a class.

4. With regard to those social strata which in present day capitalism occupy a distinct place in economic life. such as the liberal professions, technicians, functionaries, intellectuals (what is called the 'new middle class'), the attitude of the proletariat will be based on the following criteria:

- these classes are not homogeneous. Their highest strata are fundamentally integra­ted into the capitalist function and mentality, while their lowest strata have the same function and interests as the working class.

- the proletariat must act, therefore, in such a way as to accentuate this already existing separation.

The transitional society is still a society divided into classes and so there will neces­sarily arise within it that institution peculiar to all societies divided into classes: the STATE. With all the limitations and precaution­ary measures with which we will surround this institution (functionaries will be elected and revocable, their consumption will be equal to that of a worker, a unification will exist between the legislative and executive functions, etc.), and which make this state into a 'semi-state', we must never lose sight of the state’s historic anti-socialist, and therefore anti-proletarian and essentially conservative, nature. The state remains the guardian of the status quo.

We recognise the inevitability of this institution which the proletariat will have to utilise as a necessary evil in order to break the resistance of the waning capital­ist class and preserve a united administrative, and political framework in this period when society is still rent by antagonistic interests.

But we categorically reject the idea of making this state the standard-bearer of communism. By its own nature ("bourgeois nature in its essence"--Marx), it is essentially an organ for the conservation of the status quo and a restraint on communism. Thus, the state can neither be identified with communism nor with the proletariat which is the bearer of commu­nism. The proletariat is by definition the most dynamic class in history since it carries out the suppression of all classes including. itself. This is why, while utilising the state, the proletariat expresses its dictator­ship riot through the state, but over the state. This is also why the proletariat can under no circumstances allow this institution (the state) to intervene by violence within the class, nor to be the arbiter of the dis­cussions and activities of the class organs - the ­councils and the revolutionary party.

On the economic plane, the period of transition consists of an economic policy (and no longer a political economy) of the proletariat with a view to accelerating the process of universal socialisation of production and distribution. But the realisation of this programme of integral communism at all levels, while being the goal affirmed and followed by the working class, will still be subject to immediate, conjunctural and contingent conditions in the period of transi­tion which only pure utopian voluntarism would ignore. The proletariat will immediately attempt to advance as far as possible towards its goal while recognising the inevitable concessions it will be obliged to tolerate. Two dangers threaten such a policy:

- the idealisation of this policy, presenting it as communist when it is nothing of the sort

- the denial of the necessity of such a policy in the name of idealistic voluntarism.

SOME MEASURES OF THE PERIOD OF TRANSITION

Without pretending to establish a blueprint for these measures we can, at least, try to give a general idea:

1. Immediate socialisation of the great capit­alist concentrations and of the principal centres of productive activity.

2 . Planning of production and distribution--the criteria of production must be the maximum satisfaction of needs and no longer of accumula­tion.

3. Massive reduction of the working day.

4. Substantial rise in the standard of living.

5. The attempt to abolish remuneration based on wages and on its money form.

6. Socialisation of consumption and of the satisfaction of needs (transportation, leisure, meals, etc).

7. The relationship between the collectivised sectors and sectors of production which are still individual--particularly in the country­side--must tend towards an organised collective exchange through co-operatives, thus suppressing the market and individual exchange.

M.C.

Revolution Internationale/France

Printed in The International Review, no.1,

(April 1975)

Re-printed in ICC pamphlet The Period of Transition from Capitalism to Socialism (1981)

Today the Stakes Are High—Strengthen the Organization to Confront Them

At the end of March, the ICC held its 15th Congress. The life of a revolutionary organisation is an integral part of the proletariat’s struggle. It is therefore their responsibility to set before their class, and notably before their sympathisers and the other groups of the proletarian camp, the results of the work at their Congresses, these being moments of the utmost importance in the organisation’s existence. This is the purpose of the article that follows.

The 15th Congress held a particular importance for our organisation, for two main reasons.

First, since the last Congress held in spring 2001, we have witnessed a major aggravation of the international situation, at the level of the economic crisis and above all at the level of imperialist tensions. More precisely, the Congress took place while war was raging in Iraq, and our organisation had the responsibility to make its analyses more precise in order to make the most appropriate intervention, given the situation and the stakes involved for the working class in this new plunge by capitalism into military barbarism..

Secondly, this Congress took place after the ICC had been through the most dangerous crisis in its history. Even if this crisis has been overcome, it is vital for our organisation to draw the maximum number of lessons from the difficulties it has been through, to understand their origins and the way to confront them.

All the work and discussions at the Congress were animated by an awareness of the importance of these two questions, which are part of the two main responsibilities of any congress: to analyse the historic situation and to examine the activities which the organisation has to carry out within it. This work was undertaken on the basis of reports previously discussed throughout the ICC, and led to resolutions being adopted that give a frame of reference for the continuation of our work internationally.

In the previous issue of the International Review, we published a resolution on the international situation adopted by the Congress. As any reader can see, we analyse the present historical period as the final phase in capitalism’s decadence, the phase of the decomposition of bourgeois society as it rots where it stands. As we have already said on many occasions, this decomposition is the result of the inability of either of society’s two antagonistic classes – the bourgeoisie and the proletariat – to impose their own response to the irrevocable decadence of the capitalist economy: world war for the former, and world communist revolution for the latter. As we shall see, these historic conditions determine the main characteristics of the life of the bourgeoisie today, but they also weigh heavily on the proletariat and on its revolutionary organisations.

It was therefore within this framework that the Congress examined not only the aggravation of imperialist tensions that we are witnessing today, but also the obstacles that the proletariat encounters on its path towards its decisive confrontation with capitalism as well as the difficulties that our own organisation has encountered.

The analysis of the international situation

For certain organisations of the proletarian camp, notably the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party, the organisational difficulties encountered by the ICC recently, like those in 1981 and in the early ‘90s, derive from its inability to develop an appropriate analysis of the current historical period. In particular, our concept of decomposition is seen as an expression of our "idealism".

We think that the IBRP’s evaluation of the origins of our organisational difficulties reveals in fact an under-estimation of the organisation question and of the lessons drawn by the workers’ movement on this subject. However, it is true that theoretical and political clarity is an essential arm of any organisation that claims to be revolutionary. In particular, if it is not able to understand what is really at stake in the historic period in which it carries out its struggle, it risks being cast adrift by events, falling into disarray and in the end being swept away by history. It is also true that clarity is not something that can be decreed. It is the fruit of a will, of a combat to forge the weapons of theory. It demands that the new questions posed by the evolution of historical conditions be approached with a method, the marxist method.

This is a permanent task and responsibility for the organisations of the workers’ movement. The task has had more acute importance in certain periods, for example at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. The development of imperialism heralded capitalism’s coming entry into its decadence. Engels, projecting marxist analysis into the future in the 1880s, was able to announce the historic perspective looming on the horizon: socialism or barbarism. At the 1900 Paris Congress of the Socialist International, Rosa Luxemburg foresaw capitalism’s entry into its decadence and envisaged the possibility that the new period might begin with war: "It is possible that the first great expression of the bankruptcy of capitalism which lies before us may be, not the crisis, but a war". In 1899 Franz Mehring, one of the spokesmen of the left of the Social-Democracy, measured the full weight of responsibility which was going to lie on the shoulders of the working class: “The epoch of imperialism is the epoch of the bankruptcy of capitalism. If the working class is not up to the task [of overthrowing it] then the whole of humanity is under threat”. But this determination to analyse and understand the period in order to forge the weapons for the coming struggle was not universal in the Social-Democracy. Without going into Bernstein’s revisionism, nor into the speechifying of the worshippers of the “tried and trusted tactic”, Kautsky – the theoretical reference for the whole Socialist International – defended orthodox marxist positions but refused to use them to analyse the new period that was opening. The renegade Kautsky (as Lenin was later to call him) was already present in the Kautsky who refused to look the new period in the face and to recognise the inevitability of the war between the great imperialist powers.

In the midst of the counter-revolution, during the 1930s and 1940s, the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left, and the French Communist Left, continued the effort to analyse, “without any ostracism” (as the Italian Fraction wrote in their review Bilan), both past experience and the new conditions. This attitude is part of the struggle which the marxist wing has always conducted in the workers’ movement in facing up to historical evolution. It is a million miles removed from the religious vision of “"invariance” dear to the Bordigists, which sees the programme not as the product of a constant theoretical struggle to analyse reality and draw out its lessons, but as a dogma revealed in 1848, of which “not a comma need be changed”. On the contrary, the task of updating and enriching the programme and our analyses is a vital responsibility in the struggle.

This was the concern which inspired the reports prepared for the Congress and the debates of the Congress itself. The Congress approached this challenge within the framework of the marxist vision of the decadence of capitalism and of its present phase of decomposition. The Congress recalled that this vision of decadence was not only that of the Third International, but is indeed at the very heart of the marxist vision. It was this framework and historical clarity that enabled the ICC to measure the gravity of the present situation, in which war is becoming an increasingly permanent factor.

More precisely the Congress had to examine the degree to which the ICC’s analytical framework has been capable of accounting for the current situation. Following this discussion, the Congress decided that there was no question of putting this framework into question. The evolution of the current situation is in fact a full confirmation of the analyses the ICC adopted at the end of 1989, at the time of the collapse of the eastern bloc. The present events, such as the growing antagonism between the USA and its former allies that has manifested itself so openly in the recent crisis, the multiplication of military conflicts and the direct involvement within them of the world’s leading power - which has made increasingly massive displays of its military power – all this was already foreseen in the theses which the ICC produced in 1989-90.[1] The ICC, at its Congress, reaffirmed that the present war in Iraq cannot be reduced, as certain sectors of the bourgeoisie would like us to believe (in order to minimise their real gravity), to a “war for oil”. In this war, the control of oil is primarily a strategic rather than an economic objective for the American bourgeoisie. It is a means of blackmailing and pressuring the USA’s principal rivals, the great powers of Europe and Japan, and thus of countering their efforts to play their own game on the global imperialist chessboard. In fact, behind the idea that the current wars have a certain “economic rationality” is a refusal to take into account the extreme gravity of the situation facing the capitalist system today. By underlining this gravity, the ICC has placed itself within the marxist approach, which doesn’t give revolutionaries the task of consoling the working class. On the contrary it calls on revolutionaries to assist the proletariat to grasp the dangers which threaten humanity, and thus to understand the scale of its own responsibility.

And in the ICC’s view, the necessity for revolutionaries to explain to the working class the profound seriousness of what’s at stake today is all the more important when you take into account the difficulties the class is experiencing in finding the path of massive and conscious struggles against capitalism. This was thus another essential point in the discussion on the international situation: what is the basis today for affirming the confidence that marxism has always had in the capacity of the working class to overthrow capitalism and liberate humanity from the calamities into which it is now leading it?

What confidence can we have in the working class’ ability to face up to its historic responsibilities?

The ICC has on numerous occasions argued that the decomposition of capitalist society exerts a negative weight on the consciousness of the proletariat.[2] Similarly, since the autumn of 1989, it has stressed that the collapse of the Stalinist regimes would provoke “new difficulties for the proletariat” (title of an article from International Review n°60). Since then the evolution of the class struggle has only confirmed this prediction.

Faced with this situation, the Congress reaffirmed that the working class still retains all the potential to assume its historic responsibilities. It is true that it is still experiencing a major retreat in its consciousness, following the bourgeois campaigns that equate marxism and communism with Stalinism, and that establish a direct link between Lenin and Stalin. Similarly, the present situation is characterised by a marked loss of confidence by the workers in their strength and in their ability to wage even defensive struggles against the attacks of their exploiters, a situation which can lead to a serious loss of class identity. And it should be noted that this tendency to lose confidence in the class is also expressed among revolutionary organisations, particularly in the form of sudden outbursts of euphoria in response to movements like the one in Argentina at the end of 2001 (which has been presented as a formidable proletarian uprising when it was actually stuck in inter-classism). But a long term, materialist, historical vision teaches us, in Marx’s words, that “it’s not a question of considering what this or that proletarian, or even the proletariat as a whole, takes to be true today, but of considering what the proletariat is and what it will be led to do historically, in conformity with its being” (The Holy Family). Such an approach shows us that, faced with the blows of the capitalist crisis, which will give rise to more and more ferocious attacks on the working class, the latter will be forced to react and to develop its struggle.

This struggle, in the beginning, will be a series of skirmishes, which will announce an effort to move towards increasingly massive struggles. It is in this process that the class will once again recognise itself as a distinct class with its own interests, and rediscover its identity; and this in turn will act as a stimulus to its struggle. The same goes for war, which will tend to become a permanent phenomenon, each time uncovering a little more the serious tensions between the major powers, and above all revealing the fact that capitalism is incapable of eradicating this scourge, that it is a growing menace for humanity. This will give rise to a profound reflection within the class. All these potentialities are contained in the present situation. It is vital for revolutionary organisations to be conscious of this and to develop an intervention which can bring this reflection to fruition. This intervention is particularly important with regard to the minority who are looking for political clarification internationally.

But if they are to be up to their responsibilities, revolutionary organisations have to be able to cope not only with direct attacks from the ruling class, but also to resist the penetration into their own ranks of the ideological poison that the ruling class disseminates throughout society. In particular, they have to be able to fight the most damaging effects of decomposition, which not only affects the consciousness of the proletariat in general but also of revolutionary militants themselves, undermining their conviction and their will to carry on with revolutionary work. This is precisely what the ICC has had to face up to in the recent period and this is why the key discussion at this Congress was the necessity for the organisation to defend itself from the attacks facilitated by the decomposition of bourgeois ideology.

The life and activities of the ICC

The Congress drew a positive balance-sheet of the activities of our organisation since the last Congress, in 2001. Over the past two years, the ICC has shown that it is capable of defending itself against the most dangerous effects of decomposition, in particular the nihilistic tendencies which have seized hold of a certain number of militants who formed the “Internal Fraction”. The ICC has been able to combat the attacks by these elements whose aim was clearly to destroy the organisation. Right from the start of its proceedings, the Congress, following on from the Extraordinary Conference of April 2002,[3] was once again totally unanimous in ratifying the whole struggle against this camarilla, and in denouncing its provocative behaviour. It was fully convinced about the anti-proletarian nature of this regroupment. And it was no less unanimous in pronouncing the exclusion of the elements of the “Fraction”, which has crowned its anti-ICC activity by publishing on its website information which can only play directly into the hands of the police – and by justifying these actions.[4] These elements, although they refused first of all to come to the Congress (as they were invited to do) and then to present their defence in front of a commission specially nominated by the latter, have found nothing better to do in their bulletin n°18 than to continue their campaigns of slander against the organisation. This has provided further proof that their concern is not at all to convince the militants of the organisation of the dangers posed it by what they describe as a "leadership" dominated by a “liquidationist faction”, but to discredit the ICC as much as possible, now that they have failed to destroy it.[5]

How could these elements have developed, within the organisation, an activity which threatened to destroy it?

In approaching this question, the Congress highlighted a certain number of weaknesses, linked to the revival of the circle spirit and facilitated by the negative weight of social decomposition. An aspect of this negative weight is doubt in, and loss of confidence in, the working class: a tendency to see only its immediate weaknesses. Far from facilitating the party spirit, this attitude can only allow friendship links or confidence in particular individuals to substitute themselves for confidence in our principles of functioning. The elements who were to form the “Internal Fraction” were a caricature of these deviations and this loss of confidence in the class. Their dynamic towards degeneration made use of these weaknesses, which weigh on all proletarian organisations today, and weigh all the more heavily in that the majority of these organisations have no awareness of them at all. These elements carried out their destructive activities with a level of violence never before seen in the ICC. The loss of confidence in the class, the weakening of their militant conviction, were accompanied by a loss of confidence in the organisation, in its principles, and by a total disdain for its statutes. This gangrene could have contaminated the whole organisation and sapped all confidence and solidarity in its ranks – and this undermined its very foundations.

Without any fear, the Congress examined the opportunist weaknesses which enabled the clan that called itself the “Internal Fraction” to become such a danger to the very life of the organisation. It was able to do so because the ICC will be strengthened by the combat that it has just waged.

Furthermore, it is because the ICC does struggle against any penetration of opportunism that it seems to have such a troubled life, that it has gone through so many crises. It is because it defended its statutes and the proletarian spirit that animates them without any concessions, that it was met with such anger by a minority which had fallen deep into opportunism on the organisation question. At this level, the ICC was carrying on the combat of the workers’ movement which was waged by Lenin and the Bolsheviks in particular, whose many detractors castigated their frequent organisational struggles and crises. In the same period, the German Social-Democratic Party was much less agitated but the opportunist calm which reigned within it (challenged only by “trouble-makers” on the left like Rosa Luxemburg) actually prefigure its treason in 1914. By contrast, the crises of the Bolshevik party helped it to develop the strength to lead the revolution in 1917.

But the discussion on activities did not limit itself to dealing with the direct defence of the organisation against the attacks it has been subjected to. It insisted strongly on the necessity to develop its theoretical capacities, while recognising that the combat against these attacks had already stimulated its efforts in this direction. The balance-sheet of the last two years shows that there has been a process of theoretical enrichment, on such questions as the historical dimension of solidarity and confidence in the proletariat; on the danger of opportunism which menaces organisations who are unable to analyse a change of period; on the danger of democratism. And this concern for the struggle on the theoretical terrain, as Marx, Luxemburg, Lenin, or the militants of the Italian left and many other revolutionaries have taught us, is an integral part of the struggle against opportunism, which remains a deadly danger to communist organisations.

Finally, the Congress made an initial balance sheet of our intervention in the working class regarding the war in Iraq. It noted that the ICC had mobilised itself very well on this occasion: before the start of military operations, our sections sold a lot of publications at a number of demonstrations (when necessary producing supplements to the regular press) and engaging in political discussions with many elements who had not known our organisation previously. As soon as the war broke out, the ICC published an international leaflet translated into 13 languages[6] which was distributed in 14 countries and more than 50 towns, particularly at factories and workplaces, and also posted on our Internet site.

Thus this Congress was a moment that expressed the strengthening of our organisation. The ICC affirms with conviction the combat it has been waging and which it will continue to wage – the combat for its own defence, for the construction of the basis of the future party, and for the development of its capacity to intervene in the historical movement of the class. It has no doubt that it is a link in the chain of organisations that connect the workers’ movement of the past to that of the future.

ICC, April 2003

In the last issue of this Review we published an article on Polanski’s film The Pianist [31], whose subject was the uprising of the Warsaw ghetto in 1943 and the Nazi genocide against Europe’s Jews. Sixty years after the unspeakable horrors of this campaign of extermination, one might have expected to find that anti-Semitism was a thing of the past – the consequences of anti-Jewish racism being so clear that it would have been discredited once and for all. And yet this is not at all the case. In fact, all the old anti-Semitic ideologies are as noxious and as widespread as ever, even if their main focus has shifted from Europe to the “Muslim” world, and in particular, to the “Islamic radicalism” personified by Osama Bin Laden, who in all his pronouncements never fails to attack the “crusaders and Jews” as the enemies of Islam and as suitable targets for terrorist attack. A typical example of this “Islamic” version of anti-Semitism is provided by the “Radio Islam” website, which has as its motto “Race? Only One Human Race”. The site claims to be opposed to all forms of racism, but on closer inspection it becomes clear that its main concern is with “Jewish racism towards non-Jews”; in fact, this is an archive of classical anti-Semitic tracts, from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Czarist forgery from the late 19th century which purports to be the minutes of a meeting of the world Jewish conspiracy and was one of the bibles of the Nazi party, to Hitler’s Mein Kampf and the more recent rantings of the Nation of Islam leader in the USA, Louis Farrakhan. 

Such publishing ventures – and they are assuming massive proportions today – demonstrate that religion today has become one of the main vehicles for racism and xenophobia, for stirring up pogromist attitudes, for dividing the working class and the oppressed in general. And we are not talking merely about ideas, but about ideological justifications for real massacres, whether they involve Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats or Bosnian Muslims in ex-Yugoslavia, Protestants and Catholics in Ulster, Muslims and Christians in Africa and Indonesia, Hindus and Muslims in India, or Jews and Muslims in Israel/Palestine.

In two previous articles in this Review – “Resurgent Islam, a symptom of the decomposition of capitalist social relations [32]” (International Review n°109) and “Marxism’s fight against religion: economic slavery is the source of the religious mystification [33]” (International Review n°110), we showed that this phenomenon was a real expression of the advanced decomposition of capitalist society. In this article we want to focus on the Jews in particular. Not simply because Karl Marx’s famous essay On the Jewish Question [34] was published 160 years ago, in 1843, but also because Marx, whose entire life was dedicated to the cause of proletarian internationalism, is today being cited as a theoretician of anti-Semitism - usually disapprovingly, but not always. The Radio Islam site is again instructive here: on it, Marx’s essay appears on the very same web page as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, even if the site also publishes Der Sturmer type cartoons insulting Marx for being a Jew himself.

This accusation against Marx is not new. In 1960 Dagobert Runes published Marx’ essay under his own title A World Without Jews, which implied that Marx was an early exponent of the “final solution” to the Jewish problem. In a more recent history of the Jews, the right wing English intellectual Paul Johnson raised similar charges, and did not hesitate to find an anti-Semitic component in the very idea of wanting to abolish buying and selling as a basis for social life. At the very least, Marx is a “self-hating” Jew (today, as often as not, a sobriquet pinned by the Zionist establishment on anyone of Jewish descent who expresses critical attitudes towards the State of Israel).

Against all these grotesque distortions, our aim in this article is not only to defend Marx from those who are seeking to use him against his own principles, but also to show that Marx’s work provides the only starting point for understanding and overcoming the problem of anti-Semitism.

The historical context of Marx’s essay On the Jewish question

It is useless to present or quote from Marx’s article out of its historical context. On the Jewish question was written as part of the general struggle for political change in semi-feudal Germany. The debate about whether Jews should be granted the same civil rights as the rest of Germany’s inhabitants was one aspect of this struggle. As editor of the Rheinische Zeitung Marx had originally intended to write a response to the openly reactionary and anti-Semitic writings of one Hermes who wanted to keep the Jews in the ghetto and preserve the Christian basis of the state. But after the Left Hegelian Bruno Bauer entered into the fray with two essays ‘The Jewish Question” and “The capacity of present day Jews and Christians to become free”, Marx felt it was more important to polemicise with what he saw as the false radicalism of Bauer’s views.

We should also recall that in this phase of his life, Marx was in a political transition from radical democracy to communism. He was in exile in Paris and had come under the influence of French communist artisans (cf. “How the proletariat won Marx to communism” in International Review 69); in the latter part of 1843, in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, he identified the proletariat as the bearer of a new society In 1844 he met Engels, who helped him to see the importance of understanding the economic basis of social life; the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts written in the same year, are his first attempt to understand all these developments in their real depth. In 1845 he wrote the Theses on Feuerbach which express his definitive break with the one-sided materialism of the latter.

The polemic with Bauer on the question of civil rights and democracy, published in the Franco-German Yearbooks, was without question a moment in this transition.

 At that time Bauer was a spokesman for the “left” in Germany, although the seeds of his later evolution towards the right can already be noted in his attitude to the Jewish question, where he adopts a seemingly radical position which actually ended up as an apology for doing nothing to change the status quo. According to Bauer, it was useless to call for the political emancipation of the Jews in a Christian state. It was necessary, first of all, for both Jews and Christians to give up their religious beliefs and identity in order to achieve real emancipation; in a truly democratic state, there would be no need for religious ideology. Indeed, if anything, the Jews had further to go than the Christians: in the view of the Left Hegelians, Christianity was the last religious envelope in which the struggle for human emancipation had expressed itself historically. Having rejected the universalist message of Christianity, the Jews had two steps to make while the Christians had only one. 

The transition from this view to Bauer’s later overt anti-Semitism is not hard to see. Marx may well have sensed this, but his polemic begins by defending the position that the granting of “normal” civil rights for Jews, which he terms “political emancipation”, would be “a big step forward”; indeed it had already been a feature of earlier bourgeois revolutions (Cromwell had allowed the Jews to return to England and the Napoleonic code granted civil rights to Jews). It would be part of the more general struggle to do away with feudal barriers and create a modern democratic state, which was now long overdue in Germany in particular.

But Marx was already aware that the struggle for political democracy was not the final aim. On the Jewish question seems to express a significant advance over a text written shortly before, the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of the State, In this text Marx pushes his thought to the extreme of radical democracy, arguing that real democracy – universal suffrage – would mean the dissolution of the state and of civil society. By contrast, in  On The Jewish Question, Marx affirms that a purely political emancipation – he even uses the term a “perfected democracy” - falls far short of real human emancipation.

It is this text in which Marx clearly recognises that civil society is bourgeois society – the society of isolated egos competing on the market. It is a society of estrangement or alienation (this was the first text in which Marx used these terms) in which the powers set in motion by man’s own hands – not only the power of money, but also the state power itself – inevitably become alien forces ruling man’s life. This problem is not solved by the achievement of political democracy and the rights of man. This is still based on the notion of the atomised citizen rather than on a real community. “None of the so-called rights of man goes beyond the egoistic man, the man withdrawn into himself, his private interest and his private choice, and separated from the community as a member of civil society. Far from viewing man here in his species-being, his species life itself – society – rather appears to be an external framework for the individual, limiting his original independence. The only bond between men is natural necessity, need and private interest, the maintenance of their property and egoistic interest”.

Further proof that alienation does not disappear as a result of political democracy was, Marx pointed out, provided by the example of North America, where religion was formally separated from the state and yet America was par excellence the country of religious observation and religious sects.

Thus: while Bauer argues that it is waste of time fighting for the political emancipation of the Jews as such, Marx defends and supports this demand:  “We thus do not say with Bauer to the Jews: You cannot be politically emancipated without radically emancipating yourselves from Judaism. Rather we tell them: because you can be emancipated politically without completely and fully renouncing Judaism, political emancipation is by itself not human emancipation. If you Jews want to be politically emancipated without emancipating yourselves humanly, the incompleteness and contradiction lies not only in you but in the essence and category of political emancipation”. Concretely, for Marx this meant that he accepted the request of the local Jewish community to write a petition in favour of civil liberties for Jews. This approach towards political reforms was to be the characteristic attitude of the workers’ movement during the ascendant period of capitalism. But Marx is already looking further down the road of history - towards the future communist society –even if this is not yet named as such in On The Jewish Question. This is the conclusion to the first part of his reply to Bauer “Only when the actual individual man  has taken back into himself the abstract citizen and in his everyday life, his individual work, and in his individual relationships has become a species being, only when he has recognised and organised his own powers as social powers so that social force is no longer separated from him as a political power, only then is human emancipation complete”.

Marx’s alleged anti-Semitism

It is the second part of the text, replying to Bauer’s second article, which has drawn most fire onto Marx from numerous quarters, and which the new wave of Islamic anti-Semitism is misusing in support of its obscurantist world view. “What is the worldly cult of the Jew? Bargaining. What is his worldly god? Money… Money is the jealous god of Israel before whom no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of mankind – and converts them into commodities. Money is the general, self-sufficient value of everything. Hence it has robbed the whole world, the human world as well as nature, of its proper worth. Money is the alienated essence of man’s labour and life, and this alien essence dominates him as he worships it. The god of the Jews has been secularised and has become the god of the world. The bill of exchange is the Jew’s actual god…”. This and other passages in On the Jewish questionhave been seized upon to prove that Marx is one of the founding fathers of modern anti-Semitism, whose essay has given respectability to the racist myth of the blood-sucking Jewish parasite.

It is true that many of the formulations Marx uses in this section could not be used in the same way today. It is also true that neither Marx nor Engels were entirely free from bourgeois prejudices and that some of their pronouncements about particular nationalities reflect this. But to conclude from this that Marx and marxism itself are indelibly stained with racism is a travesty of his thought. 

All these phrases must be put in their proper historical context. As Hal Draper explains in an appendix to his book Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, Vol. I (Monthly Review Press, 1977), the identification between Judaism and “hucksterism”, or with capitalism, was part of the language of the time and was taken up by any number of radical thinkers and socialists, including Jewish radicals like Moses Hess who was an influence on Marx at the time (and indeed on the essay itself).

A historian of religion like Trevor Ling criticises Marx’s essay from another angle: “Marx had a mordant, journalistic style and decorated his pages with many a clever and satirical turn of phrase. The kind of writing of which examples have just been given is good vigorous pamphleteering, intended no doubt to stir the blood, but it has little to offer by way of useful sociological analysis. Such grand superficialities as ‘Judaism’ and ‘Christianity’, when used in this sort of context, have no correspondence with historical realities; they are labels attached to Marx’s own artificial, ill-perceived constructs” Ling, Karl Marx and Religion, Macmillan Press, 1980). But a few mordant phrases by Marx usually provide far sharper tools for examining a question in depth than all the learned treatises of the academics. In any case Marx is not trying here to write a history of the Jewish religion, which cannot be reduced to a mere justification for commercialism, not least because its ancient origins lie in a social order where money relations had a very subordinate role, and whose substance also reflects the existence of class divisions among the Jews themselves (for example, in the diatribes of the prophets against the corruptions of the ruling class in ancient Israel). As we have seen, having defended the need for the Jewish population to have the same “civil rights” as all other citizens, Marx merely uses the verbal analogy between Judaism and commodity relations to call for a society free of commodity relations, which is the real meaning of his concluding phrase, “The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism”. This has nothing to do with any scheme for the physical elimination of the Jews, despite Dagobert Rune’s disgusting insinuations; it means that as long as society is dominated by commodity relations, human beings cannot control their own social powers and all will remain estranged from each other.

At the same time, Marx does provide the bases for a materialist analysis of the Jewish question - a work carried on by later Marxists, such as Kautsky and in particular Abram Leon.1 Marx points out, contrary to the idealist explanation which sought to explain the stubborn survival of the Jews as a result of their religious conviction, that the survival of their separate identity and of their religious convictions had to be explained on the basis of their real role in history: “Judaism has survived not in spite of but by means of history”. And this is indeed deeply connected to the Jews’ connection to commerce: “let us look for the secret of the Jew not in his religion but rather for the secret of the religion in the actual Jew”. And it is here that Marx uses the word play between Judaism as a religion and Judaism as a synonym for bargaining and financial power, which was based on a kernel of reality: the particular social-economic role played by the Jews within the old feudal system. 

Leon, in his book The Jewish Question, a Marxist Interpretation, bases his entire study on these few limpid sentences in On The Jewish Question, and on another one in Capital which talks about “the Jews (living) in the pores of Polish society”(Vol. III, p 447) in a manner comparable to other “merchant-peoples” of history. From these few nuggets he developed the notion that the Jews, in ancient society and in feudalism, functioned as a “people-class” who were largely bound up with trade and money relations in societies which were predominantly founded on natural economy. In feudalism in particular this was codified in the religious laws, which forbade Christians to engage in usury. But Leon also shows that the Jewish connection to money relations was not always limited to usury. In both ancient and feudal society the Jews were very much a merchant people, personifying commodity relations which did not yet rule over the economy but simply linked dispersed communities where production was largely geared to use, and the bulk of the social surplus was appropriated and consumed directly by the ruling class. It was this peculiar social-economic function (which was of course a general tendency rather than an absolute law for all Jews) which provided the material basis for the survival of the Jewish “corporation” within feudal society; a contrario, where Jews engaged in other activities, such as farming, they tended to assimilate very quickly.

But this did not imply that the Jews were the first capitalists (a point which is not yet entirely clear in Marx’s text, because he has not yet fully grasped the nature of capital); on the contrary, it was the rise of capitalism that coincided with some of the worst phases of anti-Jewish persecution. Contrary to the Zionist myth that the persecution of the Jews has been a constant throughout history – and that they can never be free from it until they are gathered together in their own country2 - Leon shows that as long as they were playing a “useful” role in these pre-capitalist societies, the Jews were more usually tolerated, and often specifically protected by the monarchs who needed their financial skills and services. It was the emergence of a “native” merchant class, which began to use its profits to invest in production (for example, the English wool trade, key to the origins of an English bourgeoisie) which spelt disaster for the Jews, who now embodied an outmoded form of commodity economy and were seen as an obstacle to the development of its new forms. This tended to force more and more Jewish traders into the only form of commerce open to them – usury. But this practise brought the Jews into direct conflict with the principal debtors in society – the nobles on the one hand, and the small artisans and peasants on the other. It is significant, for example, that the worst pogroms against the Jews in western Europe took place in this period when feudalism had begun to decay and capitalism was on the rise. In England in 1189-90 the Jews of York and other English towns were slaughtered and the entire Jewish population expelled. Pogroms were often provoked by nobles who owed large amounts to the Jews and who found ready followers among the smaller producers who were also often in debt to Jewish money-lenders; both could hope to benefit from the cancellation of debt thanks to the murder or expulsion of the usurers, and the seizure of their property. The Jewish emigration from western Europe to Eastern Europe at the dawn of capitalist development was a move back to more traditionally feudal areas where the Jews could return to their own more traditional role; by contrast, those Jews who were left behind tended to become assimilated into the surrounding bourgeois society. In particular, a Jewish fraction of the capitalist class (typified by the Rothschild family) was the product of this period; parallel to this, came the development of a Jewish proletariat, although both eastern and western Jewish workers tended to be concentrated in the artisanal areas, away from heavy industry, and the majority of Jews continued to be disproportionately concentrated in the petty bourgeoisie, often in the form of petty tradesmen.

These layers  - small tradesmen, artisans, proletarians -  are thrown into the most abject misery by the decay of feudalism in the east, and the emergence of a capitalist infrastructure which already displays many features of its decline. In the late 19th century we now see new waves of anti-Semitic persecution in the Russian empire, provoking a new Jewish exodus to the west, which again “exports” the Jewish problem to the rest of the world, not least Germany and Austria. This period sees the development of the Zionist movement, which from right to left argues that the Jewish people could never be normalised until they had their own homeland – an argument whose futility was, for Leon, confirmed by the Holocaust itself, since none of this could have been prevented by the appearance of a small “Jewish homeland” in Palestine.3 

Leon, writing in the midst of the Nazi holocaust, shows how the paroxysm of anti-Semitism reached in Nazi Europe is the expression of the decadence of capitalism. Fleeing the Czarist persecution in eastern Europe and Russia, the immigrant Jewish masses found in western Europe not a haven of peace and tranquillity, but a capitalist society that was soon to be wracked by insoluble contradictions, ravaged by world war and world economic crisis. The defeat of the proletarian revolution after the first world war opened the door not only to a second imperialist butchery, but also to a form of counter-revolution which exploited age-old anti-Semitic prejudices to the hilt, using anti-Jewish racism both practically and ideologically as a basis for completing the liquidation of the proletarian menace and for gearing society for a new war. Like the International Communist Party (ICP) in Auschwitz, the Grand Alibi, Leon focuses in particular on the use that Nazism made of the convulsion of the petty bourgeoisie, ruined by the capitalist crisis and easy meat for an ideology which promised them that they would be not only free of their Jewish competitors but also be officially permitted to lay their hands on their property (even if the Nazi state did not really allow the German petty bourgeoisie to benefit from this but appropriated the lion’s share to develop and maintain a vast war economy).

At the same time, as Leon points out, the use of anti-Semitism once again as a socialism of fools, a false criticism of capitalism, enabled the ruling class to drag in certain sectors of the working class, particularly its more marginal layers or those crushed by unemployment.  Indeed, the notion of “national” socialism was one of the  direct responses of the ruling class to the close link that had been established between the authentic revolutionary movement and a layer of Jewish workers and intellectuals who, as Lenin had pointed out, naturally gravitated towards international socialism as the only solution to their situation as a homeless and persecuted element of bourgeois society. International socialism was branded as a trick of the world Jewish conspiracy and proletarians were enjoined to combine their socialism with patriotism. It should also be pointed out that this ideology was mirrored in the Stalinist USSR, where the campaign of insinuation against “rootless cosmopolitans” was a cover for anti-Semitic slurs against the internationalist opposition to the ideology and practise of “socialism in one country”. 

This emphasises that the persecution of the Jews also functions at an ideological level and requires a justifying ideology; in the Middle Ages, it was the Christian myth of Christ killers, well-poisoners, ritual murderers of Christian children: Shylock and his pound of flesh.4 In the decadence of capitalism, it is the myth of the Jewish world conspiracy that has conjured up both capitalism and communism to impose its rule over the Aryan peoples.

In the 1930s, Trotsky noted that the decline of capitalism was spawning a terrible regression on the ideological level:

“Fascism has opened up the depth of society for politics. Today, not only in peasant homes but also in city skyscrapers, there lives alongside of the twentieth century the tenth or the thirteenth. A hundred million people use electricity and still believe in the magic power of signs and exorcisms. The Pope of Rome broadcasts over the radio about the miraculous transformation of water into wine. Movie stars go to mediums. Aviators who pilot miraculous mechanisms created by man’s genius wear amulets on their sweaters. What inexhaustible reserves they possess of darkness, ignorance and savagery! Despair has raised them to their feet, fascism has given them a banner. Everything that should have been eliminated from the national organism in the form of cultural excrement in the course of the normal development of society has now come gushing up from the throat; capitalist society is puking up the undigested barbarism. Such is the psychology of National Socialism” (“What is National socialism”, 1933).

These elements all come together in the Nazis’ fantasies about the Jews. Nazism made no secret of its ideological regression – it openly harked back to the pre-Christian gods. Nazism, in fact, was an occultist movement that had seized direct control of the means of government; and like other occultisms, it saw itself doing battle with another hidden and satanic power – in this case, the Jews. And these mythologies, which can certainly be examined in their own right, in all their psychological aspects, take on a logic of their own and fuel the juggernaut that led to the death camps.

 However, this ideological irrationality is never divorced from the material contradictions of the capitalist system – it is not, as numerous bourgeois thinkers have tried to argue, the expression of some metaphysical principle of evil, some unfathomable mystery. In the article on Polanski’s film The Pianist in IR 113 we cited the ICP on the cold calculating “rationale” behind the Holocaust – the industrialisation of murder, where the maximum of profit was squeezed from every corpse. But there is another dimension, which the ICP does not go into: the irrationality of capitalist war itself. Thus the “final solution”, in the image of the world war which provided its background, is provoked by economic contradictions and does not renounce the hunt for profit, but at the same time becomes an added factor in the exacerbation of economic ruin. And if use of forced labour was demanded by the war economy, the whole machinery of the concentration camps also became an immense burden on the German war effort.

The solution to the Jewish problem

160 years on, the essence of what Marx put forward as the solution to the Jewish problem remains valid: in the abolition of capitalist relations and the creation of real human community. Of course this also is the only possible solution to all surviving national problems: capitalism has proved incapable of resolving them. The current manifestation of the Jewish problem, which is specifically linked to the imperialist conflict in the Middle East, is the best proof of this.

The “solution” put forward by the “Jewish national liberation movement”, Zionism, has become the kernel of the problem. The greatest source of the current anti-Semitic revival is no longer linked directly to the particular economic function of the Jews in the advanced capitalist states, nor to a problem of Jewish immigration into these regions. Here, since world war two, the focus of racism has shifted to the waves of immigration from the former colonial regions; most recently, with the furore over “asylum seekers”, it is aimed first and foremost at the victims of economic, ecological and military devastation that decomposing capitalism is inflicting on the planet. “Modern” anti-Semitism is first and foremost connected to the conflict in the Middle East. Israel’s nakedly imperialist policies in the region and the support unwaveringly given to these policies by the USA has been a shot in the arm for all the old myths of a world Jewish conspiracy. Millions of Muslims are convinced by the urban myth that “40,000 Jews stayed away from the Twin Towers on September 11 because they had been warned in advance that the attack was coming” – that “the Jews did it”. And this notwithstanding  that this claim is happily put forward by people who also defend Bin Laden and applaud the terrorist attack!5 The fact that several leading members of the clique around Bush, the “neo-conservatives” who are today the most vigorous and explicit advocates of the “new American century”, are Jews, (Wolfowitz, Perle, etc) has added grist to this mill, sometimes providing it with a left wing twist. In Britain recently there was a controversy around the fact that Tam Dalyell, an “anti-war” figure on the Labour left, spoke openly about the influence of the “Jewish lobby” on US foreign policy and even on Blair; and he was defended from charges of anti-Semitism by Paul Foot of the Socialist Workers Party who only regretted that he had talked of Jews and not Zionists. In actual practise, the distinction between the two has become increasingly blurred in the discourse of the nationalists and jihadists who lead the armed struggle against Israel. In the 60s and 70s the PLO and its leftist supporters claimed that they wanted to live in peace with the Jews in a democratic secular Palestine; but today the ideology of the intifada is overwhelmingly that of Islamic radicalism, which makes little secret of its wish to expel the Jews from the region or exterminate them outright. As for Trotskyism, it  has long joined the ranks of the nationalist pogrom. We have already mentioned Abram Leon’s warning that Zionism could do nothing to save the Jews of war-torn Europe; today we can add that the Jews most threatened with physical destruction are located precisely in the promised land of Zionism. Zionism has not only built a huge prison-house for the Palestinian Arabs who live under its humiliating regime of military occupation and brutal violence; it has also imprisoned the Israeli Jews themselves in the gruesome spiral of terrorism and counter-terror which no imperialist “peace process” seems able to overcome.

Capitalism in its decadence has conjured up all the demons of hatred and destruction that have ever haunted humanity, and armed them with the most devastating weapons ever seen. It has given rise to genocide on a scale unprecedented in history, and shows no sign of abating; despite the Holocaust of the Jews, despite the cries of Never Again, we have seen not only a virulent revival of anti-Semitism but also ethnic massacres on a scale which bear comparison with the Holocaust, such as the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis in Rwanda in the space of a few weeks, or the continuous rounds of ethnic cleansing that ravaged the Balkans throughout the 90s. This revival of genocide is characteristic of decadent capitalism in its final phase – that of decomposition. These terrible events give us a glimpse of the future that the final playing out of decomposition holds in store: the self-destruction of humanity. And  as with Nazism in the 30s, we see alongside these massacres the return of the most reactionary and apocalyptic ideologies all over the planet  -  Islamic fundamentalism, founded on racial hatred and the mysticism of suicide, is the most obvious expression of this, but not the only one: we can equally point to the Christian fundamentalism that has begun to influence the highest echelons of power in the most powerful nation of earth; to the growing grip of Jewish orthodoxy on the Israeli state, to Hindu fundamentalism in India which, like its Muslim mirror image in Pakistan, is armed with nuclear weapons; to the “fascist” revival in Europe. Neither should we leave the religion of democracy out of this list; just as it did during the period of the Holocaust, democracy today, the banner flown by US and British tanks in Afghanistan and Iraq, has shown itself to be the other side of the coin to the more overtly irrational faiths; a fig-leaf for totalitarian repression and imperialist war. All these ideologies are expressions of a social system which has reached an absolute dead-end and offers humanity nothing but destruction.

Capitalism in its decline has created a myriad of national antagonisms, which it has proved unable to resolve; it has merely used them to pursue its drive towards imperialist war. Zionism, which has only been able to establish its goals in Palestine by subordinating itself to the needs first of British, then of American imperialism, is a clear example of this rule. But contrary to the anti-Zionist ideology, it is by no means a special case. All nationalist movements have operated in exactly the same way, including Palestinian nationalism which has functioned as the agent of various imperialist powers large and small, from Nazi Germany to the USSR and Saddam’s Iraq, not forgetting some of the contemporary powers of Europe. Racism and national oppression are realities in capitalist society, but the answer to them does not lie in any schemes for national self-determination, or in the fragmentation of the oppressed into a host of “partial” movements (blacks, gays, women, Jews, Muslims, etc). All such movements have proven to be an added means for capitalism to divide the working class and prevent it from seeing its real identity. It is only by developing this identity, through its practical and theoretical struggles, that the working class can overcome all the divisions within its ranks and forge itself into a power capable of taking on the power of capital.

This does not mean that all national, religious and cultural issues will automatically disappear once the class struggle reaches a certain height. The working class will make the revolution long before it has cast off all the baggage of the ages, or rather in the very process of casting it off; and in the period of transition to communism it will have to confront a host of problems relating to religious belief and cultural or ethnic identity as it seeks to unify the whole of humanity into a global community.  It is axiomatic that the victorious proletariat will never forcibly suppress particular cultural expressions any more than it will outlaw religion; the experience of the Russian revolution has demonstrated that such attempts only serve to reinforce the grip of outmoded ideologies. The mission of the proletarian revolution, as Trotsky forcefully argued, is to lay the material foundations for the synthesis of all that is best in the many different cultural traditions in man’s history – for the first truly human culture.  And thus we return to the Marx of 1843: the solution to the Jewish question is real human emancipation, which will finally allow man to abandon religion by extirpating the social roots of religious alienation.

Amos  

The Massive Attacks of Capital Demand a Mass Response From the Working Class

Faced with the head-on attack on pensions in France and Austria, all sectors of the working class have joined the struggle with a determination unknown since the end of the 1980s. In France, weeks of repeated demonstrations brought together hundreds of thousands of workers from both public and private sector: 1½ million workers were in streets of the main cities in France on the 13th May, almost one million took part in a single demonstration in Paris on the 25th May, and on the third of June 750,000 more people mobilised. Workers in the education sector were at the forefront of the social movement, especially because they were the hardest hit. Austria witnessed the most massive demonstrations since the end of World War II against similar attacks on pensions: more than 100,000 people on the 13th May, and almost one million on the third of June (this in a country of less than 10 million inhabitants). In Brasilia, the administrative capital of Brazil, 30,000 public sector employees demonstrated on the 11th June against a reform in taxation and Social Security, but also against a reform of pensions imposed by the new "left-wing government" of Lula. In Sweden, 9,000 municipal and public sector workers have gone on strike against cuts in social budgets.

The bourgeoisie makes the working-class pay for capitalism's crisis

Up to now, the bourgeoisie has more or less succeeded in spreading out its anti working-class attacks over time, and in separating them by sector, by region, or by country. The major characteristic of the evolution of the present situation is that, since the end of the 1990s, these attacks have been undertaken more brutally, more violently, and more massively. This is an indication of the acceleration of the world crisis which is expressed in two major and concomitant phenomena on an international level: the return of the open recession, and the new surge in debt.

The countries at the heart of capitalism are now deeply affected by the new plunge into recession: this has been true for Japan for several years and is now the case in Germany. Officially, Germany has already entered a new period of recession (for the second time in two years). Other European states, in particular Holland, are in the same situation. The United States has been seriously threatened by recession for two years: unemployment, the trade deficit, and the federal budget deficit are all on the rise once again. The French newspaper Le Monde (16th May) sounds the alarm over the danger of deflation and the return of the spectre of the 1930s: “not only is the hope of a recovery following the war in Iraq fading by the day, its place is being taken by growing fear that the American economy is going to plunge into a spiral of falling prices (...) A scenario for disaster in which the price of services and consumer goods is in constant decline, profits collapse, companies reduce their workforce and announce redundancies, bringing in their wake the new decline in consumption and in prices. Households and companies are too indebted to meet their commitments, while exhausted banks are forced to restrict credit under the impotent gaze of the Federal Reserve. These are not merely the hypotheses of experts in search of strong sensations. This has been the situation in Japan for more than 10 years, punctuated by brief periods of remission”. What the bourgeoisie calls deflation is nothing other than a lasting plunge into recession, where the scenario described above becomes a reality, and where the bourgeoisie is no longer able to use credit to launch a recovery. This completely refutes the arguments of all those who thought that the war in Iraq would make possible the recovery of the world economy. In reality, the war and the drawn-out occupation which has followed it, are first and foremost a heavy burden for the American and British economies ($1 billion a week for the American occupying forces alone). Moreover, workers all over the world are paying for the accelerating arms race (amongst others, through various new European military programmes).

The second characteristic of the economic situation is a further increase in an already enormous level of debt, which represents a veritable time-bomb for the period to come, and which affects every level of the economy from households, to companies, to national governments, whose level of debt has never been so high (see the article on the crisis in this issue of the Review).

As always, capitalism is trying to overcome the crisis and its contradictions using the two only methods which it has at its disposal:

• on one hand, intensifying the productivity of labour by increasing the pressure on the workers who produce surplus value;
• on the other hand, directly attacking the cost of variable capital, in other words by reducing the rate of pay of the workforce. There are several methods for this: proliferating redundancy plans; reducing wages, most commonly via “delocalisation” and the use of immigrant workers to reduce the cost of labour as much as possible; and the reduction in the cost of the social wage by cutting all the social budgets (pensions, health, unemployment benefit).

Capitalism is forced to act more and more simultaneously on all these levels, in other words the state everywhere is pushed to attack at the same time every aspect of working-class living conditions. In the logic of bourgeois profit there is no other solution than to undertake these massive and head-on attacks. Obviously, the ruling class is careful to plan and to co-ordinate the rhythm of these attacks according to the country, in order to avoid simultaneous social conflicts on the same question.

Since the 1970s, with a generalisation of massive unemployment and the sacrifice of thousands of companies and of the less profitable sectors of the economy, millions of jobs had disappeared and the bourgeoisie has revealed its inability to integrate new generations of workers into the productive process. But today, we are at a new watershed: not only is the ruling class continuing to make large numbers of workers redundant, it now has the social wage in its sights. In some central countries, like United States, “social protection” has always been virtually non-existent. But in these cases, and in the USA in particular, pensions were generally financed by the employer. At the root of the “financial scandals” of recent years, of which the most spectacular example is that of Enron, is the fact that companies used their pension funds to invest on the stock exchange and this money has been lost in doubtful speculation, leaving the companies unable to pay out a decent pension or to compensate their despoiled workforce, who are now reduced to dire poverty. In countries like Great Britain, social protection has already been to a large extent dismantled. The British case is a particularly edifying example of what the working class can expect: since the “Thatcher years”, 20 years ago, pensions have been based on private pension funds. But the situation has become much worse since then. By transforming pensions into private funds, the idea was that shares in these funds would bring in a lot of money as the stock exchange rose. The opposite has happened. With a collapse in share prices, hundreds of thousands of workers are reduced to poverty (the basic state pension is only about €120 a week). Some 20% of pensioners live below the poverty line, condemning many of them to continue working beyond the age of 70, generally in poorly paid and precarious jobs. Many workers find themselves in the agonising situation of being unable to pay for their lodging or for their medical expenses. Elderly people dependent on expensive treatment can no longer rely on hospital care. British clinics and hospitals thus refuse dialysis to elderly patients who are unable to pay for it, directly condemning them to death. More generally, the seizure of houses or flats whose owners can no longer pay their mortgage has quadrupled in two years, while 5 million people are living below the poverty line (this figure has doubled since the 1970s) and unemployment is rising faster than at any time since 1992. The first capitalist country to have set up the welfare state after World War II, has become the first test bed for its dismantling.

The turning point in the violence of the attack

Today, these attacks are becoming general, “globalised”, shattering the myth of “social gains”. The nature of these new attacks is significant. They are targeting pensions, unemployment benefit, and healthcare. More and more clearly, they reveal everywhere the bourgeoisie’s growing inability to finance the social budget. The scourge of unemployment and the end of the Welfare State are two major expressions of the global bankruptcy of capitalism. This is illustrated by the recent attacks in several countries:

In France, the government intends to go further than merely aligning state sector pensions with the private sector by raising the number of years worked from 37.5 to 40 in order to gain access to a “full” pension. It has also announced that the number of years worked will be further increased to 42, and then increased beyond that depending on the level of employment. Contributions will be raised for all wage earners in order to refill the pension funds' coffers, not to mention the requirement to make contributions to new “top-up” pension funds. According to official propaganda, the reasons are purely demographic: the ageing of the population is supposedly responsible for the deficit in the pension funds and is destined to become an intolerable burden of the economy. Apparently there will not be enough young workers to pay the pensions for a growing number of old people. The reality is that young people enter working life increasingly late, not only because the technical progress of production requires longer training but also because they have an ever greater difficulty in finding a job (raising the school leaving age is moreover another means of hiding unemployment amongst young workers). In reality the main reason for the fall in contributions and the deficit in the pension funds is the inexorable rise in unemployment (which represents at least 10% of the working population) and in precarious employment. In reality, many employers have no interest in keeping older workers on the payroll, since they are usually better paid than young workers, while being less resilient and less “adaptable”. Behind all the talk on the need to work longer there lies in fact a huge drop in the level of pensions. As soon as they are put into place the planned measures will immediately reduce pensioners’ purchasing power by between 15 and 50%, including for the worst paid workers. Another “reform” is that of the social security system, to be announced this coming autumn, which has already begun with the withdrawal of 600 medicines from the approved list, with a further 650 to follow by ministerial decree in July.

In Austria, an attack comparable to that in France is aimed mainly at pensions. Whereas the length of working life was already set at 40 years, it is now to rise to a minimum of 42 years and 45 years for most workers, with a decrease in pensions of up to 40% for some categories. The conservative Chancellor Schlüssel has made the most of early elections in February to form a new homogeneous government of the right, following the “crisis” of September 2002 which put an end to the cumbersome coalition with Haider's populist party, leaving the bourgeoisie with its hands free to undertake these new attacks.

In Germany, the red-green government has begun an austerity programme baptised "agenda 2010" attacking several aspects of the social wage simultaneously. In the first place, there is a drastic reduction in unemployment benefits. The duration of benefits will be reduced to 18 months from 36 months for workers over 55 and to 12 months for the rest. After that, and redundant workers will have no other resource than “social pay” (which represents about €600 per month). This is the equivalent of halving retirement pensions for 1½ million unemployed workers, just as the number of unemployed in Germany is rising above 5 million. As for the health service, the plan is to reduce the level of health benefits (reduction in the repayment of medicines and doctor’s visits, restriction in the number of sick days). For example benefits will be stopped after the sixth week of sickness per year, and people will be obliged to top up with private insurance. These restrictions in healthcare go together with an increase in contributions for all wage earners since the beginning of 2003. At the same time pensions are also under attack in Germany: the retirement age, which is already 65 years on average, will be raised as will wage earners' contributions, while the automatic annual revaluation of pensions is to be suppressed. Since the beginning of the year taxes have been raised (paid at source on wages), measures adopted to encourage temporary work, while the precarity of work continues to increase with the number of part-time or limited duration contracts.

In Holland, the new coalition government (Christian-Democrats, liberals, reformists) has followed Austria in getting rid of its populist wing and announced an austerity plan based on budget restrictions in the social domain (with a view to saving €15 billion), notably for a radical reform of unemployment benefit and the criteria for disability pensions as well as the general revision of wages policy.

In Poland, healthcare is also under attack. While the most serious illnesses continue to be taken in charge, most healthcare will only be reimbursed at 60 or at 30 percent. “Benign” sicknesses like flu or tonsillitis will not be reimbursed at all. State employees are no longer protected from redundancy.

As we have already seen above, in Brazil Lula's Workers' Party is at the forefront of the cuts in social budgets Latin America.

Within the framework of the enlargement of the European Union the International Labour Office directive of 9th June stipulates that for 5 out of the ten countries concerned (Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Lithuania and Estonia), pension funds should be financed solely by wage earners' contributions, whereas previously they were financed jointly by the employer, the state, and the wage earner.

We can thus see that whatever the government, whether it be right or left, the same attacks are under way.

They are accompanied by a wave of massive redundancies: 30,000 job cuts at Deutsche Telekom, 13,000 at France Telecom, 40,000 in the Deutsche Bahn (German railways), 2,000 job cuts at the SNCF (French Railways). Fiat has just announced 10,000 job cuts on the European continent after laying-off 8,100 workers at the end of 2002 in Italy itself. Alstom has announced 5,000 job cuts. Swissair plans to eliminate a further 3,000 jobs in a sector which has been particularly hard hit by the crisis during the last two years. The American merchant bank Merrill Lynch has laid off 8,000 employees since last year. In Britain, 42,000 jobs have been lost during the first quarter of 2003. Not a country, not a sector is spared. It is forecast for example that between now and 2006, 400 companies per week will close in Britain. Everywhere job insecurity is becoming the rule.

The mobilisation of the working class in the recent struggles was thus a response to this qualitative aggravation of the crisis and the attacks against its living conditions which are the result.

The balance of class forces

The first thing to be said about the struggles is that they are a stinging refutation of all those ideological campaigns that followed the collapse of the Eastern bloc and the Stalinist regimes. No, the working class has not disappeared! No, its struggles do not belong to the distant past! These struggles show that the perspective is still towards class confrontations, despite the confusion and the enormous ebbing of class-consciousness provoked by the upheavals of the period since 1989. An ebb which has been still further deepened by the ravages of advanced social decomposition, that has tended to deprive the workers of their reference points and their class identity, as well as by the bourgeoisie's antifascist and pacifist campaigns, and “citizens’ mobilisations”. Confronted with this situation the attacks of the bourgeoisie and the state are pushing the workers once again to assert themselves on a class terrain and eventually to rediscover their past experience and vital needs of the struggle. The workers are thus called to renew their experience of the sabotage of the struggle by the trade unions and the leftists - the organs which the bourgeoisie uses to control the class. Still more importantly, despite the bitterness of their defeat in the immediate, deeper questions are beginning to emerge within the working class about the way society functions, and these in turn tend to call into question all the illusions sown by the bourgeoisie.

In order to understand the implications of these attacks and what these events represent for the evolution of the balance of class forces, it has never been the Marxist method to concentrate on the workers’ struggles alone, but on the contrary to discern what is the main purpose of the enemy class, what is its strategy, what the problems are that it confronts at a given moment. For in order to struggle against the ruling class, the working class must always not only identify who are its enemies, but also understand what they are doing and how they manoeuvre against it. The study of bourgeois policy is usually most important key to a deeper understanding of the overall balance of forces between classes. Marx spent far more time, pages, and energy in examining, dissecting the behaviour, and dismantling the ideology of the bourgeoisie in order to reveal its inner logic, its flaws and the contradictions of capitalism, then he spent in describing or examining the workers’ struggle in itself. This is why for example, in dealing with an altogether more important event, The class struggles in France of 1848 analyses essentially the mainsprings of bourgeois policy. As Lenin wrote in What is to be done? (1902) “The consciousness of the working masses cannot be genuine class-consciousness, unless the workers learn, from concrete, and above all from topical, political facts and events to observe every other social class in all the manifestations of its intellectual, ethical, and political life (...) Those who concentrate the attention, observation, and consciousness of the working class exclusively, or even mainly, upon itself alone are not Social-Democrats”, in other words not real revolutionaries. In the resolution on the international situation adopted at its 15th Congress, the ICC wrote “Marxism has always insisted that it is insufficient to look at the class struggle only in terms of what the proletariat itself is doing; since the bourgeoisie also wages a class struggle against the proletariat and its coming to consciousness, it has always been a key element of Marxist activity to examine the strategies and tactics used by the ruling class to forestall its mortal enemy” (International Review n°113). The failure to study the class enemy has always been typical of workerist, councilist, and economist tendencies within the workers movement. Such a vision forgets a fundamental given which should serve as a compass in the analysis of any situation, which is that outside a directly pre-revolutionary situation, it is never the proletariat which is on the offensive. In other cases it is always the bourgeoisie, as the ruling class, which is on the attack and which forces the proletariat to respond; the bourgeoisie constantly organises not only to adapt itself to the workers’ reactions but to plan ahead to confront these reactions. The ruling class keeps its indomitable enemy under constant surveillance. To do so it possesses specific instruments which allow it constantly to take the temperature of the social situation: its spies, the trade unions.

And so, in the present situation, the first question which has to be asked is why the bourgeoisie carried out these attacks in the way it did.

The bourgeoisie's strategy to push through its economic attacks

The media has compared the movement in France at length with the public sector strikes against the Juppé government during November to December 1995, which witnessed similar demonstrations. In 1995, the main objective of the government was to make use of the whole bourgeoisie’s ideological campaign on the supposed bankruptcy of Marxism and communism following the collapse of the Stalinist regimes, and to exploit the ebb in class consciousness, to strengthen and renew the credibility of the trade union control apparatus by wiping out the accumulated experience of the workers’ struggles between 1968 and the 1980s, especially on the trade union question. Even though part of the Juppé plan (the reform of social security financing and the creation of a new income tax) was put through on the sly by the Jospin government in the months that followed, the part devoted to pension reform (with the abolition of the “special status” of the public sector) was deliberately sacrificed by the bourgeoisie in order to present this as a “victory for the trade unions”. The bourgeoisie wanted the strike to be seen as a “working class victory” thanks to the trade unions, which had apparently forced the government to retreat, and as an example to be followed. The movement was thus given enormous media coverage internationally. The working class around the world was thus invited to make “the French December 1995” a reference for all its struggles to come, and above all to see in the trade unions which had been so “combative”, so “united” and so “determined” throughout these events, the best allies they could have to defend them against the attacks of capital. Indeed the movement provided an essential reference for the trade union struggles in Belgium immediately afterwards and in Germany six months later, by polishing up the image of trade union militancy which had been considerably tarnished in the past. Today the level of the economic crisis is no longer the same. The gravity of the capitalist crisis forces the national bourgeoisie to attack the problem head-on. The threat to the pension system is only one of the first measures in a long series of new massive and frontal attacks that are in preparation.

The bourgeoisie never improvises when it confronts the working class. It always tries to weaken it as much as possible. To do so, it often uses the tactic of sparking off social movements before large masses of the working class are ready for them, by provoking certain sectors which are more ready to launch themselves immediately into the movement. The most striking historical example comes to us from January 1919: the crushing of the Berlin workers, who had risen against a provocation by the Social-Democratic government but who remained isolated from their class, which was not yet ready as a whole to undertake a general confrontation with the bourgeoisie. The present attack on pensions in France was also accompanied by a strategy aimed at limiting the working class reaction which must, sooner or later, respond to this attack. Since it could not avoid the struggle, the bourgeoisie had to arrange things so that it should end in a painful defeat for the working class, such that the proletariat should once again doubt its own ability to react to the attack as a class. The bourgeoisie therefore chose to burst the abscess and to provoke the personnel of the education sector by further and particularly heavy attacks aimed specifically at them, in order that the latter should start the struggle first, exhaust themselves as much as possible, and suffer the most stinging defeat. It is not the first time that the French bourgeoisie and its European colleagues have provoked one sector as part of a manoeuvre against the whole working class. The same tactic had already been used for example in 1995 with the railway workers of the SNCF.

Under the Jospin government, the bourgeoisie - through its mouthpiece Allègre - had already announced its intention to “slim down the mammoth” of the education system which employs by far the greatest proportion of state employees. Like most of the public sector (except defence, the police, and the legal system, in other words the bodies responsible for state repression), it had already suffered budget cuts which planned the non-replacement of departures in three jobs out of four, teachers excepted. Then came the announcement at the end of 2002 of the elimination of thousands of “teaching auxiliary” jobs which had been created in the primary schools as part of the previous government’s youth employment scheme, and of monitors in the secondary education system. These job cuts, apart from making many young people redundant, mean an intolerable increase in the burden on the teachers, leaving them isolated in the front line faced with students who are more and more difficult as a result of the growing weight of social decomposition (drugs, violence, delinquency, social and family problems, etc).

The education sector, already in difficulty, thus not only had to suffer the general attack on pensions: it had inflicted on it yet another, specific attack, the project to decentralise the non-teaching personnel. For the latter, this meant being employed no longer by the national authority but by regional authorities, with an inferior and eventually more precarious work contract. This was thus a real provocation in order to concentrate the conflict in this sector. The bourgeoisie also chose the moment to attack which gave it two buffers to stop any mobilisation: for the teachers, the period of exams for the baccalaureate, and for the working class as a whole the period of the summer holidays. Similarly, in order to break the movement's combativeness, to divide and isolate it, the government had planned in advance to give some ground on the decentralisation proposals. It thus withdrew a small part of the specific attack, that is to say the decentralisation for the personnel who are closest to the teachers (psychologists, orientation councillors, and social assistants). By giving a special treatment to a minority of the personnel in question (about 10,000 employees) to the detriment of the technicians and maintenance workers (100,000 employees), the bourgeoisie was also able to divide the unity of the movement and to defuse the anger of the teachers. To complete the defeat, the government refused to negotiate the payment of strike days and applied the law in all its rigour by refusing to spread out the loss pay over more than two months: as Raffarin said, “by law, strike days are not paid. The government is applying the law”. The bourgeoisie knew also that it could count on the complete collaboration of the trade unions and leftists to share out the job of dividing and disorientating the movement, holding some back to discourage them from entering the struggle, while on the contrary pushing the others resolutely into the movement, exhorting the first to be“responsible”, “reasonable” and the others “to hang on” and to “spread” the struggle with calls for a general strike just as the movement was ebbing in order to extend the defeat especially amongst the teachers.

We thus find ourselves today in a classic schema of the class struggle: first the government attacks, and the trade unions preach union unity in order to start the massive movement of the workers behind the unions and under their control. Then the government opens negotiations where the unions divide amongst themselves in order to spread division and disorientation in the workers' ranks. This method, which plays on the trade unions’ division in the face of rising class struggle, has been thoroughly proven by the bourgeoisie as a means to preserve union control overall by concentrating as far as possible the loss in credibility on one or other trade union apparatus appointed in advance. This also means that the unions are once again put to the test, and that the inevitable development of the struggles to come once again poses the problem for the working class of the confrontation with its enemies in order to assert its class interests and the needs of its struggle.

Each national bourgeoisie adapts to the level of workers’ militancy in order to impose its plans. The 35 hour week is presented everywhere as a social gain, when in reality it constitutes an attack of the first order against the proletariat in Germany and in France where the laws on the 35 hour week have allowed the bourgeoisie to generalise the "flexibility" of the workforce and to adapt it to the needs of the company (increasing productivity, reduction or suppression of breaks in the working day, weekend working, unpaid overtime, etc). The workers in the old East German Länder have recently “won” the promise that by 2009 they too will "benefit" from the 35 hour week like workers in the West, this measure having been refused previously under the pretext of Eastern workers’ inferior productivity. The IG-Metall engineering union has been constantly trying to turn the workers away from their demands (in particular for raising wages) by organising a whole series of strikes and demonstrations on this theme. And today IG-Metall is pushing the workers in the East to demand the 35 hour week immediately, in other words encouraging them to be more exploited as quickly as possible. At the same time, the same trade union has done nothing but circulate petitions against the austerity measures of the government’s “agenda 2010”, with the exception of demonstrations in one or two towns (in Stuttgart on the 21st May for example), while at the same time the service union was organising a national demonstration reserved for workers in this sector in Berlin on the 17th May.

The prospects for the future of the class struggle

For years, confronted with the aggravation of the crisis whose first consequence for the working class has been a brutal rise in unemployment and considerable impoverishment, the bourgeoisie has undertaken a policy aimed first and foremost at masking the extent of the phenomenon. To do so it has constantly manipulated official statistics, massively deprived the unemployed of benefit and therefore removed them from the figures, and encouraged part-time working, limited contracts, the return of women to the home, underpaid or unpaid training schemes and youth employment schemes. It has also constantly encouraged older workers to take early retirement, holding up the perspective of a reduction in the number of years at work while at the same time highlighting the rise in the population's life expectancy (whose benefits the workers share the least moreover). At the same time, for those still at work, this propaganda aimed at making them accept a dramatic deterioration in their working and living conditions as a result of the job cuts carried out in the name of modernisation in the face of competition. The workers have been asked to submit to the hierarchy, and to the demands of productivity to save their jobs. In order to contain the rise in social discontent as a result of this accelerating deterioration in their conditions of existence, a reduction in the age of retirement has been used as an outlet orchestrated by the bourgeoisie and even deliberately put into operation by lowering the legal retirement age in certain countries. In France in particular, the reduction by law of the retirement age to 60, adopted under the left government, was presented as a social victory when in fact it was little more than a recognition of existing social reality. Today the aggravation of the crisis no longer allows the bourgeoisie to pay the workers to retire and to reimburse their medical costs. With a parallel increase in unemployment a growing number of workers will be less and less able to cash in an adequate number of years’ contributions to qualify for a decent retirement. Once a worker has stopped producing surplus value, he becomes a burden on capitalism such that the best solution for this system, and one towards which it is cynically moving, is that he dies as soon as possible.

This is why the brutal and open attack on pensions is expressed in the deep anxiety that is really working on the workers’ militancy. But it also opens the door to a more profound questioning about the real perspectives for the future but capitalism can offer society.

In 1968 one of the main factors in the resurgence of the working class and its struggle on to the scene of history at the international level, was the brutal end of the illusions encouraged by the period of reconstruction, which for a whole generation had offered the working class full employment and clear improvements in its living conditions after the unemployment of the 1930s and the rationing and famine of the war and the immediate post-war period. With the first expressions of the open crisis, the working class felt itself under attack not only in its living and working conditions, but also in terms of a blockage in the perspectives for the future, of a new period of increasing economic and social stagnation as a result of the world crisis. The size of the workers’ struggles following May 1968 and the reappearance of the revolutionary perspective showed clearly that the bourgeoisie's mystifications about the “consumer society” and the “bourgeoisification” of the working class were wearing thin. Though we must keep things in proportion, there are analogies between the present attacks and the situation at that time. Obviously there is no question of identifying the two periods. 1968 was a major historical event which marked the emergence from more than four decades of counter-revolution. It had an impact on the importance of the international proletariat incomparably greater than that the present situation.

Nonetheless today, we are witnessing a collapse of what appeared in a sense as a consolation after years in the prison of wage labour, and which has been one of the pillars that has allowed the system to hang on for 20 years: retirement at the age of 60, with the possibility at that age of enjoying life free from many material constraints. Today, the workers are being forced to abandon the illusion of being able to escape for the last years of their life from what is increasingly experienced as a purgatory: a working environment where there are always too few people for the job, the amount of work is constantly increasing, and the rhythm of work is constantly speeding up. Either they will have to work for longer which means a reduction in the length of the period when they could at last hope to escape from wage labour, or else because they have not contributed for long enough they will be reduced to a wretched poverty where deprivation takes the place of overwork. For every worker, this new situation poses the question of the future.

Moreover, the attack on pensions concerns all workers, and bridges the gap that had arisen between the generations of workers in a period when the weight of unemployment was bourne above all by the younger generations and tended to isolate them in the feeling that the future held nothing for them. This is why all the generations of workers, even the youngest, felt involved and alerted by this attack on pensions whose very nature is such that it creates a feeling of unity in the class and plants the seeds of a deep reflection on the future that is waiting for us in capitalist society.

With this new stage in the deepening of the crisis conditions are ripening for a calling into question of some of the ideological barriers set up by the bourgeoisie during the previous years: that the working class no longer exists, that it is possible to improve living conditions and reform the system if only to benefit from a peaceful retirement -- everything that encouraged the workers to resign themselves to their fate. This brings with it a ripening of the conditions for the working class to recover its consciousness with a revolutionary perspective. The attacks unify the conditions for a working-class counter-attack at an ever wider level, beyond national boundaries. They are laying down the same warp and weft for more massive, more unified, and more radical struggles in the future.

They constitute the yeast for a slow rising of the conditions for the massive struggles which will be necessary for the working class is to recover its identity. Little by little, they will tear down the illusions in the possibility of reforming the system. It is the action of the masses themselves which will make possible the re-emergence of the consciousness of being an exploited class that bears with it a different historical perspective for society. In this sense, the crisis is the ally of the proletariat. This being said, the road the working class must travel in order to assert its own revolutionary perspective is no motorway: it will be terribly long and difficult, strewn with the pitfalls that its enemy will inevitably put in its path.

The working class has just suffered a defeat in its struggle against the state's attack on pensions, notably in France and in Austria. Nonetheless, the struggle was a positive experience for the working class in the first place because it reasserted its existence in its mobilisation on its own class terrain. Faced with the other attacks which the bourgeoisie is preparing against it, the working class has no other choice than to develop its own combat. Inevitably, it will suffer further defeats before being able to put forward the revolutionary perspective. As Rosa Luxembourg forcefully declared in her last article, Order reigns in Berlin, written on the eve of her assassination at the orders of the Social-Democrat government: “individual battles of the revolution end in formal defeat. But revolution is the only form of ‘war’ -- and this is another peculiar law of history -- in which the ultimate victory can be prepared only by a series of ‘defeats’ (...) There is but one condition. The question of why each defeat occurred must be answered" (Die Rote Fahne, 14th January 1919). For these defeats to lead to the final victory, the proletariat must be able to draw lessons from them. In particular, it will have to understand that the trade unions are everywhere organs for the defence of the interests of the state against its own interests. But more generally, it must become aware that it has to confront an enemy which knows how to manoeuvre in order to defend its own class interests, which can count on the whole panoply of instruments to protect its domination, from its police and its prisons to its left parties and even its certified “revolutionaries” (the leftist groups, especially the Trotskyists), and above all which has all means (including its university academics) to draw its own lessons from past confrontations. Once again, as Rosa Luxembourg said: “The revolution does not develop evenly of its own volition, in a clear field of battle, according to a cunning plan devised by clever 'strategists'. The revolution’s enemies can also take the initiative, and indeed as a rule they exercise it more frequently than does the revolution” (ibid). In its gigantic battle with its capitalist enemy, the proletariat can only count on its own strength, on its self-organisation and above all on its consciousness.

Wim, 22nd June, 2003

Vietnam War: divergences on imperialist policy shake US bourgeoisie

American involvement in Vietnam began following French imperialism’s defeat in Indochina when the US moved in to pick up the pieces for the West. The strategy, again a manifestation of containment, was designed to prevent what Eisenshower’s Secretary of State Dulles had called the “domino theory” – one country after an another falling to Russian imperialism like dominoes. The aim was to transform the temporary separation of Vietnam into a northern and southern zone created by the Geneva agreements into a permanent division, as in the Korean peninsula. In this sense the American policy of subverting the Geneva agreements began under the Republican Eisenhower regime and continued under Kennedy, who began dispatching military advisers to Vietnam in the early 1960s. The Kennedy administration played an integral role in running the country, even authorising a military coup and the assassination of President Diem in 1963. The impatience of the White House with the general who delayed in assassinating Diem, has been well documented. Following the assassination of Kennedy in 1963, Johnson continued the American intervention in Vietnam, which mushroomed into America’s longest military war.

The American bourgeoisie was united behind this venture, even as a vocal anti-war movement, under leftist and pacifist auspices began to grow. The anti-war movement was largely marginal in American politics from 1965 until 1968, a safety valve for radicalised students and black activists. The Tet Offensive launched in January 1968 by North Vietnam and the NLF in the South, which included suicide attacks on the American embassy and presidential palace in Saigon, actually ended in bloody defeat for the Stalinists, but the very attempt completely exploded the American military’s long standing propaganda that the war was going so well that victory was just a few months away. Important elements within the bourgeoisie began to go sour on the war as it was now clear that the war in Vietnam would be a long drawn out affair, an orientation in stark contrast to Eisenhower’s warning, when he left office, about avoiding getting bogged down in a protracted land war in Asia.

Simultaneously another strategic orientation for American imperialism crystallised around the necessity to switch focus towards the oil rich, strategically important Middle East, where Russian imperialism was making headway in the Arab world.

President Johnson was approached by a committee of Democratic Party elder statesmen and urged to discard his plans to run for re-election, and to concentrate on ending the war – essentially an internal palace coup. In March, Johnson went on television to declare that he would not seek, nor would he accept, his party’s nomination for re-election, and that instead he would devote his energies to ending the war. At the same time, reflecting the growing divergences on imperialist policy within the bourgeoisie, the American mass media jumped on the anti-war bandwagon. and the anti-war movement was brought in from the leftist margins to the centre of American politics. For example, Walter Cronkite, the news anchorman for one of the major television networks, who ended each broadcast with his slogan “and that’s the way it is”, went to Vietnam and came back and announced that the war had to be stopped. The NBC network began a Sunday evening broadcast called Vietnam This Week, which featured at the end of every show a segment where they displayed photos of the American 18 and 19 year old boys who had been killed that week in Vietnam – an anti-war propagandistic gambit to personalise the war.

Johnson’s troubles were exacerbated by the onset of the open economic crisis and the fact that the proletariat was ideologically undefeated, and that the attempt to implement a policy of “guns and butter” – to wage the war without the necessity of material sacrifice on the home front –proved too costly to sustain. The onset of the open crisis, and the return of the class struggle was echoed in the US by a growing wave of wildcat strikes that continued from 1968 through 1971, often involving angry and disgruntled Vietnam veterans, and which caused serious political difficulties for the American ruling class. The year 1968 in fact symbolised the divisive upheaval in the US as the internal dispute within the bourgeoisie heated up, at the same time as unrest grew on the home front. A couple weeks after Johnson announced his withdrawal from the presidential race, civil rights leader Martin Luther King, who had joined the anti-war chorus in 1967 and who was rumoured to be on the verge of renouncing non-violent protest, was assassinated, triggering violent riots in 132 American cities. In early June Robert F Kennedy, younger brother of John F. Kennedy, who had participated in his brother’s cabinet as Attorney General, who was present in the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis advocating war with Russia, and again in 1963 as the Kennedy Administration waited impatiently for the assassination of Diem, and had now become an anti-war candidate for president in the Democratic primaries, was also assassinated after winning the California primary. There were violent clashes in the streets outside the Democratic convention in July, as the left of the Democratic Party fought bitterly against the Humphrey forces who were bound to continue the war. Nixon, the conservative Republican, won the presidency, promising that he had a secret plan to end the war.

Meanwhile, by October 1969, the NY Times was listing the schedule of events for the Vietnam Moratorium demonstrations on page 2 of the newspaper to help assure a massive turn out. Mainstream politicians and celebrities began to speak at the rallies. The Nixon administration negotiated with the Vietnamese Stalinists but were unsuccessful in terminating the war. Despite the continuation of the war, however, Nixon was pressed to make strides in implementing the détente suggested by Johnson, including diplomatic state visits to Moscow, and negotiating arms control agreements. Though of course they don’t have a Marxist understanding of capitalism’s global economic crisis, even bourgeois analysts have observed that American interest in détente with Russia and scaling back the cold war temporarily were prompted by US economic difficulties that accompanied the onset of the crisis and the return of the proletariat to class struggle. For example David Painter noted that “the war had exacerbated long-standing economic difficulties” for the US, “feeding inflation and further undermining the US balance of payments position (Encyclopedia of US Foreign Policy, p.283-284), Brzezinski cited “US economic difficulties,” (op. cited. P. 200), and George C. Herring observed, “By 1969 it (the war) had raised critical economic and political problems and compelled a reassessment of policies that had gone unchallenged for more than twenty years. Massive military expenditures caused a runaway inflation that undercut postwar prosperity and aroused growing discontent,” all of which “induced the Republican administration of Richard M. Nixon to seek détente with the Soviet Union (Encyclopedia of American Foreign Policy, p. 121).

In 1971, Nixon abandoned the Bretton Woods economic system that had been in place since 1944 by suspending the dollar’s convertibility into gold, which led immediately to the free floating of international currencies and a de-facto devaluation of the dollar. At the same time, Nixon imposed a 10 percent protective tariff on imports, and wage and price controls on the domestic economy. Some capitalist analysts and journalists even began to talk of a permanent decline of American imperialism and the end of the “American century.”

The divisions within the bourgeoisie that insisted on disengagement from Vietnam and a switch in focus to the Middle East were reinforced by continuing unrest and difficulties in the Middle East region, including the Arab oil boycott. Kissinger simultaneously and unsuccessfully handled negotiations with the Vietnamese and personally engaged in shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East. Nixon’s détente initiatives included an opening towards China, which had broken ideologically with Moscow, thus opening up still further opportunities for American imperialism. The cold war posture of refusing to recognise Mao’s regime and insisting that Taiwan was the legitimate government of all of China, maintained with great anti-communist, “freedom loving” ideological rhetoric throughout the 1950s and 1960s was discarded in favour of a project to woo China to switch to the American side in the cold war, which would encircle Russian imperialism with military threats not only from the west in Europe, the south in Turkey, the north (from the US and Canadian based missiles launched over the pole), but also from the east.[1] This new imperialist option only served to increase demands to terminate the war in Vietnam within the American ruing class as liquidation of the war was a precondition for China’s alliance with the US. As a regional power, China had strong interests concerning a conflict in south-east Asia, and was at the time a supporter of North Vietnam.

It was his failure to complete the shift in foreign policy emphasis towards the Middle East and to liquidate the war in order to bring China into the western bloc, that led to the incredible political turmoil of the Watergate period and Nixon’s being driven from office (Agnew, Nixon’s bellicose, hatchet man vice president had been forced to resign earlier on corruption charges in preparation for an orderly transition to an acceptable presidential replacement – Gerald R. Ford).

Within 8 months of Nixon’s removal, with Ford in the White House, Saigon fell to the Stalinists, and American imperialism withdrew from its Vietnam imbroglio, a war that cost 55,000 American and upwards of 3,000,000 Vietnamese. Carter entered the White House in 1977; by 1979 the US had switched to official recognition of mainland China, which now took China’s seat on the Security Council.

The period of 1968-1976 illustrated the tremendous political volatility that accompanies serious political divergences within the American ruling class on imperialist policies. In 8 years, there were four presidents (Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter), of whom two presidents had been driven from office (Johnson and Nixon); Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy had been assassinated and an attempt had been made on the life of George Wallace, right wing populist third party candidate (1972); and the FBI’s and CIA’s role in domestic spying on political adversaries of the administration had brought those two agencies into disrepute with “reform” legislation formally curtailing their powers. The fact that the ruling clique under Nixon used the agencies of the state (FBI/CIA) to gain a decisive advantage over the other clique was intolerable for those fractions of the ruling class who found themselves threatened as a result. The so-called national security crisis following 9/11 has permitted these agencies to once again function completely unfettered.

After the Cold War US imperialist policy adjusts to the absence of a bipolar world

The collapse of the Russian bloc at the end of the 1980s was an unprecedented event. An imperialist bloc disappeared not because it was defeated in imperialist war but because it imploded under the pressure of the historic impasse in the class struggle, the economic crisis and an inability to continue to compete in the arms race with the rival bloc. While American propaganda celebrated its victory over Russian imperialism, and lauded the triumph of democratic capitalism, 1989 proved a Pyrrhic victory for American imperialism, which quickly saw its hegemonic dominance challenged, even within its old alliance, as the discipline that held the two blocs together disappeared. The sudden disappearance of the bipolar confrontation that had characterised the imperialist arena for 45 years eliminated any compulsion for secondary or tertiary powers to adhere any longer to bloc discipline, and the “each for himself” tendency within capitalist decomposition quickly asserted itself on the international level, as newly emboldened smaller imperialisms began playing their own cards, declining any longer to subjugate their interests to those of American imperialism. The first expressions of this decomposition had appeared a decade earlier in Iran, where the Khomeini-led revolution became the first instance in which a country came to break with the US bloc, without the US being able to bring it back into line, and at the same time without it going over to the Russian bloc. Previously, countries on the periphery of world capitalism might play one bloc off against other, and might even switch sides, but none had succeeded in remaining outside the bipolar system. By 1989 this tendency became dominant on the inter-imperialist terrain.

American policy makers suddenly had to adapt to the new array of forces on the international terrain. The expansionist activities of German imperialism were particularly alarming to US imperialism. The Gulf War against Iraq, which had as its pretext Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, an “aggression” that US imperialism itself had set in motion when the American ambassador told the Iraqis that the US would not interfere in an Iraqi-Kuwaiti conflict, was a vehicle for American imperialism to reassert its dominance, and to remind an “everyman for himself” family of nations that the US was the world’s only remaining superpower, and was prepared to exert its military power as the world’s policeman. Against their will, and against their better judgements the European powers, even those who had been cultivating economic and political relationships with Iraq, found themselves obliged not only to formally approve the American war plans, but even to join the “international coalition.” The war was a tremendous success for American imperialism, demonstrating its military superiority, including its smart weaponry, and willingness to exercise power. At home, Bush, the elder, enjoyed incredible political popularity – at one point getting over a 90% approval rating in the opinion polls following the war.

However, Bush proved incapable of consolidating the American success in the Gulf. The restraint against other powers playing their own cards on the international level proved to be a very temporary phenomenon. German imperialism’s advances into the Balkans continued anew, with an acceleration in the splintering of the Yugoslavia, and “ethnic cleansing.” The Bush administration’s inability to consolidate the gains of the Gulf War and formulate an effective strategic response in the Balkans was a central factor in Bush’s failure to be re-elected in 1992. During the presidential campaign, Clinton met with the Pentagon chiefs and assured them he would authorise air strikes in the Balkans and pursue an assertive policy establishing American presence on the ground in that region, a policy that has been an increasingly important aspect of American imperialist policy over the past decade. Despite Republican criticism of Clinton’s policy of committing troops to military interventions without an exit plan during the 2000 campaign, the Bush administration’s invasion of Afghanistan, plans for invasion of Iraq, and dispatch of troops to countries around the globe (US troops are currently stationed in 33 countries) represents a continuity and further evolution of the Clinton policy.

During the Clinton administration a significant policy divergence developed within the American bourgeoisie in regard to Asia, with the far right opposing the strategy to partner with China in the far east rather than Japan. The right wing saw China as an anachronistic communist regime, at risk of implosion, and an unreliable ally – a potential enemy in fact. It was this dispute that underlay the various scandals during late 1990s and the Clinton impeachment. However, all living former presidents, from both parties (with the exception of Alzheimer’s patient Reagan) endorsed the China policy strategy and opposed the impeachment. The right wing paid a heavy price for failing in its attack on Clinton. Newt Gingrich was forced from politics, and other leaders of the impeachment forces were removed from office. In this context it is important to note is that when there are significant imperialist policy disputes within the bourgeoisie and the stakes are high, the combatants do not demur from risking destabilisation of the political order.

Recent divergences within the US ruling class on unilateral action in Iraq

In 1992 Washington adopted a very clear, conscious orientation to guide its imperialist policy in the post cold war period, based on “a fundamental commitment to maintaining a unipolar world in which the United States has no peer competitor. No coalition of great powers without the United States will be allowed to achieve hegemony” (Prof. G.J. Ikenberry, Foreign Affairs, Sept/Oct. 2002, p.49). This policy seeks to prevent the rise of any power in Europe or Asia that could challenge American prominence and serve as a pole of regroupment for the formation of a new imperialist bloc. This was initially spelt out in the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance policy statement drafted by Rumsfeld in1992, during the last year of the first Bush administration which clearly established this new grand strategy: “To prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat of the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union…These regions include Western Europe, East Asia, the territory of the former Soviet Union, and Southwest Asia…the U.S. must show the leadership necessary to establish and protect a new order that holds the promise of convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests…in the non-defence areas, we must account sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order…we must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.”

The policy continued during the Clinton administration, which undertook a tremendous weapons development programme designed to discourage the ambitions of any potential rival, and further enunciated the policy in the 1997 National Military Strategy: “The United States will remain the world’s only global power for the near-term, but will operate in a strategic environment characterised by rising regional powers, asymmetric challenges including WMD, trans-national dangers, and the likelihood of wild cards that cannot be specifically predicted.” The policy was further reiterated by the current Bush administration in the Quadrennial Defense Review Report, issued September 30, 2001, less than three weeks after the attack on the World Trade Center, which identified as an “enduring national interest” the goal of “precluding hostile domination of critical areas, particularly in Europe, Northeast Asia, the East Asian littoral,[2] and the Middle East and Southwest Asia.” The Quadrennial report argued that “well targeted strategy and policy can…dissuade other countries from initiating future military competitions.” And in the National Security Strategy 2002 the Bush administration asserted: “Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equalling, the power of the United States.“ In June 2002, speaking at a West Point graduation ceremony, President Bush affirmed yet again that “America has, and intends to keep, military strengths beyond challenges—thereby making the destabilising arms races of other eras pointless, and limiting rivalries to trade and other pursuits of peace.”

All of this combines to demonstrate the essential continuity in American imperialist policy, across party lines, for well over a decade since the end of the cold war. Continuity of course does not imply that the implementation of this orientation is identical in all respects. Obviously there has been an evolution , especially on the level of the practical application of this orientation, as the world situation has changed over the past decade. For example, the ability of US imperialism to organise an international “coalition” to endorse its military adventures increasingly runs into greater difficulties as time progresses, and the tendency for the US to increasingly go it alone, to act unilaterally, in its strategic efforts to prevent the rise of a rival in Asia or Europe has reached proportions that have triggered serious debates within the ruling team itself.

This debate reflects a recognition of the difficulties American imperialism faces. Though it is incapable of a “complete” consciousness of the development of social and economic forces in the world in the Marxist sense, it is clear the bourgeoisie, and the American bourgeoisie in particular, is quite capable of recognising certain key features in the evolution of the international situation. For example, an article entitled, “The Reluctant Imperialist: Terrorism, Failed States, and the Case for American Empire,” by Sebastian Mallaby, noted that US policy makers recognise growing “chaos” in the international arena, the phenomenon of “failed” states that are incapable of maintaining a modicum of stability in their societies, and the consequent dangers of massive uncontrolled migration and flow of refugees from the periphery to the metropoles of world capitalism. In this context, Mallaby writes, “The logic of neo-imperialism is too compelling for the Bush administration to resist. The chaos in the world is too threatening to ignore, and existing methods for dealing with that chaos have been tried and found wanting” (Foreign Affairs, Mar/Apr, 2002, p.6). Mallaby and other American bourgeois foreign policy theorists advocate the need for the US as the world’s superpower to act to stem the tide of this chaos, even if it has to do so alone. They even talk openly of a “new imperialism” that the US must implement to block the centrifugal forces that threaten to rip global society apart. In the current international situation, they also recognise that the possibility of pressuring America’s erstwhile allies into an international “coalition” in the manner of the 1990-91 Gulf War is virtually zero. Hence the pressure, previously identified in the ICC press, for the US to act unilaterally on the military level is growing immeasurably. The recognition of the need to be prepared to act unilaterally can be traced back to Clinton administration officials who began to openly discuss this option, and lay the groundwork for unilateral action by American imperialism. (See for instance Madeline Albright’s “The Testing of American Foreign Policy’ in Foreign Affairs, Nov./Dec 1998). So in this sense, in Afghanistan when the US secured the “blessing” of the international community for its military operations based on its ideological and political manipulation of the 9/11 aftermath, but then conducted the actual military operations on the ground on their own, even freezing out its close buddy, Great Britain, the Bush administration was acting in continuity with the policy initiated under Clinton.

Even if the bourgeoisie is aware of the need for the US to ultimately act unilaterally, the question of how soon to go how far in acting unilaterally is a serious tactical question for US imperialism, the answer to which is not guided by the precedents of the cold war, when the US frequently acted without consultation with its NATO and other allies, but could count on its power and influence as bloc leader to get the others to fall in line (as it did in Korea, in the Cuban Missile Crisis, in Vietnam, in the case of the Pershing and Cruise missiles in the early ’80’s, etc.). That answer will also have a profound impact on the future evolution of the international situation as well. It is particularly notable that the debate that occurred over the summer months of 2002 took place primarily within the Republican Party leadership itself, within the traditional foreign policy establishment of the Republican Party, in fact. Kissinger, Baker, Eagleburger, even Colin Powell, raised a cautionary warning not to act unilaterally too soon, and argued that it was still possible, and preferable, to secure UN approval for the US hostilities towards Iraq. Some bourgeois commentators in the US even raised the possibility that the Republican foreign policy elders might have been speaking on behalf of George Bush the elder as they argued for a repeat of the approach which guided the previous Gulf War. The Democrats, even the left of that party, were remarkably silent in this dispute within the ruling party, with the sole exception of a brief foray into the spotlight by Gore who tried to score points with the left of the Democrats by issuing a statement that war with Iraq would be an error, distracting attention and focus from the war against terrorism.

The question for us is what is the significance of these divergences within the bourgeoisie of the world’s only superpower.

First, it is important not to exaggerate the significance of the recent debate. Historical precedent demonstrates amply that when there are serious imperialist policy disputes within the American bourgeoisie, while the antagonists understand that the stakes are high, they do not shy away from pursuing their policy orientations even at the risk of provoking political turmoil. Clearly these political consequences were not present in the recent debate, as they were, for example during Vietnam. In no way did this debate reflect any break in the fundamental unity of the American bourgeoisie on imperialist policy. Second, the disagreement was not on the question of war against Iraq, upon which there is nearly complete agreement within the American ruling class. All sides agree with this policy objective, not because of anything that Saddam Hussein has done or threatens to do, or out of a desire to avenge the failings of Bush the elder, or the desire to boost Exxon’s oil profits in any vulgar materialist sense, but because of the necessity to serve a warning again to the European powers who would play their own card in the Middle East, Germany especially. This warning is meant to serve notice that the US is not afraid to use military force to maintain its hegemony. Therefore, it was no accident or particular surprise that it has been German imperialism that has been most vehement in its opposition to the US war preparations, since it is its imperialist interests that are primarily targeted by US imperialism’s offensive.

The debate within the US ruling circles has focused on when and on what basis to unleash the war, and perhaps more critically how far should the US go in acting alone at the present time. The American bourgeoisie knows on the one hand that it must be prepared to act unilaterally, and that acting unilaterally will have significant consequences for it on the international terrain. It will undoubtedly contribute to further isolation of American imperialism, provoke greater resistance and antagonism on the international level, and potentially push other powers to look for possible alliances to counter American aggressiveness, all of which will further impact on the difficulties facing American imperialism in the coming period. So the actual moment when the US discards any pretext of securing international endorsement of its military actions and acts unilaterally is in fact a tactical decision that has serious strategic implications. In March, 2002, Kenneth M. Pollack, currently a Senior Fellow and Deputy Director at the Council on Foreign Affairs and formerly Director for Gulf Affairs on the National Security Council during the Clinton administration openly talked of the need for the government to act quickly to unleash war against Iraq before the war fever whipped up so successfully in the US following 9/11 and the international sympathy created by the terrorist attacks that facilitated other nations into acquiescing in the US military operations evaporated. As Pollack put it, “Too much delay could be as problematic as too little, because it would risk the momentum gained from the victory over Afghanistan. Today the shock of the September 11 attacks is still fresh and the US government and public are ready to make sacrifices – while the rest of the world recognises American anger and may be leery of getting on the wrong side of it. The longer the wait before an invasion, the harder it will be to muster domestic and international support for it, even though the reason for invading would have little or nothing to do with Iraq’s connection to terrorism…The United States can afford to wait a little while before turning to Saddam, in other words, but not indefinitely” (Foreign Affairs, Mar-Apr 2002, p.47). The opposition to US military intervention in Iraq, both within the US working class, which is not all lined up behind this coming war, and around the world among secondary and tertiary powers implies in fact that the US may have indeed delayed too long before attacking Iraq.

It is clear that the more cautious elements within the ruling team, notably Colin Powell, who advocated diplomatic arm twisting to gain Security Council endorsement for military action against Iraq, prevailed within the administration last fall, and, as events have demonstrated, their tactical approach has proven quite effective, in gaining a unanimous vote, which gives the US the pretext to unleash war against Iraq when it wants. But clearly by February any momentum gained last fall has been largely dissipated, as France, Germany, Russia and China have openly opposed American war plans, with three of them (China, France and Russia) having veto power in the Security Council. Critics within the American bourgeoisie have raised concerns that the Bush administration lacks sufficient skill in manoeuvring to gain international endorsement for war (see for example recent comments by Sen. Joseph Biden, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee).

The contradictions inherent in the present situation raise extremely serious problems for the US. Decomposition and chaos on the international level pose the impossibility of creating new “coalitions” on the international level. Thus in fact Rumsfeld and Cheney are right when they insist that it will never again be possible to constitute an international coalition on the level of 1990-91. Yet it is impossible to imagine that US imperialism could permit such a situation to block it from ever again taking military action in pursuit of its own imperialist interests. On the other hand, if the US does take unilateral military action, whatever the short term success it will achieve, it will only isolate the US further on the international level, alienate the smaller countries, and make them contestationist, more resistant to the bully superpower. On the other hand, if the US backs off and does not wage unilateral warfare in the current framework, it would be a serious show of weakness by the superpower, that would only embolden smaller powers to play their own cards and directly challenge US dominance.

The issue for revolutionaries is not to fall into the trap of predicting at what precise moment the American bourgeoisie will unleash unilateral war, whether in Iraq in the near future, or in some other venue at a future date, but to understand clearly the forces at work, the nature of the debate within the US ruling circles, and the serious implications for further chaos and instability on the international situation in the period ahead.

JG

Marxism, an indispensable weapon for the working class

Internationalism, as part of the communist left, has never hidden its belonging to the political milieu which claim its adherence to marxism, the communist theory that has historically best expressed the movement of the working class towards its political and economic emancipation. Marxism has demonstrated its superiority over all other social theories by being able to offer a global understanding of the movement of human history and to predict the broad lines of its future evolution. Moreover marxism as the theoretical viewpoint of the revolutionary class in capitalism , is the most advanced point of human thinking about social reality. At the same time marxism is not a kind of neutral science that can be learned in the unie that can be learned in the universities for the sake of learning. Marxism is over all a weapon of combat of the working class in its revolutionary struggle against capitalism, a tool for the advance of proletarian consciousness through the exposure of bourgeoisie mystifcations and the expelling of all bourgeoisie’s ideological influences from the working class. For us only those political organizations which base themselves in Marxism can be truly meaningful in the struggle to overthrow capitalism by the working class.

Of course we know that one is not a revolutionary simply because it swears to be a "marxist". In fact for the greatest part of the last century most of the forces of the left wing of the political apparatus of the bourgeois state, have, cynically, called themselves "marxists". All around the world every school children is taught that the political continuator of the Socialist parties that helped massacre the proletariat during W.W.I and the Communist parties of the Stalinist counterrevolution are marxist organizations –the supposed defenders of the interest of the working class. And the same is said of their leftist appendages, the troskist, moist and other so-called marxist-leninist gruplets that chant, with a more radical tone, the same counterrevolutionary songs than the former outionary songs than the former organizations. Indeed the bourgeois media goes as far as calling ‘marxist’ many currently demonized little sanguinary dictators like Castro, Milosevic, Kim Sung, and even Sadam Hussein!

In other words the dominant class has learned a long time ago that to better attack the consciousness of the working class was not enough with openly attacking marxism, as it did at the beginning of the communist movement during the XIX century. In fact the bourgeoisie on its permanent struggle to undermine the consciousness of the proletariat, has found more effective to pretend from the left of its political apparatus to represent ‘marxism’, while from the right accuses it of some of the worst crimes that capitalism has committed against humanity.

Thus we are aware that the allegiance to marxism is not enough to judge the class nature of a political organization –which is determined by their whole practice expressed in their program, political orientations, activities and political origins. On the other hand we know that there are well meaning individuals that want to be revolutionaries while they are at the same time caught in the trap of the "anti-marxist" campaigns that the bourgeoisie has so much developed since the collapse of the Stalist re collapse of the Stalist regimes. Yet, instead of capitulating to the pressure of bourgeois ideology and the confusions of these elements, this makes even more important for marxist revolutionaries to defend marxism.

As far as ND is concerned, according to its elements themselves, they are not "marxists", but the declared enemies of marxism. For us they are not confused well meaning militants, but individuals with a coherent bourgeois orientation and practice.

Is the Defense of Marxism paranoia?

On our statement on ND we essentially said that:

-ND, because of its political activity and main self-declared porpouse –"our goal is to spread an alternative to marxsim"-, is in general sense a bourgeois group, which main function is to spread distrust in the revolutionary traditions of marxism.

-yet, ND, because its main field of action, seems more precisely to be an organized effort of the bourgeoisie to infiltrate the so-called "non-market, anti-satist, libertarian socialist" political milieu of which Discussion bulletin is its main forum.

-and we finished by calling this milieu –particularly its De Leonist 0;particularly its De Leonist components, which consider themselves officially marxist- to react against ND’s activities and in particular for DB to stop being a willing vehicle of the propaganda of this group.

This was and is our position about ND and if the publisher of DB wanted to disagree with us, defend ND or whatever he should at least took up the trouble to quote our statement so that his readers, particularly those which don’t know Internationalism, could have formed an opinion for themselves. The accusation that we are "paranoid" because we defend marxism seems so baseless –even strangely foolish coming from somebody who considers himself a marxist- that hardly deserves a serious response. Any children knows how to use that term to mean that somebody has lost all sense of reality and is victim of delusions of persecution. Well, not even FG can’t deny the reality of ND attacks to marxism (he prefers to use the term "rejection"), is he also without knowing "paranoid"? Of course FG could have said that we are "paranoid" because we have the suspicion that ND is "an organized effort of the bourgeoisie". About this question obviously we don’t have the prove that ND is so, other than calling the attention to its politics and behavior, bs politics and behavior, but this does not change a iota of the fact that ND is a bourgeois group.

However, it seems to us that what Frank G. is avoiding with the polemic trick of labeling us as "paranoid", is to take himself a stand in relation to the class nature and activity of ND. Here are some questions that he should consider answering: Does he consider this group despite its anti-marxism and its bourgeois democratic ideology a genuine political expression of the working class? Does he considers ND to be a part of what DB terms "the real revolutionaries of our era: the non-market, anti-statist, libertarian socialists."? Furthermore, we know that DB considers itself a forum for the debate and discussion between the components of this "political milieu", then, how does his publisher explains that ND has never taken the trouble to respond to the critics of other groups and contributor of DB?

In any case even if FG does not want to take a clear position on ND, he should at least explain his suspicion of paranoia symptoms on those who defend marxism vis a vis the campaigns of slanders of its declared enemies. For our part we think that the defense of marxism is our most elementary responsibility, and call again those with an adherence to DeLeonism –which claimso DeLeonism –which claims a historical affiliation to marxism- to do likewise. This activity is particularly crucial on face of a new generation of militant workers without political culture and almost not experience in the working class struggle.

Eduardo Smith.

The debate on the means of struggle

The revolutionary events of 1905 in Russia provoked something like an earthquake in the whole workers' movement. As soon as the workers' councils were formed, as soon as the workers launched mass strikes the left wing of Social Democracy (with Rosa Luxemburg in her text Mass strike, Party and Trade Unions, Trotsky in his text on 1905, Pannekoek in several texts, especially on parliamentarism), started to draw the lessons of these struggles. The emphasis on the self-organisation of the working class in councils, the critique of parliamentarism, which was pushed forward in particular by Rosa Luxemburg and Pannekoek, was not the result of a tendency towards anarchism but was a first attempt at grasping the lessons of the new situation at the onset of capitalism’s decadence and of trying to understand the new forms of struggles.

Despite the relative international isolation of revolutionaries in Japan the debate on the conditions and means of struggles that also arose in Japan reflected the tumult in the working class and its revolutionary minorities on a world scale.

Much more clearly than before, two tendencies clashed.

On the one hand the tendency around Kotoku, with strong anarchist leanings, since their whole emphasis was on “direct action” along anarchist lines: a general strike and revolutionary syndicalism. Kotoku went to the USA in 1905/06 and became acquainted with the positions of the syndicalist IWW[1] and established contact with Russian anarchists. The anarcho-syndicalist current published the paper Hikari – The Light – from 1905 on.

On the other hand, Katayama defended unconditionally the parliamentary road to socialism in Shinkigen (New Times). Despite the divergences between these two wings they joined in 1906 to form the Socialist Party of Japan (Nippon Shakaito), which – as Katayama suggested – was to fight for socialism "within the limits of the constitution".

The Socialist Party of Japan existed from 24/02/1906 until 22/2/1907 and published the paper Hikari until December 1906.[2]

In February 1907 the 1st Congress of the new socialist party was held, where different points of view clashed. After having elected a delegate for the Stuttgart Congress of the 2nd International the discussion began. Kotoku spoke up vigorously against parliamentary work and demanded direct action (chokusetsu kodo). "We will absolutely not be able to carry out a real revolution for the objectives of socialism through universal suffrage and parliamentary politics. There is no other possible method than the direct action of the united workers (...) Three million men preparing for elections is worth nothing [for this] does not represent three million conscious and organised men". Tazoe defended the struggle on the strictly parliamentary terrain, while the majority adopted a compromise resolution tabled by T. Sakai. This went no further than to remove from the statutes the words "within the limits of the constitution".

At the same time the members were entitled to choose whether or not to take part in the movement for general voting rights, in anti-militaristic and anti-religious movements.

The positions and critique of Kotoku degenerated into anarchism and failed to take up the critique which began to be put forward by the left wing of the 2nd International of the opportunism of social-democracy, against parliamentarism and trade unionism.

Following this debate, Kotoku, who considered himself an anarchist from 1905 onwards, acted more and more as an obstacle to the construction of an organisation; above all he prevented searching elements from dealing in more depth with Marxism. He wanted to propose the perspective of "direct action". Instead of pushing forward the theoretical clarification of political positions, thus contributing to the construction of the organisation, he felt an urge for frenetic activism.

As soon as the congress was over the Socialist Party was forbidden by the police.

After a renewed resurgence of strikes in 1907 there was another reflux of the class struggle between 1909-1910. During this time police hunted revolutionaries like dogs. The mere carrying of red flags was already considered a crime. In 1910 the anarchist Kotoku Shusui was arrested and accused of having plotted to assassinate the emperor. Many left socialists were also arrested. In January 1911 Kotoku and eleven other socialists were sentenced to death and executed – under the pretext of wanting to assassinate the emperor. The socialist press was banned, meetings were prohibited, and socialist books, which could be found in bookshops and libraries, were burnt. In the face of this repression, a large number of revolutionaries went into exile or withdrew. The long period of the “Japanese winter” (fuyu) began.

Revolutionaries who had not gone into exile and intellectuals now used an editing house – Baibunsha – for publishing their texts in conditions of illegality. In order to escape censorship, the articles had to be written in an ambiguous way.

In Europe repression and the imposition of the anti-socialist laws were not able to stop the growth of Social Democracy (for example the German SPD or, still more severely repressed, the RSDLP in Russia and the SdKPIL in Poland & Lithuania). The workers' movement in Japan faced even more difficulties to grow under conditions of repression and to gain in strength and set up revolutionary organisations functioning with a party spirit, in other words of going beyond the practice of small circles where the role of individuals was preponderant, a practice whose weight had always dominated the movement in Japan.

Neither on a programmatic nor on an organisational level had the movement reached the step where a marxist wing could become significant. Despite the first contacts with the 2nd International closer links were still to be established. The movement in Japan was still dominated by the circle spirit and individual leaders continued to play a dominant role. Anarchism, pacifism and humanitarianism still had a big influence.

Despite these specificities, we can see that the working class in Japan had become “integrated” into the international working class, and, although lacking the long experience of class struggle accompanied by the major programmatic and organisational acquisitions of the revolutionary movement in Europe, it faced much the same questions and showed similar trends as the class elsewhere. In this sense the history of the working class in Japan has more parallels with the history of the class in the USA or other more peripheral countries, where a marxist wing had not been able to gain the upper hand and where anarcho-syndicalism still played a major role.[3]

The Working Class and World War I

Although Japan declared war on Germany at the end of 1914 in order to snatch the colonial assets from Germany (within a few months Japan conquered German colonial outposts in the Pacific Ocean and Tsingtao [China]), Japanese territory was never touched by the fighting.

Since the centre of the war lay in Europe, Japan only participated directly in the war in its early phase. After these early military successes against Germany it refrained from further military activities and in a certain sense played a ”neutral role”. Whereas in Europe the working class was more and more urgently confronted with the problem of the war, in Japan the class war provoked an economic boom. Japan had in fact become a major arms supplier, and had an enormous need for manpower. The number of factory workers doubled between 1914 and 1919. In 1914 some 850,000 employees worked in 17,000 companies, by 1919 1,820,000 employees worked in 44,000 companies. While male employees still counted for a weaker part of the total workforce, in 1919 they had risen to almost 50%. By the end of the war there were 450,000 miners. The Japanese bourgeoisie thus became one of the big beneficiaries of the war – it became a big war supplier and at the same time it was spared the mass mobilisations and the total militarisation that occurred in the European powers.

Because Japan found gigantic outlets in the armaments sector during World War I it could evolve from a still mainly agriculturally dominated society into an industrial society. The increase of production between 1914 and 1919 was 78%.

Because Japanese military involvement remained very limited,, the working class in Japan did not face the same situation as in Europe. Unlike the ruling class in Europe, the Japanese bourgeoisie did not find it necessary to undertake the mass mobilisation and militarisation of society. This made it possible for the trade unions in Japan to abstain from establishing a "holy alliance” with capital, as the unions did in the European countries, and so to avoid being unmasked as pillars of capital. Whereas the workers in Europe were confronted both with starvation and enormous imperialist massacres with a total loss of 20 million lives, years of trench warfare, and the loss of the flower of working class youth, the proletariat in Japan was saved from this choice between life and death. Thus the driving force of the struggle against war, which had pushed the working class in Europe, in Germany and Russia in particular, into struggle, and radicalised it, was missing. There was no fraternisation, as occurred between Russian and German soldiers or on the Western Front.

This contrast in the situation of different sectors of the world proletariat during World War I was an indication that, contrary to what revolutionaries thought at the time, the conditions of imperialist war were not the most favourable for the development and generalisation of the world revolution.

Revolutionaries in Europe, who put forward internationalist positions and perspectives shortly after the beginning of World War I and who met in Summer 1915 in Zimmerwald and later in Kienthal could refer to a revolutionary tradition of the period leading up to World War I (the position of Marxists in the 19th century, the statements of the 2nd International at the congresses of Stuttgart and Basle). However, socialists in Japan had to pay the price of their relative isolation in relation to this question, because their internationalist resistance could not base itself on a more profound, solidly anchored position in Marxism. As in 1904/05 most of the voices raised against the war were pacifist or humanist, and revolutionaries in Japan failed to take up the perspective propagated by the revolutionary vanguard in Zimmerwald – the 2nd International is dead, a new International must be formed, war can only be finished through turning the imperialist war into a civil war.

Nevertheless the tiny minority of revolutionaries in Japan did recognise the responsibility which lay on their shoulders. They raised their internationalist voice in illegal[4] newspapers, they continued to meet in secret,

and despite their limited forces, they did their best to spread internationalist positions. While Lenin and the activities of the Bolsheviks were hardly known, the internationalist position of the German Spartakists and the courageous fight of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg received a lot of attention.[5]

Food Riots in August 1918

Although Japan had experienced a certain economic boom during and because of the war, the onset of the period of capitalist decadence in 1914 was fundamentally an economic phenomenon on a world scale that made itself felt in every country, including those that had been spared the military ravages of World War I. Japanese capital could not hold itself aloof from the permanent crisis of overproduction, brought about by the relative saturation of world markets. Likewise, the working class in Japan would have to face up to the same change in conditions and perspectives forced on the proletariat on a world scale.

Although wages had risen in all industrial sectors by 20-30%, due to a labour shortage, prices increased between 1914-1919 by 100%. Real wages fell altogether from a level of 100 in 1914 to 61 in 1918. These big price increases forced the working class into a series of defensive struggles.

Between 1917 and 1918 the price of rice doubled. In the summer of 1918 workers started to protest against the price increases. There are no reports about strikes in the factories and a generalisation of demands to other areas. Apparently thousands of workers took to the streets; however these demonstrations did not take on a more organised form, or formulate any specific aim or demand. Shops seem to have been plundered. In particular agricultural workers and the recently proletarianised workforce, as well as Burakumin (social ”outcasts”) seem to have played a very active role in the looting. Many houses and company offices were looted. There seems to have been no unification of economic and political demands. Unlike the development of the struggles in Europe there were no mass meetings and no workers' councils. After the repression of the movement some 8,000 workers were arrested. More than 100 people were killed. The government resigned for tactical reasons.

The working class had arisen spontaneously – but at the same time the political immaturity of the class became glaringly clear.

Although workers' struggles can erupt spontaneously, the movement can only develop its full strength if it can draw upon a political and organisational maturation. Without this more profound maturation a movement will quickly collapse. This was the case here; they collapsed as fast as they had arisen. There doesn’t seem to have been any organised intervention by a political organisation.

Without the persevering activities of the Bolsheviks and Spartakists the movements in Russia and in Germany would have faltered very quickly. In Japan such an organised intervention was fatally missing.

But despite the different conditions of experience in Europe and in Japan, the working class was to make a big step forward.

The Echo of the Russian Revolution in Japan

When in February 1917 the working class in Russia put the revolutionary process into motion and took power in October, this first successful proletarian rising also found its echo in Japan. The Japanese bourgeoisie immediately understood the danger springing from the revolution in Russia. From April 1918 it was one of the first to participate in the most ruthless manner in the setting up of a counter revolutionary army. Japan was the last country to withdraw its troops from Siberia in November 1922.

While news about the Russian revolution spread very quickly from Russia to the west, and the revolutionary development in Russia had a great impact in particular in Germany and led to a destabilisation of the armies in Central Europe, the echo of the revolution was still very limited in Japan. Not only geographical factors contributed to this – several thousand kilometres separated Japan from the centre of the revolution and Petrograd and Moscow – but also the lower level of radicalisation in Japan due to the war. However, the working class in Japan was to take part in the international wave of revolutionary struggles that unfolded between 1917-23.

The Reaction of Revolutionaries

In the beginning, news about the Russian revolution only spread very slowly and patchily to Japan. Only in May and June 1917 were the first articles about the revolution published in the socialist press.

Sakai drafted a message of greetings under conditions of illegality, which was printed by Katayama in the USA in the migrant workers’ newspaper Heimin (Commoners), in the IWW paper International Socialist Review and also in Russian papers. In Japan Takabatake was the first to give an account of the role of the Soviets in "Baibunsha", emphasising the decisive role of revolutionaries. However, the different roles that the parties played during the revolution in Russia was not yet known.

The level of ignorance about events in Russia and about the role of the Bolsheviks can be seen through the first statements of the best known revolutionaries. Thus Arahata wrote in February 1917: "None of us knew the names of Kerensky, Lenin and Trotsky". And in the summer of 1917 Sakai called Lenin an anarchist, and even in April 1920 he claimed that “Bolshevism is somewhat similar to syndicalism”. Even the anarchist Osogui Sakae wrote in 1918 that “Bolshevik tactics were the tactics of anarchism”'.

Out of enthusiasm about the development in Russia Takabatake and Yakamawa drafted a Manifesto (ketsugibun) in May 1917 in Tokyo, which they sent to the RSDLP. However, due to the chaos in transport it never reached revolutionaries in Russia, and since there was hardly any direct contact between the milieu of revolutionaries in exile (most Japanese revolutionary elements living abroad such as Katayama lived in the USA) and the centre of the revolution, the manifesto was only published two years later at the founding congress of the Communist International in March 1919.

This message from Japanese Socialists declared:

“Since the very beginning of the Russian revolution we have followed your fearless activities with enthusiasm and deep admiration. Your work has had a great influence on our people’s consciousness. Today, we are indignant that our government has sent troops into Siberia under whatever pretext. This undoubtedly serves as an impediment to the free development of your revolution. We deeply regret that we are too weak to counter the peril with which you are threatened by our imperialist government. We are quite unable to do anything because the government is persecuting us with severity. However, you may rest assured that the red flag of revolution will wave over all of Japan in the not too distant future.

Along with this letter, we are sending you a copy of the resolution approved at our May 1, 1917, rally.

With revolutionary greetings, the Executive Committee of the Socialist Groups in Tokyo and Yokohama”

The "Resolution of the Japanese Socialists" read as follows:

"We, the socialists of Japan, assembled in Tokyo May 1, 1917, express our deepest sympathy for the Russian revolution, which we follow with admiration.

We recognise that the Russian revolution is both a political revolution of the bourgeoisie against medieval absolutism and a revolution of the proletariat against modern-day capitalism.

Transforming the Russian revolution into a world revolution is not a matter for only the Russian socialists; it is the responsibility of socialists of the entire world.

The capitalist system has already reached its’ highest stage of development in all countries, and we have entered the epoch of fully developed capitalist imperialism.

In order not to be deceived by the ideologists of imperialism, socialists of all countries must steadfastly defend the positions of the International, and all the forces of the international proletariat must be directed against our common enemy, international capitalism. Only thus will the proletariat be able to fulfil its’ historic mission.

Socialists of Russia and of all other countries must do everything in their power to put an end to the war and assist the proletariat of the warring countries to turn their weapons, today aimed at brothers on the other side of the trenches, against the ruling classes of their own countries.

We have faith in the courage of the Russian socialists and of our comrades around the world. We are firmly convinced that the revolutionary spirit will spread and permeate all countries.

The Executive Committee of the Socialist Group in Tokyo” (Proceedings and Documents of the First Congress, March 1919, published in Premier Congrès de l’Internationale Communiste, p. 224).

“At the same time that the Russian revolution signifies, in one of its aspects, a political revolution by the rising commercial and industrial class against the politics of a medieval despotism, it is also, in another of its aspects, a social revolution by the class of common people (heimin) against capitalism.

Therefore on this occasion it is the responsibility of the Russian revolution - and, at the same time, of socialists in all countries - to resolutely insist on an immediate end to the war. The class of common people (Gemini) in all the warring countries must be rallied and its fighting strength redirected, so that it is aimed in each case at the ruling class in its own country. We have confidence in the brave struggle of the Russian Socialist Party and the comrades in all countries and look forward to the success of the socialist revolution" (resolution of 7/5/17, from Tokyo-Yokohama socialists).

The same socialists of Tokyo sent another telegram to Lenin, of which they sent a copy to the USPD and to the SPD in Germany.

“The moment, when in view of the social reorganisation of the world, our movement will be reconstituted and when together with the comrades of all countries we shall work together as best as we can, this moment probably is not so far from now. We hope that in this critical phase of truce and in view of all these important events we can take up contact with you. As far as the foundation of an International of Socialists, which is planned for the near future, is concerned, if we can we want to send a delegation and we are still in the process of making preparations to do so. Hoping that you recognise our organisation (Baibunsha) and hoping for your support and much advice (...) the representatives of socialists of Tokyo greet you”.

This message shows the internationalist orientations, the efforts towards regroupment and the support for the foundation of a new International. However, it is hard to assess which precise preparations to set up an organisation were taken by Baibunsha at that moment.

While this message was intercepted by the secret police and it probably never reached the Bolsheviks, the SPD and USPD, however, kept it secret and never published it.

As these statements show the revolution acted as a powerful spark on revolutionaries. At the same time, the impact of the revolution on the working class as a whole was certainly weaker.

In contrast to many countries to the west of Russia (Finland, Austria, Hungary, Germany etc), where the mere reception of the news about the overthrow of the Tsar and the successful taking of power through the workers’ councils had created such enthusiasm and such an overwhelming wave of solidarity, that the workers themselves intensified the struggles “in their own country”, there was no direct reaction amongst the broad working masses in Japan. After the end of World War I militancy as a whole was on the increase – however, not explicitly because of the revolution ignited in Russia. The reason had more of an economic background: because the export boom sparked off by the big growth in exports during the war period had collapsed shortly after the end of the war. In 1920 a depression started. Workers' anger was aimed mainly at price increases and a wave of lay-offs. In 1919 there were some 2,400 “labour disputes” with 350,000 workers on strike; there was a decline of the movement in 1920, when 130,000 workers struck in about 1,000 separate disputes. The movement seems to have retreated from 1920 onwards.

Workers' struggles remained more or less contained within an economic terrain, and hardly any political demands were raised. This is why there were no workers' councils – unlike Europe or even the USA and Argentina, where the Russian revolution had inspired workers on the US West coast and in Buenos Aires to radicalise their movement

Between 1919 and 1920 some 150 unions were founded, all of which acted as an obstacle against the radicalisation of the workers. The unions were the spearhead and most pernicious weapon of the ruling class to counter-act the rising combativity. Thus in 1920 the Labour Union League, Rodo Kumiai Domei, a national Trades Union Federation, was founded. Until then the union movement was split into more than 100 single unions.

At the same time a large “democracy movement” was launched with the help of the bourgeoisie in 1919, putting forward the demand of general voting rights and electoral reform. As in other Western European countries parliamentarism served as a bulwark against revolutionary struggles. Japanese students were the main protagonists of this demand.

The debate on the new methods of struggle

Under the impact of the Russian revolution and the wave of international struggles, a process of reflection also set in amongst revolutionaries in Japan.

Inevitably this process of reflection was marked by contradictions. On the one hand the anarcho-syndicalists (or those who claimed to be so) claimed adherence to the positions of the Bolsheviks, since they were the only ones who had successfully completed a revolution and aimed at the destruction of the state. This current maintained that the politics of the Bolsheviks proved their rejection of a purely parliamentary orientation (a debate known as the Gikau-sei-saku versus Chokusetsu-kodo line).

In this debate in February 1918 Takabatake defended the idea that economic and political struggles were very complex. The struggle could involve both dimensions – direct action and the parliamentary struggle. Parliamentarism and syndicalism were not the only elements composing the socialist movement. He spoke up against the anarcho-syndicalist rejection of the “economic struggle” as well as the individualistic attitude of Osugi. While Takabatake in a very confused manner placed “direct action” and mass movement on the same level, his text was part of a general process of clarification of the means of struggle in this epoch.

Yamakawa stressed that the identification of a political movement with parliamentary politics was not valid. Moreover he stated, “I believe syndicalism has degenerated because of reasons which I do not understand sufficiently”.

In view of the limited experience and the limited level of theoretical-programmatic clarification of these questions, it is important to recognise that there were voices in Japan who put into question the old methods of trades' union and parliamentary struggle and were searching for answers to the new situation. This demonstrates that the working class was also confronted with the same questions and that revolutionaries in Japan were also involved in the same process of trying to come to grips with the new situation.

At the founding congress of the German KPD the lessons of the new epoch in relation to the union and parliamentary question were beginning to be drawn albeit in a groping manner. The discussion of the conditions of struggle in the new epoch were of a world historical importance. Such questions could only be clarified if there was an organisation and a framework for discussions.

Without an organisation and still isolated internationally, clarification in the revolutionary milieu in Japan was to remain difficult. Therefore it is all the more important to be aware of these efforts during that phase to put into question the former methods of trades' union and parliamentary methods, without falling into the trap of anarchism.

Attempts at clarification and the construction of an organisation

The revolution in Russia, the new historical conditions of the decadence of capitalism, the unfolding of the international wave of struggles confronted revolutionaries in Japan with new challenges. It was obvious that clarification and the search for answers to these questions could only make headway if there was a Marxist pole of reference. The formation of such a pole came up against big obstacles, because its precondition was a clear cut delineation between an anarchist wing, hostile to political organisations, and a wing which affirmed the necessity of a revolutionary organisation but which, however, was still unable to tackle its construction in a determined manner.

Hampered by a tendency to still remain oriented towards and centred on Japan, marked by a predominance of a circle spirit and well-known personalities, who had only recently become more familiarised with marxism, and a weak determination to set up a fighting organisation, these elements were slow in facing up to the task of the hour.

Thus amongst the most famous leading personalities (Yamakawa, Arahata and Sakai) Yamakawa was still convinced in 1918 that he ought to write a “critique of Marxism”. However, in the May edition of New Society, Sakai, Arahata and Yamakawa proclaimed their support for Bolshevism. In February 1920 they reported the foundation of the Comintern in their paper New Social Review (Shin Shakai Hyoron – which in September 1920 changed its name to Shakaishugi [Socialism]). At the same time these revolutionaries were still active in study circles such as the Friday Society (Shakai shugi kenkyu -Studies in Socialism) and Wednesday Society (Shakai mondai kenkyu -studies on social problems).

Their activities were less geared towards the construction of an organisation, than the publication of papers, which were mostly short-lived and which were not anchored in any organisational structure. Against the background of these confusions and hesitations on the organisation question amongst revolutionaries in Japan, the Comintern itself was going to play an important part in the attempts to set up an organisation.

DA

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the multiplication of wars and genocide quickly cancelled all the speeches about the so-called the new world order that was supposed to result from it. On the other hand, we have to recognise that all the ideological campaigns on democracy and capitalist prosperity met a certain echo and still weigh heavily on the class consciousness of the exploited.

The collapse of the eastern bloc was supposed to open up huge "new markets" and give rise to a new phase of economic development, peace and democracy. During the 1990s, predictions about this so-called economic development were supported by the media barrage about the "emerging countries" like Brazil or the countries of South East Asia. At the end of the 90s the "new economy" took up the baton, supposedly opening a new phase of expansion based on a technological revolution. What has the real story been? It has shown that all these have been false prophecies! After the poorest countries of the third world, which for two or three decades have seen a net fall in their GNP per inhabitant, we saw the fall of the "second world" with the economic collapse of the countries of the eastern bloc, and the bankruptcy of Russia and Brazil in 1998; Japan broke down at the beginning of the 90s and, eight years later, the whole of South East Asia was in serious trouble. The latter, which for a long time had been seen by the ideologues of capitalism as the new pole of development for the 21st century, began to fall by the wayside, along with a whole number of other "intermediate" or "emerging" countries. While the e-economies in the developed countries fell into an e-recession in 2000-2001, the emerging countries became the plunging countries. In these areas, the fragile economies were not capable of rising above debts amounting to tens of percent of the GNP. Thus, after the Mexican debt crisis at the beginning of the 80s, other countries lengthened the list: Brazil, Mexico again in 1994, the South East Asian countries, Russia, Turkey, Argentina, etc. The recession hitting the most developed countries was no longer limited to the old technological sectors (coal, steel, etc), or ones which had already reached their peak (shipbuilding, cars, etc) but the very sectors billed as the spearheads of the "new economy", the "new industrial revolution": computers, Internet, telecommunications, aeronautics, etc. In these branches, there have been hundreds of bankruptcies, restructurings, fusions, take-overs - and hundreds of thousands of redundancies, wage cuts and attacks on working conditions.

Today, with the crash in stock-exchange values in the sector that was supposed to be the key to this new prosperity, and with the recession already displaying its devastating effects, the ideological mystifications of the bourgeoisie about the crisis have begun to be seriously eroded. This is why the bourgeoisie is coming up with all sorts of false explanations about the current difficulties. It is obliged to hide as much as possible the gravity of the sickness affecting its system in order to prevent the proletariat from becoming aware that capitalism has reached a dead-end.

Speculative bubble following the crisis in Asia

Capitalism plunges inexorably into the crisis

As opposed to what the ruling class tells us, the latest dive in the economy is not the product of the collapse of the Twin Towers in the United States, even if that was an exacerbating factor, in particular for certain economic sectors such as air transport or tourism. The slow-down of American growth goes back to the bursting of the internet bubble in March 2000 and the level of economic activity was already weak at the end of summer 2001. As the experts of the OECD emphasised "the economic deceleration which began in the United States in 2000 and spread to other countries has been transformed into a world reflux of economic activity, from which few countries or regions have escaped" (Le Monde, 21 November 2001). The current economic crisis thus has nothing specifically American about it.

OECD GDP growth 1962-2002: Gradual decline of mean growth per decade since the 1960s

The capitalist system has entered its sixth phase of recession since the resurgence of the crisis at the end of the Sixties: 1967, 1970-71, 1974-75, 1980-82, 1991-93 and 2001 -?, without counting the collapse of the South East Asian countries, of Brazil, etc in the years 1997-98. Since the Sixties, each decade has shown a growth rate lower than the preceding one:

1962-69 = 5.2%

1970-79 = 3.5%

1980-89 = 2.8%

1990-99 = 2.6%

2000-02 = 2.2%

In 2002, growth in the Euro zone hardly reached 0.7%, and although the USA stayed at 2.4% this was still a less elevated figure than during the 1990s. As a matter of fact, if we look at the "fundamentals", the US economy has been marking time since 1997, because that was when the rate of profit stopped progressing.

What characterises the current recession, according to the bourgeois commentators' own statements, is the speed and the intensity of its development. The United States, the first economy of the world, very quickly plunged into recession. The fall of the American GDP is faster than at the time of the preceding recession and the aggravation of unemployment has reached a record unequalled since the 1974 crisis. Japan, the second economy of the world, fares no better. Even with negative real interest rates (in Japan, households and enterprises actually gain money by borrowing!) consumption and investment have not picked up. Despite massive revival plans, the Japanese economy has just plunged into recession for the third time. It's the strongest crisis for 20 years and according to the IMF, Japan could, for the first time since the war, go through two consecutive years of contracting economic activity. This latter accounts for 130% of GDP today and should reach 153% in 2003.

The intensification of the contradictions of decadent capitalism

In the 19th century, during the ascendant period of capitalism, the net budgetary position of public finance (the difference between income and expenditure) of the six big countries (the US, Japan, Canada, France, GB, Italy) was only occasionally in deficit, primarily due to wars. This balance was otherwise stable and in constant improvement between 1870 and 1910. The contrast is striking in decadence, where the deficit is quasi-permanent except for four years at the end of the Twenties and twenty years between 1950 and 1970. Here again the main reason for this is war, as well as economic crises.

The weight of the national debt expressed as a percentage of the GDP decreases throughout the ascending period. In general it never exceeds 50%. This ratio explodes at the time of the entry into decline, to ebb only during the period 1950-80, but without ever going down below 50%. It then goes up during the years 1980-90.

This mountain of debts which are accumulating not only in Japan but also in the other developed countries constitutes a real powder keg that could have major destabilising effects in the long term. Thus, a rough estimate of the world debt for the entirety of economic agencies (states, companies, households and banks) oscillates between 200% and 300% of world production. Concretely, that signifies two things. On the one hand, that the system has advanced the monetary equivalent of two to three times the value of world production in order to mitigate its crisis of overproduction; and on the other hand, that it would be necessary to work two to three years for nothing to repay this debt. While such massive debt can still be borne by the more developed economies, it is by contrast about to strangle the "emerging" countries one by one. This phenomenal debt on a world level is historically without precedent and shows what a dead-end the capitalist system has reached - but also reveals its capacity to manipulate the law of value in order to ensure its survival. Although in the recent period, "as the dominant world power, the US has arrogated to itself the right to finance its effort of investment and to support a very vigorous growth of consumption" ("After the euphoria, the hangover", International Review 111), no other country could have allowed itself the commercial deficit which went with growth in the US. "the result was a classic crisis of overproduction which was materialised in a reversal of the profit curve and a slow-down in economic activity in the US, several months before September 11" (ibid.). There is therefore no basis for speculations about a new phase of growth based on a so-called technological revolution. The theoretical speeches about the "new economy", the whole bluff around it, and the recent accounting frauds have seriously put into question the reliability of national accounting, which is the basis for calculating GNP - especially in America. With the scandals around Enron, Andersen, etc, we can see that a good part of the new economy was pure fiction. Hundreds of billions of dollars imputed to the accounts of such enterprises were simply made up and vanished in a flash. This cycle ended with a particularly severe stock market crash in the sector that was supposed to carry the new capitalism to the baptismal font. 

The myth of "less state"

"The direct causes of the strengthening of the capitalist state in our epoch express all the difficulties resulting from the definitive loss of correspondence between capitalist relations of production and the development reached by the productive forces" (The Decadence of Capitalism, ICC pamphlet).

We are supposed to believe that with liberalisation and globalisation, states have almost nothing more to say, that they have lost their autonomy to the markets and supranational organs like the IMF, WTO, etc. But when we look at the statistics, it has to be said that despite 20 years of "neo-liberalism", the overall economic weight of the state (more precisely, of the sector referred to as "non profit making", the expenditure of all public administration, including the cost of social security) has in no way diminished. It continues to grow, even if at a slower rhythm, to reach a crest of 45% to 50% for the 30 OECD countries with a low of around 35% for the United States and Japan, and a high of 60% to 70% for the Scandinavian countries. Oscillating at around 10% throughout the ascendant phase of capitalism, the share of the state (ie the non-market sector) in the creation of added value climbs gradually during decadence to almost 50% in 1995 in the OECD countries (source: The World Bank, Report on Development in the World, 1997).

These statistics also reveal the artificial swelling of growth rates in decadence, insofar as national accounting partly counts the same thing twice. In practice, the selling price of products in the market incorporates the taxes that are used to pay national expenditure, namely the cost of non-market services (teaching, social security, public sector personal...). The bourgeois economy calculates the value of these non-market services as being equal to the sum of wages paid to the personnel who provide them. Now, in national accounting, this sum is tacked on to the added value produced in the market sector (the only productive sector), even though it is already included in the selling price of market products (the knock-on effect of taxes and social security contributions on product prices). Consequently, in decadence, the GNP and the growth rate of the GNP inflate artificially insofar as the share of the public expenditure increases with time (from 10% in 1913 to 50% in 1995).

This share having remained quasi-constant (10%) during the course of the ascendant phase, then, if the GNP is over-estimated by 10%, the growth rates during the ascendant phase correctly reflect the reality of the development of the productive sector. In decadence on the other hand, the explosion of the unproductive sector - and particularly between 1960 and 1980 - artificially dopes capitalism's performance. In short, to correctly evaluate real growth in decadence it is necessary to deduct nearly 40% of the current GNP corresponding to the growth of the unproductive sector since 1913!

As for the political weight of the states themselves, it has indeed increased. Today, as throughout the 20th century, state capitalism does not have a precise political colour. In the United States, it is the Republicans (the "right") who are now taking the initiative for a state-supported economic revival and who subsidise the airline and insurance companies. The central power also directly supports such companies through the law of "Chapter 11", which authorises firms to protect themselves from their creditors. The budgetary revival programmed by Bush has led to the federal balance going from a surplus of 2.5% of GNP to a deficit estimated by the IMF at 1.5% of the GNP in 2002, an incomparably higher rate of public spending than the most spendthrift European states. The Federal Reserve Bank, very closely related to the authorities, lowered its interest rates as the recession took shape, in order to contribute to the revival of the economic machine: from 6.5% at the beginning of 2001 to 2% at the end of the year. Among other things this made it possible for heavily indebted households to get their hands on further loans or to renegotiate them. To be coherent, this new orientation meant a fall of the dollar, allowing American products to become more competitive and to regain parts of the global market. In Japan, the banks were re-floated twice by the state and some were even nationalised! In Switzerland, it was the state that organised the gigantic operation of re-floating the national airline company Swissair. Even in Argentina, and with the blessing of the IMF and the World Bank, the government had recourse to a vast public-works programme to try to recreate employment. If in the 19th century the political parties used the state to advance their interests, in decadence it is urgent global and imperialist economic requirements that dictate the policy to be followed and determine the colour of the government in place. This fundamental analysis, developed by the communist left, was amply confirmed throughout 20th century and is more than ever relevant today when the stakes are even higher.

Total state spending as a percent of GDP

The development of military expenditure

It was Engels who at the end of the 19th century anticipated what would be the historical alternative of the phase of decadence: "socialism or barbarism". Rosa Luxemburg developed a number of political and theoretical implications from this and the Communist International defined the characteristics of the new period: "the era of wars and revolutions". Finally, it was the left communists, and in particular the Communist Left of France, who systematised and deepened the place and the significance of war in the ascendance and decadence of capitalism.

Without question one can affirm that, in contrast to the ascendant phase, the decadence of capitalism has been characterised by war in all its forms: world wars, permanent local wars, etc. In this connection, as a very useful historical complement, we cannot resist the temptation to quote extracts by the historian Eric Hobsbawm (1994) in his book The Age of Extremes, who - by means of comparative assessments - masterfully distinguishes the fundamental differences between the "long 19th" and the "short 20th century: "How are we to make sense of the Short Twentieth Century, that is to say of the years from the outbreak of the First World War to the collapse of the USSR which, as we can now see in retrospect, forms a coherent historical period that has now ended? ... in the Short [Twentieth] Century more human beings had been killed or allowed to die by human decision than ever before in history ... it was without doubt the most murderous century of which we have record, both by the scale, frequency and length of the warfare which filled it, barely ceasing for a moment in the 1920s, but also by the unparalleled scale of the human catastrophes it produced, from the greatest famines in history, to systematic genocide. Unlike the ‘long nineteenth century', which seemed, and actually was a period of almost unbroken material, intellectual and moral progress, that is to say of improvement in the conditions of civilised life, there has, since 1914, been a marked regression from the standards then regarded as normal in the developed countries... In the course of the twentieth century, wars have been increasingly waged against the economy and infrastructure of states and against their civilian populations. Since the First World War, the number of civilian casualties in war has been far greater than the number of military casualties in all belligerent countries except the USA. ... In 1914 there had been no major war for a century ... Moreover, most wars involving major powers at all had been comparatively quick... The length of war was measured in months or even (like the 1866 war between Prussia and Austria) in weeks. Between 1871 and 1914 there had been no wars in Europe at all in which the armies of major powers crossed any hostile frontier... There had been no world wars at all... Between 1815 and 1914 no major power fought another outside its immediate region ... All this changed in 1914. In short, 1914 opens the age of massacre. Most non-revolutionary and non-ideological wars of the past had not been waged as struggles to death or total exhaustion... Why, then, was the First World War, waged by the leading powers on both sides as a zero-sum game, i.e., as a war which could only be totally won or totally lost? The reason was that this war, unlike earlier wars, which were typically waged for limited and specifiable objects, was waged for unlimited ends... It was an absurd and self-defeating aim which ruined both victors and vanquished. It drove the defeated into revolution and the victors into bankruptcy and physical exhaustion... Modern warfare involves all citizens and mobilises most of them; it is waged with armaments which require a diversion of the entire economy to produce them, and which are used in unimaginable quantities; it produces untold destruction and utterly dominates and transforms the life of the countries involved in it. Yet all these phenomena belong to the wars only of the twentieth century... Did war advance economic growth? In one sense it plainly did not... About this rising curve of barbarism after 1914 there is, unfortunately, no serious doubt." (our emphases)

This "age of massacres" inaugurated by the First World War and contrasting so clearly with the long and much less murderous 19th century, is further attested by the relatively low level of military expenditure in world production throughout the ascendant phase of capitalism, and by its powerful growth in the ensuing period. From 2% of world production in 1860, to 2.5% in 1913, it rose to 7.2% in 1938, reached around 8.4% in the 60s and again went up to about 10% at the height of the cold war at the end of the 80s (sources: Paul Bairoch for world production and the SIPRI for military expenditure). The particularity of armaments is that, unlike machinery or consumer goods, they can't be consumed in a productive manner (they can only rust or destroy other forces of production). They thus correspond to a sterilisation of capital. To the 40% growth of unproductive expenditure in the period of decadence, we thus have to add another 6% corresponding to the relative increase in military expenditure...which gives us a world production overvalued at nearly 50%. This gives a rather more accurate picture of the great performance of capitalism in the 20th century and shows the contrast with the  "almost unbroken material, intellectual and moral progress" of the long 19th century. 

The future remains in the hands of the working class

What is absolutely certain it is that with the development of the recession at the international level the bourgeoisie will impose a new and violent degradation of the living standards of the working class. Under the pretext of a state of war and in the name of the higher interests of the nation, the American bourgeoisie is carrying out the austerity measures it had already long envisaged, since they were necessitated by a recession which had been underway for a year: massive lay-offs, increased production rates, emergency regulations in the name of anti-terrorism which are used as a testing ground for the maintenance of social order, etc. After the collapse of the eastern bloc, the arms race slowed down for a few years but took off again in the mid-90s.  September 11 has made it possible to justify an even greater development of armaments. The military expenditure of the USA represents 37% of world spending on arms, which is rising in all countries. All over the world, unemployment levels are on the rise even though the bourgeoisie has managed to partly conceal their real extent by introducing all kinds of insecure jobs and by gross manipulation of the statistics. Everywhere in Europe, the budgets are revised downwards and new austerity measures are programmed. In the name of so-called budgetary stability, which has nothing to do with the proletariat, the European bourgeoisie is re-examining the question of retirement (lowering pension rates and lengthening working life are on the agenda) and new measures are planned to remove "the brakes on the development of growth", as the experts of the OECD say euphemistically. They talk about  "attenuating rigidities" and "making work more available" by making it far more precarious and reducing all the social benefits (unemployment, health care, various allowances, etc.). With the fall in the stock exchange, the use of pension funds for capital investment is revealed for what it is: another trick to despoil working class incomes. In Japan, the state has planned to restructure 40% of public organisations: 17 will close and 45 others will be privatised. Lastly, while these new attacks come to hit the proletariat in the heart of world capitalism, poverty develops in a breathtaking way on the periphery of capitalism. The situation of the "emerging" countries is significant for this reason, especially countries such as Argentina, Venezuela and Brazil. In Argentina the average income per inhabitant has been divided in three over the last three years. The debacle is greater than what befell the US in the 30s. Turkey and Russia are not far behind.

Faced with this situation of economic dead-end, social chaos and increasing misery, the working class has only one answer: the massive development of struggles on its own class terrain in all countries. Because no "democratic alternative", no change of government, no other policy can bring any other remedy for the fatal disease of capitalism. The generalisation and the unification of the combat of the world proletariat, towards the overthrow of capitalism - this is the only alternative able to take society out of this dead end. Rarely in history has it been so evident that you cannot fight the effects of the capitalist crisis without destroying capitalism itself. The level of decomposition reached by the system, the grave consequences of its very existence, are such that the question of going beyond capitalism will more and more appear as the only realistic way out for the exploited. The future remains in the hands of the working class.

December 2002: extracts from the report on the economic crisis adopted by the 15th Congress of the ICC

Sources

• "Growth in GNP: (1962-2001"): OECD
• The ratio between the budgetary balance and the GNP (in percentage of GNP): Paul Mason and Michael Muss: "Long term tendencies in budget deficits and debts", working documents of the IMF 95/128 (December 1995)
• Alternatives Economiques : "L'etat de l'economie 2003"
• Maddison: "L'economie mondiale 1820-1992", OECD, and "Deux siecles de revolution industrielle", Pluriel H 8413

Dictatorship and Democracy: Two Faces of Capitalist Barbarism

On 11th September 1973, a bloody military coup led by General Pinochet overthrew Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government. A terrible period of repression of the working class followed: thousands of people,1 mostly workers, were systematically massacred, tens of thousands imprisoned and tortured. This appalling barbarity was accompanied by hundreds of thousands of redundancies (10% of the workforce during the first year of military dictatorship).

The order that reigned in Santiago (set up with the support of the CIA2) was nothing other than the order of capitalist terror in its most caricatural form.

With the 30th anniversary of the overthrow of Allende’s “socialist” government, the whole “democratic” bourgeoisie has made full use of the occasion to try to derail workers from their own class interests. It has been trying to sell the idea that the only struggle workers should support is the defence of the democratic state against dictatorship and evil tyrants. This is the meaning of the campaign orchestrated by the media, when they draw the parallel between Pinochet’s coup d’Etat of 11th September 1973, and the attack on the Twin Towers in New York (see for example, the headline in Le Monde of 12th September: “Chile 1973, the other 11th September).

In the forefront of this campaign by all the forces of bourgeois democracy are the left wing parties, and the leftists who supported the Chilean MIR3 to the hilt by enrolling the workers behind the Allende clique and thus delivering them over to Pinochet’s butchers.4 Against this gigantic mystification that consists in presenting Allende as a pioneer of “socialism” in Latin America, revolutionaries have the responsibility to re-establish the truth about the reality of Chilean democracy. For the workers should never forget that Pinochet’s military junta only finished off the job of putting down workers’ struggles that had already been begun by the “popular” army of Allende’s “socialist” government.

We are reprinting below two leaflets produced by two of the groups that were later to form the ICC’s sections in Britain and France: the first was distributed by World Revolution at the big protest demonstrations that followed the coup. The second was distributed by Révolution Internationale shortly after the coup itself.

In Chile, as in the Middle East, capitalism shows once more that its crises are paid for in working class blood. As the junta butchers workers and anyone who opposes the naked rule of capital, the “left” of the whole world joins in a chorus of hysteria and mystification. Parliamentary resolutions, Cassandra-like squealings of Labour MPs, irate “I told you so” shrieks of the Trotskyists, mass demos – all these are carefully planned rehearsals of the official and not-so-official “left”. Their cohorts in Chile, the deposed Popular Unity government of Allende, prepared the massacre after physically and ideologically disarming the Chilean workers for three years. By considering the Allende coalition as “working class” or “socialist”, the whole “left” tries to hide or minimise Allende’s real role, and helps to perpetuate the myths created by state capitalism in Chile.

What was the Allende regime? Let the myth-makers of the “left” answer this question: Was it a “working class government”? But how can the working class “govern” the capitalist state, parliament, the army and the police? Is working class parliamentary or trade union support the criterion? But that is to say that almost all the bourgeois democracies are “working class” today. Was it a “socialist” regime? Only if you understand by that the policies of state capitalism. Was Allende’s coalition an expression of the organised might of the Chilean workers at the point of production, an expression of the self-activity of workers’ councils, factory and neighbourhood committees? Was Allende’s coalition a result of a huge wave of revolutionary working class activity not only in Chile but also in Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, the US and the world? Was his coalition the class response of the workers to the deepening crisis of world capitalism in decadence? Was the whole thrust of his policies to abolish capitalist production, ie to abolish wage labour, commodity production and extend the revolutionary impetus towards the world arena? No? Of course not! A million times NO!

The whole policy of the Popular Unity was to strengthen capitalism in Chile. This large, state capitalist faction, based on the trade unions (which are everywhere capitalist organs today) and sectors of the petty bourgeoisie and technocracy was welded together 15 years ago by the Communist and Socialist Parties. Under the names of Workers’ Front, FRAP or Popular Unity, this faction wanted to make a backward Chilean economy competitive on the world market. Such a policy, envisaging a strong state sector, was capitalist pure and simple. To have oozed over it a bit of “nationalisation under workers’ control” would not have changed the basic capitalist relations of production, which remained untouched under Allende, and were reinforced to the hilt. At the point of production, in the public and private sectors, the workers still had to sweat for a boss, still had to sell their labour power. The vampire-lust of capitalist accumulation, exacerbated by the chronic underdevelopment of the Chilean economy and an intolerable foreign debt, had to be satisfied, especially in the mining sector (copper) from which the Chilean state apparatus obtained 83% of its foreign revenue. It is not an accident that the “left” began to call the copper workers “well-paid”, “highly-paid”, “a privileged group”, “an aristocracy of labour”, “an economist layer” etc, because it is this sector of the class which refused to go along with Allende’s mystifications. It is here that the “Battle for Production” of the PU foremen was utterly lost.

Once nationalised, the copper mines had to become profitable. From the beginning, the resistance of the miners helped destroy this capitalist plan. Instead of giving credence to the reactionary PU catch-phrase “voluntary work is revolutionary duty”, the Chilean industrial working class, especially the miners, kept on struggling for higher wages, and resisted speed-ups by absenteeism and walk-outs. It was the only way they could begin to catch up with the inflation of the previous years and the growing inflation under the new regime, which was up to 300% per annum on the eve of the coup.

Working class resistance to Allende began in 1970. In December 1970, 4,000 Chuquicamata miners struck, demanding higher wages. In July 1971, 10,000 coal miners struck at the Lota Schwager mine. New strikes at the mines of El Salvador, El Teniente, Chuquicamata, La Exotica and Rio Blanco spread at around the same time, demanding higher wages.

Early in 1971, the Chilean state copper corporation, Codelo, had predicted an output of copper of 840,000 metric tons for 1971. By May, because of many technical problems caused by nationalisation and the falling price of copper following the end of the Vietnam inter-imperialist war, the target was reduced to 625,000 metric tons. It is then that the strikes really deepened the crisis of Chilean capital.

Allende’s reaction was a typically capitalist one: to alternatively slander and cajole the workers. In November 1971 Castro came to Chile to reinforce Allende’s anti-working class policies. Castro thundered at the miners, and spoke against trouble-making “demagogues”; at the Chuquicamata mine he said that “a hundred tons less per day means a loss of $36 million a year”.

While copper is the main source of Chile’s foreign revenue, mining represents only 11% of the country’s GNP, and employs only 4% of the labour force, that is, around 60,000 copper miners. However, the numerical size of this sector of the class is quite out of proportion to the weight the miners have in the national economy. Small in numbers, but highly powerful and conscious of it, the miners forced the escalator clause for wages onto the state and inspired the wages offensive which spread through the Chilean working class in 1971. Journalists like Richard Gott side directly with state capital when they write: “The prolonged strike at El Teniente earlier this year was a contributory factor to the atmosphere that permitted Allende’s downfall”. And adds: “Any government that really wanted to do something for the poorest section of Chilean society would inevitably have looked unfavourably on the wage demands of such a privileged group as the copper miners” (The Guardian, 1.10.73). This same scribbler thinks that Allende the freemason was a “marxist”, while the rest of the capitalist press assents and tries to prove that the “Chilean road to socialism” was a variety of “socialism” which failed. The Stalinists and Trotskyists of course agree, with their Talmudic differences. To the latter, Allende’s capitalism deserved “critical support”. Anarchists weren’t left behind: “…the only way out for Allende would have been to appeal to the working class to seize power for themselves to forestall the inevitable coup” claims Libertarian Struggle (October 1973). Thus Allende was not only a “marxist” – he was also a failed Bakunin. But what is really laughable is to imagine that a capitalist government could ever “appeal” to the workers to destroy capitalism!

In May-June 1973, the miners began to move again. 10,000 struck at the El Teniente and Chuquicamata mines. The El Teniente miners asked for a 40% wage rise. Allende put the O’Higgins and Santiago provinces under military rule, because the paralysis at El Teniente “seriously threatened the economy”. “Marxist” managers, PU members, sacked workers and brought in strikebreakers and replacements. 500 carabineros attacked the workers with tear gas and water cannon. When 4,000 miners marched to Santiago to demonstrate on 14 June, the riot police savagely charged them. The government branded the workers as “agents of fascism”. The CP organised parades in Santiago against the miners, calling on the government to use a “firm hand”. The MIR group, an extra-parliamentary “loyal opposition” of Allende, criticised the use of force and advocated the use of persuasion. Allende appointed a new Minister of Mines in August 1973: General Ronaldo Gonzalez, the munitions director of the army. In the same month, Allende alerted army units in all of Chile’s 25 provinces. It was a move against the lorry owners’ strike, but also against some sectors of the workers who were striking, in public works and urban transport. Throughout the last months of Allende’s regime, generalised attacks and killings against workers and slum dwellers by the police, army and fascists became the order of the day. From within, the class had already been attacked, vilified and demoralised by the Trojan Horse of the capitalists, the PU. Organisationally, the PU had attempted to strait-jacket its whole electoral support into all kinds of hierarchical “popular committees”, such as the 20,000 or so which existed in 1970, People’s Supply Committees (JAPS) and finally, the much vaunted “cordones” which Trotskyists and anarchists are presenting now as types of “soviets” or “factory committees”. It is true that the cordones were in many cases the spontaneous creation of the workers, as were many factory occupations, but they ended up integrated within the ideology and organisational apparatus of the PU. As a Trotskyist paper itself admits, “by September 1973 such cordones had been formed in all the industrial suburbs of Santiago, and the political parties of the left were pushing for the creation of similar cordones throughout the country” (Red Weekly, 5.10.73). The cordones weren’t armed and had no independence from the whole network of PU trade unions, local committees, secret police, etc. Their independence would have been posed only if the workers had begun to organise themselves separately and against the Allende apparatus. That would have meant to open up the class struggle against the PU, the army and the rest of the bourgeoisie.

Allende’s government didn’t just attack the workers and peasants. As all capitalist governments, it also had in-fights with its own supporters. In 1970 a MIR member was killed by an armed commando group of the CP, the “Ramona Parra Brigade” in Concepcion. A terrorist guerrilla group, the VOP, was pulverised in 1971. Throughout 1972, the MIR itself was attacked as “provocateurs” by the CP. In April 1972, even a Trotskyist “leader”, Luis Vitale, was badly beaten by the police in Concepcion at a demo which was crushed with batons and tear gas. The governor, a CP Central Committee member called Vladimir Chavez, ordered such attacks. Police officers were also CP members, which is quite usual wherever there is a large CP machine. Searches for arms and fugitive guerrillas always led to scores of injured and sometimes deaths. The population was terrified into submission. In December 1971, Pinochet, one of Chile’s new dictators, was let loose on the streets of Santiago by Allende. The army imposed curfews, press censorship and arrests without warrants. In October 1972, the army – Allende’s dear “Popular Army” – was called into the cabinet. Allende knew by then that this coalition had proven useless to beat the working class into the ground. He had tried hard but failed. The job had to be continued by the army, without parliamentary niceties. But at least the PU had helped disarm the workers ideologically. That facilitated the tasks of the bloodhounds when 11 September came.

The working class stood on the sidelines during the coup. True, many militants fought back, but to defend their lives, not to bring back the wretched PU caretaker government. Those who fought back, heroically, were in the main PU supporters from the slum tenements, a sort of lumpen-proletariat – Gott’s “poorest” section of Chilean society. These militants, their dreams shattered, are suffering terribly. They were Allende’s cannon fodder, they were the support of the MIR, a support which succumbed to the populist and nationalist demagogy of the Chilean “left”. On the whole, the electoral basis of Allende was dwindling at the time of the coup. The workers in the mines and the large manufacturing concerns didn’t move. The battle wasn’t theirs. No general strike was called, and even if the statified Chilean TUC, the CUT, had called for one, probably nobody would have followed the suicidal appeal. Allende was right when he said that “our companeros were not prepared”.

The truth is that Allende came to power in 1970 to save bourgeois democracy in a crisis-ridden Chile. Having reinforced the state sector in a manner befitting the whole of the distorted Chilean economy, and having mystified parts of the working class with “socialist” phraseology (an impossibility for the two other bourgeois parties), his role came to an end. Exit the King. The logical end of his position, a fully state controlled capitalism, wasn’t possible because Chile remained in the sphere of influence of US imperialism, and had to trade with a hostile world market in which that imperialism was predominant.

The “left” here, and wherever there are liberals, humanists, quacks and technocrats, are all lamenting Allende’s downfall. They must encourage the lie of Allende’s “socialism” in an attempt to mystify the working class. Already in September, in Helsinki, social democrats of all stripes representing 50 nations got together in order to “oust” the Chilean junta. The obscene slogan of “anti-fascism” is again being raised to obscure the class struggle, to obscure the fact that the workers have nothing to gain by fighting and dying for any bourgeois or “democratic” (read imperialist, east or west) cause. The Judith Harts are already mouthing their “unity of the left” cries against the junta. Mitterand and the “Programme Commun de la Gauche” in France, and every bourgeois scoundrel and progressive parson has jumped on the “anti-fascist” bandwagon. Under the cover of “anti-fascism” and support for the PU, sections of the world ruling class are trying to mobilise workers for parliamentary carve-ups. Against this new “International Brigade” of the bourgeoisie, the working class can only show contempt and hostility.

The opportunists of the state capitalist “extreme left” are (most naturally) on this bandwagon just as the MIR was on Allende’s. But, oh this delicious “but” – they are “critically” on it. The real questions aren’t even posed in such quarters. It is not a question of “parliament versus armed struggle”, it is a question of capitalism versus communism, the bourgeoisie the world over against the workers the world over. We workers have only one programme: the abolition of frontiers, the abolition of the state and parliament, the elimination of wage labour and commodity production by the producers themselves, the liberation of world humanity initiated by the victory of the revolutionary workers’ councils. Any other programme is the programme of barbarism, the barbarism and dupery of the “Chilean way”

World Revolution 4th November 1973

The military scum are slaughtering the Chilean workers by the thousands. They are being hunted down, humiliated, and murdered, house by house, factory by factory. Order reigns. And the order of capital is BARBARISM.

Still more vile and disgusting is the fact that the workers have their backs to the wall, and that they are forced to fight, whether they want to or not, in a struggle where they are beaten in advance and without any perspective, without any possibility of believing that they are dying in the defence of their own interests.

The “left” is protesting at the massacre. But it is the Popular Unity government that called this criminal army to power. The “left” is carefully keeping quiet about the fact that only ten days ago they were in government hand in hand with these assassins described as the “People’s Army”. They were still saluting these criminals and torturers when they had ALREADY begun to arrest workers and carry out searches in the factories.

Let one thing be clear. In three years of left government the workers have ALWAYS been deceived, exploited, and suppressed. The “left” organised the exploitation. The “left” put down the strikes of the miners, the farm workers, and the hunger-stricken homeless in the slums. The “left” denounced the workers in struggle as “provocateurs” and called the military into the government.

The Popular Unity government has never been anything but a particular means of maintaining order by deceiving the workers. Faced with a world wide crisis, Chilean capital found itself in difficulty and had to settle things in its own way, first of all putting down the proletariat and crushing its ability to resist. To do so, it proceeded in two stages. First it mystified the workers, then it dragged them before the firing squad behind the banners of bourgeois “democracy”.

The left and the leftists are not satisfied with dragging the workers to the slaughter. Here in France, they even have the gall to use the corpses of Chilean workers to undertake a large scale DECEPTION: the blood is barely dry in Santiago, and already they are calling on the workers to demonstrate and to strike to defend “democracy” against the military. And in doing so, Marchais, Mitterand, Krivine & Co are preparing to play the SAME role here as Allende, the CP, and the leftist MIR in Chile. For in France, and throughout the world, as the crisis deepends the same problem will be posed for the bourgeoisie: how to break the proletariat.

By organising the “democratic” deception over Chile, the left today is preparing to take in hand the operation which will mean enrolling the workers under the banner of “nationalisations”, the “republic”, and similar swindles, in order to pin them down on a terrain which is not their own and deliver them up to repression. And by refusing to denounce the left for what it really is, the leftists also take their stand on the side of capital.

The crisis has hit sooner and harder in Chile than elsewhere. And even before the proletariat could engage ITS OWN struggle, all the forces of the left, the bourgeoisie’s Trojan horse amidst the working class, have undertaken to muzzle it, to prevent it appearing as an independent force on its own terrain, with its own programme, which is not some “democratic” or state capitalist reform, but the social revolution.

And all those, like the Trotskyists, who have given the slightest support to this castration of the working class, by supporting however critically the forces of the “left”, also bear responsibility for the massacre. The Trotskyists in France prove that they are on the same side of the barricades as the left wing of capital, since they debate with the latter as to the “tactical” and military means of taking power and reproach Allende for not having done a better job of enrolling the workers under his banner!

From France 1936 to Chile 1973, by way of the Spanish Civil War, Bolivia, and Argentina, the same lesson has been meted out to us over and over again.

The proletariat can make no alliance, enter no front with capital, even draped in the banner of “socialism” or “freedom”. Any force that contributes, however slightly, to tie the workers to a fraction of capital, is on the other side. Any force that encourages the slightest illusion in the left wing of capital is nothing but a link in the chain that leads to the slaughter of the workers.

There is only one “unity”: the unity of the workers of the world. There is only one guiding line: the total autonomy of the workers’ forces. There is only one banner: the destruction of the bourgeois state and the international extension of the revolution. There is only one programme: the abolition of wage slavery.

As for those who are tempted to let themselves be deceived by fine talk, the hollow speeches about the “republic”, the disgusting old songs of “Popular Unity” - then let them look the horror of Chile in the face.

As the crisis deepens, there is only one alternative: the resurgence of the revolution or the crushing of the proletariat!

Révolution Internationale,

18th September 1973

NOTES

1 The official figures are 3,000 dead. According to the associations for aid to the victims, there were at least 10,000 dead or missing.

2 We should note that the United States were not alone in supporting the “gorillas” of Latin America. The junta which seized power in Argentina shortly afterwards, and which was itself responsible for 30,000 deaths, cooperated actively with the Chilean government in the assassination of political opponents during “Operation Condor” , and received “technical” help from the French military who passed on their “expertise” in the struggle against “subversion” learned during the war in Algeria.

3 MIR: “Movement of the Revolutionary Left”

4 See our article in Révolution Internationale new series, n°5: “Le Chili révèle la nature profonde de la gauche et des gauchistes”.

For more than 2.5 years the bourgeoisie has been announcing a recovery which it has been forced to put off at every quarter. For more than 2.5 years economic performance has fallen systematically below forecasts, forcing the ruling class to revise these downwards. The present recession, beginning in the second half of the year 2000, is already one of the longest since the end of the 1960s. And, although there are some signs of recovery in the United States, this is still far from being the case in Europe or Japan. Moreover, any improvement in United States is essentially the product of some of the most vigorous state intervention in 40 years, and an unprecedented increase in debt, leading to fears that the new speculative bubble in the housing market is about to burst.

As regards state intervention aimed at maintaining economic activity, it should be noted that the American government has allowed an unrestrained increase in the budget deficit. From a positive balance of $130 billion in 2001, by 2003 the budget had fallen into deficit to the tune of $300 billion (3.6% of GNP). Today, the American business and political classes are increasingly alarmed by the size of the deficit and by the increases forecast as a result of the conflict in Iraqi and a reduction in tax returns as a result of the fall in income tax.

With regard to the debt, the Federal Reserve's drastic reduction in interest rates was intended above all to maintain household consumption thanks to the renegotiation of their mortgage loans. Reducing the load of housing loan repayments made it possible for the banks to grant new loans and so increase household debt. American households' mortgage debt has thus grown by $700 billion (more than twice the budget deficit!). The United States' ability to recover more rapidly than other countries is due to the triple growth of American debt: state, households, and foreign debt. However, this recovery will only last if sustained economic activity continues into the medium-term. Otherwise America runs the risk of finding itself in the same situation as Japan more than ten years ago, faced with the bursting of a speculative property bubble and an enormous increase in bad debt.

Europe can scarcely afford such luxury, since its deficits were already impressive when the recession began again, and the continued recession has only served to increase these deficits. Thus Germany and France, which represent the economic heart of Europe, but today are revealed as the worst students in the class, with budget deficits of the 3.8% and 4% respectively. These are already well beyond the 3% ceiling fixed by the Maastricht treaty, and, as a result France and Germany are both under threat of punishment by the European commission and the enormous fines provided for by the treaty. This reduces still further Europe's ability to undertake a serious policy of recovery. Moreover, any European recovery will have to carry the weight of the fall in the dollar against the Euro organised by the US to reduce its trade deficit: Europe will have more and more difficulty in maintaining its export surplus. It is hardly surprising that countries at the heart of Europe like Germany, France, Holland and Italy are in recession and that the others are not far behind.

Those who believed the bourgeoisie's talk about a new era of prosperity thanks to the opening of East European markets after the collapse of the Berlin Wall are having to think again. Far from providing a springboard for "German domination", reunification is still proving to be a heavy burden for Germany. Once the locomotive of Europe, Germany now has difficulty in keeping up with the train. Inflation is down almost to the point of deflation, high real interest rates are a dampener on economic activity, and the existence of the Euro makes it impossible to undertake a policy of competitive devaluation of the national currency. Unemployment, wage restrictions, and recession have all led to a stagnation of the domestic market never seen during previous downturns. The future integration of Eastern countries into the European Union will weigh still more heavily on the economic situation.

The obsolescence of capitalist relations of production finds rxpression in the crisis

The uninterrupted decline in growth rates since the end of the 1960s (see our article "The reality of 'economic prosperity' laid bare by the crisis" in International Review n°114, and the graph below), reveals the immense bluff that the bourgeoisie has maintained throughout the 1990s about capitalism's supposed renewed economic prosperity thanks to the 'new' economy, globalisation, and the recipes of neo-liberalism. This is hardly surprising, since the crisis has nothing to do with economic policy: the exhaustion of the Keynesian policies of the 1950s and 60s, followed by the neo-Keynesian policies of the 1970s, and the inability of the neo-liberal recipes of the 1980s and 1990s to offer any kind of solution, are due to the fact that the world wide crisis is not the result of "bad economic management", but of the fundamental contradictions that pervade the whole mechanism of the capitalist economy. And if the crisis has nothing to do with economic policy, it has still less to do with the government of the day. Whether they be on the right or on the left, governments have gone the rounds of all the recipes available. We thus have the British and American governments applying the most neo-Keynesian policies imaginable, with run-away budget deficits, despite being at opposite ends of the political spectrum. Similarly, the austerity programmes of the Schröder government in Germany (social-democrat and ecologist), and of the Raffarin government in France (liberal right), are as alike as two peas in a pod.

One of the main responsibilities of revolutionaries, confronted with this 35-year uninterrupted spiral of crisis and austerity, is to demonstrate that its roots are to be found in the historical obsolescence of the wage labour that lies at the heart of capitalist relations of production.[1] [48] Wage labour concentrates within itself all the social, economic, and political limitations of the production of capitalist profit, and its very mechanisms set a barrier in the way of the latter's complete realisation.[2] [49] The generalisation of wage labour lay at the heart of capitalism's expansion in the 19th century, and, since World War I, has lain at the heart of the inadequacy of the solvent market relative to the needs of the process of accumulation.

Against all the false explanations for the crisis, it is up to revolutionaries to demonstrate that while capitalism was once a necessary and progressive mode of production, it is now historically redundant and is dragging humanity to its doom. As in the decadence of previous modes of production (feudalism, slavery, etc.), this historical obsolescence lies in the fact that the social relations of production have become too narrow to contain and encourage the development of the productive forces as they once did.[3] [50]In today's society, it is wage labour that is holding back the full satisfaction of human needs. Humanity will only be able to free itself from these contradictions by overthrowing this social relationship and creating communism.

Since the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the bourgeoisie has mounted endless campaigns on the "absurdity of communism", the "utopia of revolution", and the "dilution of the working class" in a formless mass of citizens whose only legitimate activity is supposedly the "democratic" reform of a capitalism presented henceforth as humanity's only horizon. Within this monstrous ideological swindle, the anti-globalisation movement has been accorded a monopoly on anti-establishment protest. The ruling class takes endless trouble to put them at the forefront of the criticism of its own system: their analyses and activity are widely reported in the media, their most eminent representatives are occasionally invited to summit meetings, etc. And with good reason, the stock in trade of the anti-globalisation movement perfectly complements the bourgeoisie's ideological campaign on the "utopia of communism", since both are grounded in the same hypothesis: that capitalism is the only possible system, and its reform the only alternative. According to this movement, with the organisation ATTAC and its council of "economic experts" at its head, capitalism could be humanised if only a "good regulated capitalism" could expel "bad financial capitalism". The crisis is supposedly the result of neo-liberal deregulation and the dictatorship of finance capital imposing its demand of 15% return on investment from industrial capital - all supposedly decided at an obscure 1979 meeting called "the Washington consensus". Austerity, financial instability, recession - all this is nothing but the result of a new balance of forces within the bourgeoisie itself, to the benefit of usurious capital. Whence the ideas of "regulating finance", "pushing it back", and "redirecting investment towards the productive sphere", etc.

In this atmosphere of general confusion as to the causes of the crisis, revolutionaries must establish a clear understanding of what are its origins, and above all demonstrate that it is the product of capitalism's historical bankruptcy. In other words, they must re-establish the validity of marxism in this domain. Sadly, when we look at the analyses of the crisis proposed by the groups of the proletarian political milieu (eg the PCInt - Programme Communiste, or the IBRP), we can only say that they have great difficulty in marking a clear separation with the ambient ideology of anti-globalisation, and of mounting a clear defence of marxism. Both groups are undoubtedly part of the proletarian camp, and set themselves fundamentally apart from the anti-globalisation crowd by the denunciation of reformist illusions and their defence of a revolutionary communist perspective. However, their own analysis of the crisis is to a large extent borrowed from the anti-globalists' defrocked leftism.

Some choice selections: "The profits gained from speculation are so great that they are attractive not only to 'classical' businesses but also for many others such as insurance companies or pension funds, of which Enron is an excellent example (...) Speculation is a complementary, not to say the principal, means whereby the bourgeoisie appropriates surplus-value (...) A rule has been imposed, fixing the minimum return on invested capital at 15%. To achieve or to outdo this rate of growth in share value, the bourgeoisie has had to increase the conditions of exploitation of the working class: the rhythm of labour has intensified, real wages have fallen. Collective redundancies have affected hundreds of thousands of workers" (Bilan et Perspectives n°4, p.6, our translation). We can start by pointing out that this is a strange way to pose the problem on the part of a group that proclaims itself "materialist" in contrast to the ICC's "idealism". "A rule has been imposed", says the IBRP. But how? By itself? We will not insult the IBRP by suggesting that they imagine any such thing. This new rule must have been imposed by a class, a government, a given human organisation, but why? Because certain powerful individuals have suddenly become greedier and nastier than usual? Because the "bad guys" have won out over the "good guys" (or the "less bad guys")? Or simply, as marxism would have it, because the objective conditions of the world economy have obliged the ruling class to intensify their exploitation of the workers. Unfortunately, the passage we have quoted does not pose the problem like this.

Worse still, we could read the same analysis in any anti-globalist pamphlet: financial speculation has become the main source of capitalist profit (!), financial speculation imposes its 15% rule on business, financial speculation is responsible for the increase in exploitation, massive lay-offs and falling wages, and it is even financial speculation that is the source of a process of de-industrialisation and of poverty all over the planet: "The accumulation of speculative and financial profit feeds a process of de-industrialisation that brings in its wake unemployment and poverty all over the planet" (idem, p.7).

The PCInt - Programme Communiste is scarcely any better, even if it does refer to the authority of Lenin, and couch its analysis in more general terms: "Thanks to the development of finance capital, the banks have become the real actors of capital's centralisation, increasing the power of gigantic monopolies. In capitalism's imperialist phase, it is finance capital that dominates the market, companies, indeed the whole of society, and this domination itself leads to further financial concentration to the point where 'Finance capital, concentrated in a few hands and exercising a virtual monopoly, exacts enormous and ever-increasing profits from the floating of companies, issue of stock, state loans, etc., strengthens the domination of the financial oligarchy and levies tribute upon the whole of society for the benefit of monopolists' (Lenin, in Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism[4] [51]). Capitalism was born from minuscule usurious capital, and ends its evolution in the form of gigantic usurious capital" (Programme Communiste, n°98, p1, our translation). This vigorous denunciation of parasitic finance capital could satisfy the most radical anti-globalist.[5] [52]

One would search in vain through these few extracts for any kind of demonstration that it is capitalism as a mode of production which is outmoded, that it is capitalism as a whole which is responsible for the world's crises, wars, and poverty. One would search in vain for any denunciation of the anti-globalists' central idea: that crises are caused by finance capital, when in fact it is the capitalist system as a whole which lies at the heart of the problem. By adopting whole segments of the anti-globalist argument, these two groups of the Communist Left leave the door wide open to a theoretical opportunism towards leftist analyses. These present the crisis as the consequence of a change in the balance of forces within the bourgeoisie, between the financial oligarchy and industrial capital. The moment when the financial oligopoly got the upper hand over business capital, is supposedly linked to the decision taken in Washington to suddenly raise interest rates.

There has not in reality been any "triumph of finance over industry", it is the whole bourgeoisie which has changed gear in its offensive against the working class.

Is "financial profit" the basis for a usurious capitalism?

The denunciation of the theme of finance capital is today a theme common to all the so-called "critical" economists. It is the fashion among the "critics of capitalism" to claim that the rate of profit has increased but that it has been confiscated by the financial oligarchy, and that as a result the industrial rate of profit has not significantly recovered. This is supposed to explain the failure of growth to recover (see the graph in this article, below). It is true that, since the decision to raise interest rates in 1979, a large part of extracted surplus value has not been accumulated via company self-financing, but has been distributed in the form of financial revenue. The typical response to this observation is to present the growth in finance capital as a drain on global profit, which thus hinders productive investment. The weakness of economic growth is thus explained by the parasitism of the financial sphere, by the hypertrophy of "usurious capital", whence the pseudo-marxist "explanations" based on Lenin's mistakes (such as the passage cited above from Programme Communiste) according to which financial profit is supposedly a "drain" on company profit (the famous 15% return on investment).

This analysis is a return to the vulgar economics of a capital choosing between productive or financial investment depending on the relation between the return on industrial investment and the return on finance capital. On a more theoretical level, these approaches to finance as a parasitic element demand a return to two theories of value and profit.

According to marxist theory, value exists prior to its redistribution and is produced solely in the production process through the exploitation of labour power. In Book III of Capital, Marx clearly states that interest is "The part of the profit paid to the owner is called interest, which is just another name, or special term, for a part of the profit given up by capital in the process of functioning to the owner of the capital, instead of putting it into its own pocket" (Capital, Vol III, Part V, Chapter 21, "Interest-Bearing Capital").[6] [53] In saying this, Marx radically sets himself apart from bourgeois economics, which presents profit as the sum of different factors of profit (revenue from the factor of labour, revenue from the factor of capital, revenue from the factor of rent, etc.). Exploitation disappears, since each factor is remunerated according to its own contribution to production: "For vulgar political economy, which seeks to represent capital as an independent source of value, of value creation, this form is naturally a veritable find, a form in which the source of profit is no longer discernible, and in which the result of the capitalist process of production - divorced from the process - acquires an independent existence" (Capital, Vol III, Part V, Chapter 24, "Externalisation of the relations of capital in the form of interest-bearing capital"). The fetishism of finance consists in the illusion that holding a part of capital (a share, a treasury bond, a debenture) will, in the true sense of the term, "produce" interest. Buying a share means buying the right to receive a fraction of the value created, but that does not in itself create value. It is labour, and only labour, that gives value to what is produced. Capital, property, shares, a savings account, or a stock of machines, produce nothing whatsoever by themselves. It is human beings who produce.[7] [54] Capital has a "return" in the same sense that the hunting hound "returns" with the game. It creates nothing, but it gives its owner the right to a share of what has been produced by whoever set the capital in motion. In this sense, capital is less an object than a social relation: a share of the fruit of the labour of the workers ends up in the hands of the owner of capital. The ideology of anti-globalisation turns things upside down by mixing up the extraction of surplus value with its distribution. The source of capitalist profit lies solely in the exploitation of labour, there is no such thing as speculative profits for the bourgeoisie as a whole (although this or that sector of the bourgeoisie may gain from speculation); the stock market does not create value.

The other theory, flirting with vulgar economy, conceives global profit as the sum of industrial profit on the one hand, and financial profit on the other. The rate of accumulation is supposedly low because finance profit is higher than industrial profit. This vision is directly inherited from the late and unlamented Stalinist parties, which spread a "popular" criticism of capitalism seen as the confiscation of "legitimate" profit by a parasitic oligarchy (the "200 families" in France, etc.). Here the idea is the same: it is based on a veritable fetishism of finance, which sees the stock market as a means of creating value in the same way as the exploitation of labour. This is the basis for the whole anti-globalist mystification of the Tobin tax, the regulation and humanisation of capital. Any theory which transforms a contradiction as effect (the increasing role of finance capital) into a contradiction as cause carries with it the risk of falling into a typically leftist vision: that there is a distinction between a "good" capitalism that invests and a "bad" capitalism that speculates. This leads to a vision of finance capital as a sort of parasitic growth on an otherwise healthy capitalist body. The crisis will not disappear, even after the abolition of the "gigantic usurious capital" so dear to Programme Communiste. In a sense, the idea of capitalism dominated by finance capital leads to an under-estimation of the depth of the crisis, since it implies that the crisis is the result of the parasitic role of finance capital demanding extravagant interest rates from companies, and therefore preventing them from undertaking productive investment. If this were indeed the root of the crisis, then its resolution would merely be a matter of "euthanasia for the rentiers" as Keynes put it.

This sliding into leftism at the analytical level leads to the presentation of various economic data with the aim of demonstrating this absolute domination by finance capital, and its enormous drain on the economy: "the major companies saw their investments oriented towards the supposedly more 'profitable' financial markets (...) This phenomenal market developed faster than production (...) As far as currency speculation is concerned, of the $1,300 billion that moved daily from one currency to another in 1996, at most 5-8% corresponded to payment for goods or services sold between countries (to which we should add non-speculative currency exchange operations). Of these $1,300 billion, 85% thus corresponded to purely speculative daily operations! These figures would need to be brought up to date, but we can bet that the figure has gone beyond 85%" (IBRP, Bilan et Perspectives, n°4, p.6). The figure is indeed higher now, and the sums exchanged are now in the region of $1,500 billion, or in other words almost the entire debt of the Third World... but these figures only frighten the ignorant for they are meaningless! In reality, this money is merely going round in circles and the faster it turns the higher the figures. We need only imagine a speculator converting 100 currency units every ½ hour; after 24 hours, the total transactions will amount to 4,800 units, and if he speculated every ¼ hour, then the total sum counted would double... but this sum is purely virtual since the speculator only actually possess the original 100 +5 or -10, depending on his talents as a speculator. This media presentation of the facts, adopted by the IBRP, unfortunately gives credit to the interpretation of the crisis as a product of the parasitic action of finance.

In reality, the growth in the financial sphere is to be explained by the increase in non-accumulated surplus-value. It is the crisis of over-production - and therefore the scarcity of fields for profitable accumulation - which engenders the payment of surplus-value in the form of finance revenue, rather than finance capital which opposes or substitutes itself for productive investment. The increasing role of finance capital corresponds to a growing proportion of surplus-value, which can no longer be profitably re-invested.[8] [55]The distribution of financial revenue is not automatically incompatible with accumulation based on company self-financing. When there is attractive profit to be drawn from economic activity, finance revenue is re-invested and participates in companies' accumulation. What needs explaining, is not that profit goes out in the form of the distribution of finance revenue, but that it doesn't come back to be productively reinvested in the economic cycle. If a significant part of these sums were reinvested, then this would be expressed in a rise in the rate of accumulation. And if this is not happening, it is because there is a crisis of over-production, and therefore a scarcity of possibilities for profitable accumulation.

Financial parasitism is a symptom of capitalism's difficulties, not a cause. The financial sphere is the crisis' showcase, for this is where stock market bubbles, currency collapses, and banking upheavals make their appearance. But these upheavals are the product of contradictions whose origins lie in the productive sphere.

Wage labour at the heart of the crisis of over-production

What has happened over the last twenty years? Austerity and falling wages[9] [56] have allowed companies to re-establish their rate of profit, but these increased profits have not led to an increase in the rate of accumulated investment. Growth has therefore remained depressed (see the graph in this article). In short, the brake placed on wage costs has restricted markets, and fed financial revenue rather than the reinvestment of profit. But why is the level of reinvestment so low despite the fact that companies have re-established their profits? Why has accumulation not started up again despite a twenty-year increase in the rate of profit? Marx, followed by Rosa Luxemburg, have shown that the conditions of production (the extraction of surplus-value) are one thing, while the conditions for the realisation of this surplus labour crystallised in manufactured commodities are another. The surplus labour crystallised in production only becomes surplus-value in the form of liquidities that can serve for accumulation if the commodities produced have been sold on the market. It is this fundamental difference between the conditions of production and the conditions of realisation that allows us to understand why there is no automatic link between the rate of profit and growth.

The graph summarises very well capitalism's evolution since World War II. The exceptional phase of prosperity during the period of reconstruction saw all the basic variables of profit, accumulation, growth, and labour productivity either increase or fluctuate at high levels until the re-appearance of the open crisis at the turn of the 1960s-70s. The exhaustion of gains in productivity that began in the 1960s dragged all the other variables down together until the beginning of the 1980s. Since then, capitalism has been in an altogether unprecedented situation on the economic level, combining a high rate of profit with mediocre labour productivity, rates of accumulation, and therefore of growth. This separation, for more than 20 years, between the evolution of the rate of profit and that of the other variables, can only be explained in the framework of capitalism's decadence. The IBRP does not believe this, and considers that the concept of decadence should be confined to the dustbins of history: "What role then does the concept of decadence play on the terrain of the militant critique of political economy, in other words of a profound critique of the phenomena and dynamics of capitalism in the period in which we are living? None. (...) We will not be able to explain the mechanisms of the crisis, nor denounce the relationship between the crisis and the increasing influence of finance capital, or the relationship between the latter and the policies of the super-powers in their struggle for control of financial income and its sources, using the concept of decadence".[10] [57] The IBRP thus prefers to abandon the key concept of decadence on which its own positions are based[11] [58] and to replace them with concepts in vogue in the anti-globalist milieu, such as "financiarisation" (which we have translated as the "increasing influence of finance capital") and the "rent of finance capital" in order to "understand the crisis and the policies of the super-powers". They even end up declaring that "these concepts [decadence in particular] are foreign to the method and the arsenal of the critique of political economy" (idem).

Why is the framework of decadence so vital for understanding the crisis today? Because the uninterrupted decline in growth rates in the OECD countries since the end of the 1960s (respectively 5.2%, 3.5%, 2.8%, 2.6%, and 2.2% for the 1960s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and the years 2000-02) confirm capitalism's return to the historic tendency that began with World War I. The parenthesis of the exceptional period of growth (1950-75) is definitively closed.[12] [59] Like a broken spring returning to its position of rest after one last rebound, capitalism is inexorably returning to the growth rates of the period from 1914 to 1950. Contrary to the vociferous claims of our critics, the theory of the decadence of capitalism is not in the least a specific product of the period of stagnation in the 1930s.[13] [60] It lies at the very heart of historical materialism, the secret at last discovered of the succession in history of modes of production. As such, it gives us the framework for analysing the evolution of capitalism, and above all of the period since World War I. Its bearing is general, and valid for a whole historical era. It is absolutely not dependent on a particular period or economic conjuncture. Moreover, even if we include the exceptional phase of growth between 1950 and 1975, the two world wars, the depression of the 1930s, and more than 35 years of austerity and crisis until the present day, condemn capitalism out of hand: barely 35 years of "prosperity" (if we count large) against 55-60 years of war and/or economic crisis (and the worst is still to come!). The historical tendency for capitalism's obsolete relations of production to hold back the growth of the productive forces is the rule, the framework that allows us to understand the evolution of capitalism, including its exceptional phase of prosperity after World War II (we will return to this point in future articles). By contrast, it is the abandonment of the theory of decadence which is a pure product of the years of "prosperity", analogous to the way in which the reformists of the Second International allowed themselves to be deceived by capitalism's performance during the Belle Époque that preceded 1914.

Moreover, the graph demonstrates clearly that the mechanism at the basis of the increase in the rate of profit is neither an increase in labour productivity, nor a reduction in capital. It also allows us definitively to wring the neck of all the nonsense about the "new technical revolution". There are some university professors who are dazzled by computers to the point where they fall for the bourgeoisie's campaigns about the "new economy", and confuse the frequency of their computer's CPU with the productivity of labour: it is not because the Pentium 4 is 200 times faster than the first-generation processors that the office worker types 200 times faster on his keyboard, or increases his productivity by the same amount. The graph shows clearly enough that labour productivity has declined since the 1960s. And despite the restoration of profits, the rates of accumulation (investments which underpin possible gains in productivity) have not taken off. The "technological revolution" only exists in the campaigns of the ruling class and in the heads of those who swallow them. More seriously, the empirical observation that the increase in productivity (progress in technology and the organisation of labour) has been constantly slowing down since the 1960s, contradicts the media image of increasing technical change, a new industrial revolution supposedly borne on a wave of computing, telecommunications, the Internet, and multimedia. How are we to explain the strength of this mystification, which turns reality upside down in the heads of every one of us?

Firstly, we should remember that the increases in productivity were much more spectacular immediately following World War II than those which are presented today as a "new economy". The organisation of labour in three eight-hour shifts, the generalisation of production lines throughout industry, rapid progress in the development and extension of all kinds of transport (trucks, trains, aircraft, cars, ships), the replacement of coal by cheaper oil, the invention of plastics and their use to replace more expensive materials, the industrialisation of agriculture, the universal supply of electricity, natural gas, running water, radio and the telephone, the mechanisation of home life thanks to the development of household appliances, etc... all these are far more remarkable in terms of an increase in productivity than the recent developments in computing and telecommunications. And since the "Golden 60s", the increase in productivity has fallen continuously.

Furthermore, there is a constantly encouraged confusion between the appearance of new commodities for consumption and the progress of productivity. The tide of innovation, and the proliferation of the most extraordinary new consumer products (DVD, GSM phones, the Internet, etc.) is not the same thing as an increase in productivity. An increase in productivity means the ability to reduce the resources needed to produce a commodity or a service. The term "technical progress" should always be understood as progress in the "techniques of production and/or organisation", strictly from the standpoint of the ability to economise the resources used in the production of a commodity or the supply of a service. No matter how extraordinary, the progress of digital technology is not expressed in significant increases in productivity within the productive process. This is the bluff of the "new economy".

Finally - and despite the assertions of our critics, who deny the reality of capitalism's decadence and the validity of Rosa Luxemburg's theoretical work, and who make the fall in the rate of profit the alpha and omega of capitalism's evolution - the history of the economy since the beginning of the 1980s shows us clearly that it is not because profit rates increase that growth starts up again. Certainly, there is a link between the rate of profit and the rate of accumulation, but it is neither mechanical nor unambiguous: the two variables are partially independent. This contradicts those who make the crisis of overproduction dependent on the fall in the rate of profit, and the return to growth on its renewed rise: "This contradiction between the production of surplus value and its realisation appears as an overproduction of commodities and therefore as a cause of the saturation of the market, which in turn holds back the process of accumulation, which makes the system as a whole unable to counter-balance the fall in the rate of profit. In reality, the process is the opposite (...) It is the economic cycle and the process of valorisation which makes the market 'solvent' or 'insolvent'. It is on the basis of the contradictory laws which control the process of accumulation that we can explain the 'crisis' of the market" (Battaglia Comunista's presentation to the first conference of groups of the Communist Left, May 1977, our translation). Today, we can see clearly that the rate of profit has been rising for some twenty years despite the fact that growth remains depressed and the bourgeoisie has never spoken of deflation as much as it does today. It is not because capitalism can produce profitably that it is also able to create automatically, by the same mechanism, the solvent market where it will be possible to transform the surplus labour crystallised in commodities, into hard cash which alone allows the profit to be reinvested. The extent of the market does not depend automatically on the evolution of the rate of profit; like the other variables that condition capitalism's evolution, it is partially independent. Understanding this fundamental difference, between the conditions of production and those of realisation, already highlighted by the theoretical work of Marx as it was continued by Rosa Luxemburg, allows us to understand why there is no automatic relationship between growth and the rate of profit.

Decadence and the orientation of the workers' resistance

Because they reject decadence as the framework for understanding the present period and the crisis, point to financial speculation as the cause of the world's misfortunes and under-estimate the development of state capitalism on every level, the two most important groups of the communist left apart from the ICC - the PCInt - Programme Communiste and the IBRP - can offer no coherent orientation for the resistance struggles of the working class. We need only read their analyses of the bourgeoisie?s austerity policies and the conclusions they draw from their analysis of the crisis to see this: "During the 1950s, the capitalist economies returned to growth and the bourgeoisie at last saw profits flourish durably. This expansion, which continued during the decade that followed, was thus based on a growth in credit and was possible thanks to the support of the state. It undeniably found expression in an improvement in the workers' living conditions (social security, collective bargaining, rising wages...). These concessions by the bourgeoisie, under pressure from the working class, were expressed in a fall in the rate of profit, which is itself an inevitable phenomenon linked to the internal dynamic of capital (...) While at the beginning of the imperialist stage, the profits gained thanks to the exploitation of the colonies and of their peoples allowed the dominant bourgeoisies to guarantee a certain social peace by allowing the working class to benefit from a fraction of the extorted surplus value, the same is no longer true today, since the logic of speculation implies a calling into question of all the social gains won by the workers of the 'central countries' during the previous decades from their bourgeoisie" (IBRP, Bilan et Perspectives, n°4, our translation).

Here again, we can see that abandoning the framework of decadence opens wide the door to concessions to leftist analyses. The IBRP prefers to copy the leftists' fairy-tales about the social gains of "social security, collective bargaining, rising wages" which were supposedly "concessions by the bourgeoisie, under pressure from the working class", and which today are called into question by the "logic of speculation", rather than basing itself on the theoretical contributions inherited from the groups of the international communist left (Bilan, Communisme, etc.), who analysed these measures as the means whereby the bourgeoisie made the working class dependent on, and attached it to, the state.

During capitalism's ascendant phase, the development of the productive forces and of the proletariat was not adequate to threaten the bourgeoisie and to make a victorious international revolution a possibility. This is why, even though the bourgeoisie did everything it could to sabotage the proletariat's organisation, the workers were nonetheless able, in bitter struggle, to combine in a "class for itself" within capitalism, through their own organisations: the working class' political parties, and the trades unions. The unification of the proletariat was achieved through struggles to wrest reforms from capital in the form of improvements in working class living conditions: reforms on both the economic and the political terrain. As a class, the proletariat won the right to a political life within society, or to use Marx's terms in The poverty of philosophy: the working class won the right to exist and to assert itself in social life as a 'class for itself', in other words as an organised class with its own meeting places, its own ideas, and its own social programme, its traditions and even its songs.

With capitalism's entry into its decadent phase in 1914, the working class demonstrated its ability to overthrow the bourgeoisie's domination by forcing the latter to bring the war to an end and by developing and international wave of revolutionary struggle. Ever since, the proletariat has been a permanent potential threat for the bourgeoisie. This is why the bourgeoisie can no longer tolerate its class enemy being able to organise permanently on its own class terrain, being able to live and grow within its own organisations. The state extends its totalitarian domination over every aspect of social life. Everything is in the grip of its omnipresent tentacles. Everything that lives in society must either submit unconditionally to the state, or confront it in a fight to the death. The time when capital could tolerate the existence of permanent organisations of the proletariat is over. In the same way, "Since World War I, in parallel with the role of the state in the economy, the laws that regulate the relationship between capital and labour have proliferated, creating a strict framework of 'legality' within which the proletarian struggle is circumscribed and reduced to impotence" (ICC pamphlet The unions against the working class). This state capitalism on the social level means the transformation of all class life into an ersatz on bourgeois terrain. Whether through the trades unions in some countries, or directly in others, the state has laid hands on all the different strike funds or funds for mutual assistance in case of sickness or unemployment, created by the working class during the 19th century. The bourgeoisie has deprived the proletariat of its political solidarity, to transform it into economic solidarity in the hands of the state. By dividing wages into a part paid directly by the employer, and another part paid indirectly by the state, the bourgeoisie has greatly reinforced the mystification that the state is an organ standing above classes, a guarantee of the common interest and of the working class' social security. The bourgeoisie has succeeded in tying the working class materially and ideologically to the state. This was how the Italian and Belgian Fractions of the international communist left analysed the unemployment and mutual aid funds set up by the state during the 1930s.[14] [61]

What has the IBRP to say to the working class? First and foremost, that the "logic of speculation" is responsible for "calling into question of all the social gains"... and here we are back again to the absolute evil of "financiarisation"! In passing, the IBRP forgets that the crisis and the attacks on the working class did not wait for the appearance of the "logic of speculation" to rain down on the proletariat. Does the IBRP really believe, as its prose suggests, that all will be rosy for the working class if only the "logic of speculation" were eradicated? On the contrary, this leftist mystification that the struggle against austerity depends on the struggle against the "logic of speculation" should be fought as vigorously as possible!

Worse still, it is a gross mystification to lead the proletariat to the belief that social security, collective bargaining, or even the automatic sliding scale of wages indexed to inflation, are "gains won by the workers" in struggle. Certainly, the reduction of the working day, the outlawing of child labour, or of night work for women, were really concessions won by the workers' struggles during capitalism's ascendant phase. By contrast, the so-called "social gains" like social security, or the collective bargaining enshrined in the "Social Pacts for Reconstruction" have nothing to do with the struggle of the working class. It was not the working class exhausted by war, drunk with nationalism, in the euphoria of the Liberation, which won these "gains" thanks to its "struggle". The "Social Pacts for Reconstruction" were worked out by the governments in exile as they prepared to set up measures of state capitalism. It was the bourgeoisie which took the initiative, during 1943-45 and in the midst of the war, of bringing together all the "live forces of the nation" and the "social partners", through tripartite meetings of representatives of the employers, of the government, and of the different parties and trades unions, in other words in the perfect national harmony of the resistance, to plan the reconstruction of its devastated economies, and to negotiate the socially difficult phase of reconstruction. There were no "concessions by the bourgeoisie, under pressure from the working class", in the sense of a bourgeoisie forced to accept a compromise faced with a working class mobilised on its own terrain and developing a strategy that broke with capitalism; these were the means adopted by the collusion of all the different components of the bourgeoisie (employers, trades unions, government) to ensure the social control over the working class during the reconstruction period.[15] [62] We should also remember that after the war, it was the bourgeoisie itself that created from nothing trades unions like the CFTC in France or the CSC in Belgium.

Obviously, revolutionaries denounce any reduction in either direct or indirect wages. Obviously, they denounce the attacks on living conditions when the bourgeoisie reduces the coverage of social security. But they will never defend the principle of the mechanism that the bourgeoisie has set up to tie the working class to the state.[16] [63] On the contrary, revolutionaries must denounce all the ideological and material logic that underpins these mechanisms, such as the supposed "neutrality" of the state, or of the social security organised by the state.

There is much at stake in the general aggravation of the contradictions of the capitalist mode of production, and in the difficulties that the working class has in rising to the situation. It is up to revolutionaries to respond adequately to the new questions that history poses, and they need to deepen their analyses to do so. But this deeper analysis cannot be founded on the adulterated garbage produced by the extreme left fractions of the bourgeoisie's political apparatus. Only by taking their stand on marxism, and on the gains of the communist left, especially on the analysis of the decadence of capitalism, will revolutionaries be able to live up to their responsibilities.

C. Mcl

The Comintern and Japan

Although the working class conquered power in Russia in October 1917, it took revolutionaries in Japan a long time to establish direct contact with the centre of the revolution and the international movement. There is no evidence of contacts between Japanese and Russian revolutionaries in 1917 and 1918. At the founding congress of the Communist International in March 1919 there was no delegation from Japan. Although S. Katayama – coming from the USA – was to be a delegate for Tokyo and Yokohoma, he could not attend the congress either. And, although in November 1918 and 1919 the first and second congresses of “Communist Organisations of the East” were held in Moscow, where delegates from Japan were invited, nobody from Japan attended them. At the Baku Conference in September 1920 a Japanese participant came from the USA. He was a member of the IWW, but had no mandate from any organisation in Japan and had come of his own accord.

The reason for the prolonged isolation of revolutionaries in Japan from the rest of the world can be partly explained by the fact that the overland connections between Russia and Japan were largely interrupted because of the civil war, since the Japanese army – as one of the most ruthless opponents of the workers revolution – fought until 1922 in Siberia. But the political weaknesses of the revolutionaries themselves was the main explanation. There was no group among them that acted as the driving force for the construction of an organisation and for its integration into the international revolutionary movement. There was no reference point for the Comintern, which was looking intensively for contact in Japan.

The absence of a faction that would have laid the basis for a new organisation turned out to be a big weakness. The preparatory work, which a faction accomplishes for the construction of the party, is itself a result of a long process of maturation and of a hard combat for a Marxist understanding of the organisation question. It was after the movement had reached its height and was going into a retreat that the Comintern made desperate and opportunistic attempts to contribute to the setting up of an organisation.

After the Comintern opened the Far East Secretariat in Shanghai in 1920, where revolutionaries from Korea and China were active, contact was established in October 1920 with the Japanese anarchist Osugi. He received a fund of 2,000 Yen from the Comintern Far East Secretariat, because he committed himself, vis-a-vis the Comintern delegates, to set up an organisation in Japan.

But what programmatic and organisational credibility did an anarchist have for the construction of a communist party? Osugi himself demanded autonomy for each “national section” and only agreed to the foundation of an international co- ordination office. Moreover, he had no mandate from any group. When he returned from Shanghai, Osugi founded the paper Rodo Undo (Labour Movement). The other, still dispersed, revolutionaries showed no great determination at the turn of 1920/1921 to found an organisation. Osugi, who remained faithful to his anarchist principles, when following developments in Russia called for the overthrow of the government after the events at Kronstadt in 1921. The Comintern then refused any further contact with him. Efforts to set up an organisation with Osugi had failed.

In Japan itself Yamakawa, Sakai and Arahata made more efforts to regroup forces from the end of 1920 on. In August 1920 the August League (Hachigatsu Domei) was founded, which in December 1920 became the Japanese Socialist League (Nihon Shakai-shugi Domei). Different currents of different theoretical-programmatic backgrounds had merged. Some 1,000 members had joined. The official newspaper was Socialism (Shakaishugi).

From the very beginning the police wanted to repress the organisation. Between August and November 1920 6 preparatory meetings were broken up by the police, and on December 9th 1920, the scheduled founding conference in Tokyo was also broken up by the police. The attempt to set up an organisation failed because of strong police pressure. Thus dispersal and fragmentation prevailed and the process of clarification and regroupment could not make a breakthrough. Instead the different groupings continued to publish different papers – such as Studies in Socialism – edited by Sakai and Yamakawa, Japan Labour News by Arahata, and Labour Movement by Osugi. In May 1921 the Socialist League was officially forbidden.

The Socialist League which should have played the role of a pole of regroupment, was unable to establish a clear demarcation, to bring about a selection through clarification, or to lay the foundations for a revolutionary organisation. Instead the trend of different personalities, each of whom was regrouping elements around them and each of whom was publishing a paper, continued to dominate.

After the fiasco of contact with Osugi the delegates of the Shanghai office of the Comintern suggested to Yamakaw in April

1921 that he start preparations for the foundation of a party. Until then Yamakawa and Sakai, who was very close to him, had an attentist attitude. But now, Yamakawa, Kondo and Sakai started to work on a platform and they elaborated the statutes of a “communist preparation committee”. But even in spring 1921 these comrades still did not have the intention of setting up a communist party at that time. The concept of a communist organisation as an organisation of combat, which would have to play a vanguard role in the revolutionary struggle, had not yet been anchored sufficiently. The emphasis was still on the spreading of ideas and communist propaganda only. However, these comrades were willing to intensify contact with the Comintern.

Kondo was sent to Shanghai in May 1921 in order to plan further steps with the Comintern. Kondo, whose political development had been influenced by the IWW while in the USA, and who had previously worked on Osugi’s paper Labour movement ( Rodo Undo), exaggerated the progress that had been made when he spoke to the delegates of the Comintern, because in reality very little progress had been made in the setting up of an organisation. Impressed by Kondo, the delegates promised financial help. Kondo returned with funds worth 6,500 Yen but failed to use the money for the construction of an organisation.1

Upon his return to Tokyo contrary to agreements with the Comintern, Kondo founded his own group Gyomin Kysanto (Enlightened People’s Communist Party), and became its chairman in August 1921. Yakamawa and Sakai rejected his proposal to shape the Communist Propaganda Group into a party, since they still had not digested the setback of the dissolution of the Socialist Party in May 1921. After a police raid in December 1921 Kondo’s group was outlawed and dissolved. A delegate of the Comintern, Grey, who was arrested at the same moment, was also carrying funds of the Comintern with him and a list of contacts. Both fell into the hands of the police.

Another set-back for the Comintern in its efforts to help build a party

At the time of the 3rd Congress of the Comintern in summer 1921, there was still no delegate from Japan. The only Japanese comrades present came from the USA (Gentaro was a member of the Japanese Socialist Group and Unzo was a member of the IWW). As a consequence revolutionaries in Japan were once again cut off from the central debate in Moscow around the course and the methods of the Comintern. At this congress the delegates of the currents which later became known as the Communist Left fought against the growing opportunist trend of the Comintern.

In the meantime, the Comintern itself had set up some committees with Radek as their co-ordinator with Japan. They decided on a campaign for the introduction of general voting rights. This occurred even though the 1st Congress of the Comintern had denounced in 1919 the dangerous role of bourgeois democracy and parliamentarism, and at the 2nd and 3rd Congresses the comrades of the Italian and Dutch-German Left warned against the attempts to try and use parliamentarism.

At the 3rd World Congress Taguchi Unzo, a member of the IWW, also opposed this campaign.

In autumn 1921 the Comintern called for a Conference of Far Eastern Peoples, which was planned as a direct counter- conference to the summit of the imperialist powers in Washington in Nov 1921, where the latter planned to carve up their zones of influence in the Far East.

Different groups from Japan were invited to attend the Far Eastern Conference. Both the group around Yamakawa as well as Kondo‘s Enlightened People’s Communist Party sent delegates, two anarchists and more individuals joined the delegates from Japan. At the Conference, which finally started in January 1922 in Petrograd, Takase, who spoke on behalf Kondo’s Enlightened People’s Communist Party, claimed a communist party had already been formed. Obviously this was a bluff. Impressed by the congress the anarchist Yoshida announced he had been “converted” to communism; but on his way back to Japan he took up anarchist positions again.

At the conference Bukharin demanded that the next phase of workers‘ struggles should focus around the construction of an entirely democratic regime, instead of aiming immediately at the setting up of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Moreover, the main goal should be to abolish the imperial system. In January 1922 Zinoviev still spoke of Japan as an imperialist power; but only a few months later, when the Communist Party of Japan was going to be founded, Japan was no longer considered an imperialist country.

Despite the efforts of the revolutionary forces gathered in Petrograd in January 1922, revolutionaries in Japan continued to remain dispersed.2

Difficulties in making any decisive progress in the construction of an organisation were compounded by the year-long isolation and the insufficient efforts to establish links beyond Japan. The Comintern hardly knew the different components of the revolutionary milieu in Japan, let alone the more serious ones. The underestimation of the organisation question amongst the most serious elements, their lack of initiative in establishong contact, although in the most difficult circumstances, also account for the failures of the Comintern.

If the Comintern put its confidence in the anarchist Osugi and the very individualistic and unpredictable Kondo this was because the most serious elements in Japan had not yet grasped the need to take up contact directly with the Comintern. They themselves left this step to the anarchist and least serious elements.

Even if the Comintern tried to offer all sorts of possible help to revolutionary forces in Japan, the indispensable conviction of comrades in the country itself cannot be replaced. The responsibility of revolutionaries towards their class is never a “national” one, limited to the geographical area revolutionaries live in, but must be based on an international and long-term approach.

Thus it was all the more tragic that the critical attempts to draw the lessons of decadence in relation to the question of parliamentarism were unkown because revolutionaries in Japan had no contact with the forces of the Communist Left, which were emerging at the same time. The consequences of these difficulties in overcoming their isolation contributed to their political and programmatic confusion.

When the revolutionary wave in Japan entered into reflux in 1920, the working class in Japan had fought without any real intervention by revolutionaries at its side. Thus the wave of struggles ebbed, without a real faction, not to mention a party, having arisen. When the Comintern had already embarked upon an opportunistic course, the Comintern managed to regroup revolutionaries in Japan, who wanted to participate in the construction of a party.

This is why the foundation of the Japanese Communist Party on July 15th 1922 took place at an inauspicious time, that is under the influence of growing opportunism.

The foundation of the CPJ

The party was a regroupment of leaders and members of different groups, who had little organisational experience and without a real Marxist wing – in particular there was no Marxist wing on the organisation question. Old revolutionaries, inspired by the Comintern, joined, such as Sakai Yamakawa, Arahata, and with them the groups they had headed until then, such as Yamakawa’s Wednesday Society Group and the publication Vanguard, the circle around Sakai’s The Proletariat, the Enlightened People’s Communist Party Group, members of Sodomei (the League of Japanese Trades Unions, formed in 1921). In 1923 there were some 50 members. But the very concept of membership was a problem, since individual members did not belong to the party but to one of the groups that comprised the party. Moreover, there was no platform and no statutes. No central leadership was elected. The party members were active above all in their former groups, with the groups around Yamakawa and Sakai having the greatest number of members.

Instead of working towards the construction of a single united body, party life was going to be fragmented and influenced very strongly by these groupings and the weight of the former leading personalities.

Since programmatic clarification had not advanced sufficiently, no programme had actually been elaborated.

Moreover, the party did not have a press and because of illegality it did not issue any public statements. Instead individual members took position in different political publications. It was only in April 1923 that three papers – Vanguard, The Proletariat, Studies in Socialism, merged into one – Red Flag – (Sekki), which was to act as a party organ.

At the same time the party aimed at becoming a mass party. Following the orientations of the Comintern, Yamakawa called for the formation of a mass party. This mass party was to encompass all “organised and unorganised workers, peasants and lower strata of the middle classes and all anti-capitalist movements and organisations”. The CPJ thus took up the orientation that the Comintern had opted for, but which was an expression of opportunism. The period of mass parties was over – as was most explicitly analysed by the German KAPD at the time.

In November 1922 a programme on Japan was drafted by a commission of the Comintern, with Bukharin at its head. While the draft dealt with the fast economic development of Japan during World War I, it emphasised above all that “Japanese capitalism today still shows residues of feudal relationships of the past. The biggest left over is the emperor (mikado) as the head of government... The residues of feudalism also play a dominant role in the entire structure of the present-day State. The organs of the State are still in the hands of a block, which is composed of different parts of the commercial and industrial bourgeoisie and big landlords. The special semi-feudal nature of the State is above all illustrated through the outstanding leading role of genro (nobility – feudal landlords) in the constitution. On this background, forces who are directed against the State, arise not only from the working class, the peasantry and petty-bourgeoisie, but they also emerge from the broad layers of the so-called liberal bourgeoisie – whose interests are also opposed to those of the present government... The completion of the bourgeois revolution may became the prologue /prelude of the proletarian revolution, aiming at the domination of the bourgeoisie and the setting up of proletarian dictatorship... The struggle between feudal lords and the bourgeoisie will certainly take on a revolutionary character.” (Houston, p. 60).

Whereas at its founding congress the Communist International in its manifesto put proletarian revolution on the agenda everywhere, the degenerating Comintern started in 1922 to ascribe different historical tasks to the proletariat according to the different parts of the world.

Placing Japan, China and India on the same level, since there was still a higher proportion of peasants in Japan and above all because there was still an emperor and feudal remnants, the Comintern proposed that the working class in Japan should set up an alliance with bourgeois groups. The Comintern and also the CPJ underestimated the real development of state capitalism that had already occurred in Japan.

While the emperor still played a role as a political representative, this did not change anything about the class composition of Japanese society and it did not alter the world historical tasks that the working class was facing.

Private industry was certainly less developed in Japan than in other industrial countries. This was due to the way capitalism unfolded in Japan. But ever since the expansion of the capitalist mode of production, - this specificity of Japanese capital - the relatively weak proportion of private in relation to state owned capital was “compensated” by the early rapid growth of the State. From a very early stage the State played a very active and interventionist role to defend Japanese national interests. Behind this position of the CPJ and the Comintern there was a serious underestimation of the level of state capitalism which had taken on much bigger proportions and which was to some extent more developed in Japan than in most western countries.

Even if, due to the weak development of the private capitalist sector during the ascendant phase there were not as many bourgeois parties as in Europe, and if on the whole parliamentarism had less weight and influence than in other countries this did not mean that the working class in Japan was facing different historic tasks and would have to fight for bourgeois democratic parliamentarism.

This orientation of the CPJ came up against resistance within its ranks. Thus Yamakawa said that although there was no bourgeois democracy in Japan, it was nevertheless ruled by bureaucratic and military cliques. But unlike the Comintern, he said, there was no need of catching up a bourgeois revolution. He took a position against mobilisation for parliamentarism.

The theses were discussed at a party conference on March 15th 1923, but no decisions were taken. Sano Manabu suggested an alternative platform, with the main idea that proletarian revolution was also on the agenda in Japan. There were also divergences regarding the demand for general voting rights. The same Sano Manabu rejected participation in parliament. Yamakawa also spoke up against participation in elections.

Since Left Communist voices from Europe could not be heard in Japan, which might have helped to deepen the framework of this critique, it could not be developed and based on a more profound programmatic base.

Since the wave of revolutionary struggles was already on the decline, both internationally and in Japan, the CP was spared the test of intervention in the heat of the struggles. Considering its limited organisational experience, its politically confused and opportunistic positions, it can be assumed that the party would have had great difficulties to act as an organisation of combat and to play a vanguard role.

The strategy of the Japanese bourgeoisie was that of any other ruling class: the use of repression and infiltration of the CPJ. On June 5th 1923 the party was forbidden, some 100-200 members were arrested and all party members known to the police were thrown into prison.

In March 1924 the party was finally dissolved. Arahata opposed its dissolution, defending the need to fight for its existence. Yamakawa and Sakai backed up its dissolution, saying that an illegal vanguard party was no longer necessary or desirable. According to Yamakawa such a party would be alienated from the workers and could only fall victim to bourgeois repression. Revolutionary Marxists should join mass organisations such as unions and peasants organisations and prepare a legal proletarian party of the future. Thus the first CP, which was never a solid body but rather a regroupment of different personalities, having no organisational tissue and working without a party spirit, was never able to accomplish its tasks.

After the worldwide reflux of struggles, revolutionaries were facing the same task. Whereas the degenerating Comintern put forward the slogan of the construction of mass parties and the policy of the united front, thus further increasing the confusion amongst the increasingly tired and disoriented workers, revolutionaries were in fact faced with the task of pursuing the work of a faction.

However, once again revolutionaries in Japan were to face great difficulties in fulfilling this task. No fraction emerged from its ranks fighting against the degeneration of the Comintern and laying the basis for a future party.

Rising counterrevolution in Japan

The bourgeoisie used the international balance of forces, which was bending in its favour, in order to increase its attacks against the working class in Japan.

Whereas the working class during World War I and in the ensuing revolutionary wave had not been very radicalised and only took part in a peripheral manner in these struggles, the working class was to be hard hit during the 1920s by rising counterrevolution. After the banning of the party in 1923, the government seized the opportunity of the effects of the devastating earthquake which shook Tokyo on September 1st 1923, when more than 100,000 people were killed and large parts of the city were destroyed, to increase repression against the working class. A special “thought police” (Tokko) was established. In the following years there were repeated mass arrests of workers: 1928: 4,000; 1929: 5,000; 1932: 14,000; 1933: 14,000.

Whereas in Europe there was a weak and short economic recovery in the 1920s, Japan was hit by the world economic crisis earlier, which led to increased attacks against the working class in Japan. Prior to the start of the big crisis in Japan, which began in 1927 two years before the crash of 1929, production had already fallen by 40% in the main industrial areas. The value of Japanese exports shrunk by 50% from 1929 to 1931. Japanese capital was again heading for military conquests. The military budget, which by 1921 – at the peak of the intervention against Russia – reached some 50% of the state budget, was never really reduced after World War I. Unlike Europe or the USA there was no real demilitarisation. Whatever cuts in the military budgets were decided the money was immediately invested in modernisation of the weapon systems. Unlike Europe, where the working class – although increasingly being weakened – blocked the road to war until the end of the 1920s, the working class in Japan was only able to offer a weaker resistance against the capitalist attacks and its militaristic course. On this background in Japan the State took over the leading positions in the economy much earlier than the State in Europe and started developing a widespread state capitalist regime and embarked upon a determined course of military conquests.

Workers’ living standards, which were much lower than in Europe, were reduced even more. Workers’ real incomes dropped from an index of 100 in 1926 to 81 in 1930 andto 69 in 1931. In the countryside there was widespread hunger.3

In the context of a weakened working class, with capital on the offensive, it was fatal for revolutionaries to want to try and overcome the disadvantageous balance of forces at all costs by provoking struggles artificially and by trying to build a mass party.

The CPJ becomes a lackey of Stalinism

After the end of the revolutionary wave in 1923 and as Stalinism within Russia and the Comintern grew stronger, more and more Communist Parties submitted to the rule of Moscow and became its tools. The development of the CPJ illustrates this glaringly.

The Comintern tried to build a new party at all costs, which would defend Russian interests. After the dissolution of the party in March 1924 the Comintern founded a new Communist Group in August 1925, which proclaimed a new party on December 4th 1926 that was nothing but a parrot of Moscow. In 1925 the Comintern stated the positions and the work of the former party in the Shanghai Theses. The Comintern’s orientation was that the bourgeois- democratic revolution, which had been inaugurated with the Meiji-restoration, should be terminated, since feudal remnants (above all of the feudal landlords) and the bourgeoisie still subsisted. The Comintern placed emphasis on feudal remnants, although it had to admit: “The Japanese state itself is a powerful element of Japanese capitalism. No European country has advanced so much in the introduction of state capitalism as Japan, where some 30% of all investment in industry and in the financial sector are financed by the state” (Houston, p. 67).

Nevertheless, according to the Comintern, the Japanese state would still have to become really bourgeois- democratic. Yamakawa opposed this analysis. He insisted on the amalgamation of the State with big finance capital. He claimed that the bourgeoisie had been holding power in Japan for a long time and that the proletariat should set up an anti- bourgeois alliance with the peasantry, rejecting the “two-stage revolution” as it was defended by Moscow. Yamakawa supported the idea that a left wing within the workers‘ movement or a workers- peasant-party could take the place of the prohibited CP. Yamakawa started to publish a paper in December 1927 RONO (Labour- Farmer).

The Comintern continued to practice the policy of “undermining and conquering the trades unions”. The CPJ gained a big influence in the Labour Union Council of Japan, Nihon Rodo Hyogikai, founded in May 1925.

In the parliamentary elections of 1928 the CPJ defended a “united front” with the other “left capitalist” parties, whose number had increased and out of which seven had joined to form the Musantaishuto (Proletarian Mass Party).

After another wave of repression in March 1928 all left parties were forbidden and their leaders sent to jail. The death penalty was threatened if political activities were continued underground. However, once the police had imprisoned the former CPJ leaders, Moscow could “staff” the party again in November 1928 and supply another central committee, which followed the instructions of Moscow. The central committee and the politburo of the CPJ were replaced in the ensuing years whenever the Comintern changed its course. After the respective repressions and arrests a new leadership was always sent by Moscow. The party was kept alive “artificially” by Moscow but despite Moscow’s efforts it never managed to increase its membership significantly. The CPJ had become a complete lackey of Moscow.

When in 1928 the Comintern declared “socialism in one country” as its official policy and threw out all the remaining Left Communist remnants and kicked out the Trotskyist left opposition forces, the CPJ saw no reason to speak of a betrayal of the working class interests by the CI. The CPJ, staffed for five years by Moscow, organisationally and programmatically a totally loyal defender of Moscow, never produced a force of resistance against this. In 1927, a group of arrested members of the CPJ, led by Mizino Shigeo, had already rejected internationalism and started to defend the idea of “national socialism”.

Language problems and the difficult access to texts of that time require us to be cautious in a definite assessment of the attitude of the CPJ, but at the time of writing this text, we do not know of any groups that were expelled or which split form the CPJ because they fought against Stalinisation and the introduction of the idea of “socialism in one country”. We can assume that the JPC did not produce any critical voices or even resistance to Stalinisation. At any rate, if there were opposition voices, they were not in contact with the opposition in Russia or with the Left Communist currents outside Russia. Even on the events in neighbouring China in 1927, which were debated very heatedly within the Comintern and internationally, as far as we know, there were no critical voices raised from Japan denouncing the disastrous policy of the Comintern.

Even if the party did not immediately betray following the declaration of “socialism in one country” by the Comintern, it was unable to give birth to any proletarian resistance, fighting for an internationalist position.

Japanese imperialism on the road to war: Stalinism eliminates the internationalist voice

Since Japanese capital had come up against a working class offering less resistance than the proletariat in Europe, it could therefore embark upon a systematic war course earlier than its European rivals. In September 1931 the Japanese army invaded Manchuria and set up a puppet state Manchuko.

While the course towards war was gaining momentum internationally, and whereas the war in Spain in the mid-thirties was the rehearsal for the confrontations in Europe and the 2nd World War, the war between Japan and China unfolded from 1937-45.

Japanese imperialism pushed the spiral of barbarism onto a higher level before World War II started. In 1937 more than 200,000 Chinese were massacred in Nanking within a few days. A total of 7 million people were killed during this war.

The Left Communist group Bilan, which was one of the few groups to defend an internationalist position (even at the price of a split) during the Spanish war served as the internationalist reference point to all revolutionary forces. In Japan, however, the precious traditions of internationalism during the war in 1905 between Japan and Russia and of World War I had been silenced by Stalinism. The Japanese State Socialist Party (Nihon Kokka Shakaito – comparable to the NSDAP in Hitler’s Germany) which was founded in 1931, and the Social Democratic Party of Japan openly supported the imperialist war course of Japanese capital. The Social Masses Party (Shakai – Taishuto) also spoke up in favour of supporting the “defence efforts” of the Japanese Army in October 1934, since the “army fights both against capitalism and fascism”. The party leadership of the Socialist Party (Shakai Taishuto) called the war against China “the sacred war of the Japanese nation”. The Japanese Trades Union Congress Zenso outlawed workers strikes in 1937.

Whereas only the Left Communist forces defended internationalism, both the Stalinist CPJ and Trotsky himself called for the defence of China against Japan.

In September 1932 the CPJ declared: “The war of Japanese imperialism in Manchuria marks the beginning of a new series of imperialist wars directed primarily against the Chinese Revolution and the USSR.... Should the imperialists of the whole world hurl their challenge at our fatherland, the USSR, we will show them that the world proletariat will rise in arms against them... Long live the Red Army of the Soviet Union and the Red Army of Soviet China” (Langer, Red Flag in Japan, 1968, S. 49). And under the slogans “Down with the Imperialist War”, “Hands off China”, “Defend Revolutionary China and the Soviet Union” the CPJ called for the support of Russia and China against Japanese capital. The CPJ had become a total lackey of Moscow.

But Trotsky also threw overboard his own position, which he held in World War One. Starting off from a totally mistaken view, that “The present Japanese adventure in Manchuria can lead to revolution in Japan” (1931), (“Can fascism really triumph? Germany – the key to the international situation”, 26/11/1931) – he called upon the Soviet Union to arm China: “in the present gigantic historical struggle (between China and Japan) the Soviet government cannot remain neutral, it cannot take up the same position in relation to China as to Japan. It is obliged to fully support the Chinese people.” Regarding the position that there were still “progressive wars possible”, he said: “If there is any just war in this world, then it is the war of the Chinese people against its oppressors. All working class organisations, all progressive forces of China, will without abandoning their programme and their political independence, fulfil their duty in this war of liberation” (30.7.1937),

“In my declaration to the bourgeois press I spoke of the duty of all workers organisations in China to participate actively and in the front line in the war against Japan, without renouncing in the least possible manner on their programme and their autonomous activities. But the Eiffelists4 call this ‘social-patriotism’. This means capitulation under Chiang Kaishek! It means turning your back on the principle of class struggle. ‘In imperialist war, Bolshevism stood for revolutionary defeatism. Both the Spanish civil and the Chinese-Japanese war are imperialist wars. (..) We take up the same position in relation to the Chinese war. The only salvation for the workers and peasants of China is to act as an autonomous force against both armies, both against the Chinese as well as against the Japanese‘. Just these four lines of the document of the Eiffelists4 of Sept. 1 1937 reveal they are either traitors or complete idiots. But when stupidity reaches such proportions, then this amounts to betrayal. (...) To speak of revolutionary defeatism in general without distinguishing between oppressed and oppressing countries means turning Bolshevism into a miserable caricature and to place this caricature in the service of imperialism. China is a semi-colonial country, which is being transformed by Japan into a colonial country in front of our eyes. As far as Japan is concerned it is leading an imperialist, reactionary war. As far as China is concerned, it is fighting a progressive war of liberation (...) Japanese patriotism is the abject hideous face of international banditism. Chinese patriotism is legitimate and progressive. To place these two on the same level and to speak of ‘social-patriotism’, means you have not read anything from Lenin, you have not understood anything at all about the attitude of the Bolsheviks in the imperialist war, and defending this therefore only means to insult Marxism (...) We have to underline with great emphasis, that the 4th International takes sides with China against Japan” (“On the Chinese-Japanese War”, Letter to Diego Riviera, 23/09/1937).

“The workers organisations of both countries cannot take up the same position (..) There is no doubt that Japan is leading a war of conquest, China is leading a national liberation struggle. Only conscious or unconscious agents of Japanese imperialism place both countries on the same level” (Trotsky 25/09/1937).

The whole tradition of a ruthless struggle against both imperialist sides was abandoned by Trotsky. Only the Left Communist groups defended a clear internationalist position in this imperialist confrontation. The group Bilan took up the following position on the war: “Experience has shown that when the internaional proletariat was led, by the Communist International and the Russian Soviet, to envisage the possiblity of bourgeois and anti-imperialist revolutions in China (in 1927), then in reality it sacrificed itself on the altar of world capitalism” (Resolution by the EC of the international communist left on the Sino-Japanese conflict, Bilan p.1449, Nov- Dec 1937).

“And it is in this historic phase, when national wars have been consigned to the museum of antiquities, that the workers are supposed to mobilise for a ‘war of national emancipation’ of the ‘Chinese people’.

Who today supports China’s ‘war of independence’ (...)? Russia, Britain, France, the United States. Every imperialism supports it (...) even Trotsky supports it, letting himself be carried away by the current of imperialist war and calling for support for the ‘just’ war of the ‘Chinese people’ (...)

On each side of the front there is a greedy ruling bourgeoisie, which wants nothing but to have the workers slaughter each other: on each site there are proletarians being driven to the abattoir. It is false, totally false, to think that there exists a bourgeoisie with which the Chinese workers can, however temporarily, ‘march side by side’, and that only Japanese imperialism need be defeated for the Chinese workers to struggle victoriously for the revolution. Everywhere, imperialism controls the game, and China is nothing but the plaything of the other imperialisms. If they are to find the road to revolutionary struggle, then Chinese and Japanese workers must find the class road which will lead them to find each other: the fraternisation which will cement their simulataneous assault on their own exploiters (...)

Only the fractions of the International Communist Left are opposed to all the currents of traitors and opportunists, and hold high the banner of the struggle for revolution. Alone, they will struggle for the transformation of the bloody imperialist war in Asia, into a civil war of the workers against their exploiters: fraternisation of Chinese and Japanese workers; destruction of the fronts of ‘national war’; struggle against the Kuomintang, struggle against Japanese imperialism, struggle against all the currents that act for imperialist war amongst the workers (...)

In this new war, the international proletariat must find the strength to escape from its executioners and traitors, and to express its solidarity with its class brothers in Asia, by unleashing its own struggles against its own bourgeoisie.

Down with the imperialist war in China. Long live the civil war of all the exploited against the Chinese bourgeoisie and against Japanese imperialism” (Bilan, “A bas le carnage imperialiste en Chine: contre tous les bourreaux: Pour la transformation immédiate de la guerre en guerre civile”, p.1415, Oct-Nov.1937).

This was the internationalist tradition of the Communist Left, that stood for the only and real continuity with the positions of revolutionaries during WW1. However, no revolutionary forces in Japan seem to have been able to hold up this internationalist banner.

In Europe the bourgeoisie launched the “popular fronts” in order to enrol the working class in the imperialist battle for the defence of the “democratic states” against fascist Hitlerite Germany. In order to mobilise the workers for war, the bourgeoisie needed to lure the workers into the defence of “democracy”. However, in Japan the working class had already been defeated sufficiently.

The initial calls by the CPJ for the setting up of a united front of the Left parties with the CPJ, in order to defend the Soviet Union, were rejected by the other Left parties, which had submitted to the interests of the Japanese state. The CPJ in turn had chosen its camp.

The residues of the CPJ, which had been prescribed once again before the Chinese- Japanese war started, called for the defence of the Soviet Union against Japan.

During the war, the residues of the CPJ called for the “destruction of the feudal-militaristic order in Japan through a bourgeois democratic revolution, [saying that] within this process active co- operation with the capitalist nations would be necessary”. On the basis of such arguments the CPJ supported the USA and Russia in their fight against “imperial Japan”.

In the winter of ‘45-‘46 the CPJ was re-founded as a political organisation under the US occupation. A programme was drafted, which as in the theses of 1927 & 32 contained a project of a “two-phase- revolution”. The immediate task was the “overcoming of the imperial system, the democratisation of Japan, a land reform”. This strategy offered a basis for co- operating with the USA in the demilitarisation and demobilisation of Japan. The Supreme Commander of the US-Allied Forces was a part of the progressive bourgeoisie, whose historic function was to accomplish the bourgeois- democratic revolution.

As in the rest of the world, the working class came out of the war weaker than before.

Reconstruction was undertaken with a heavily defeated and demoralised class. For decades the ruling class took pleasure in presenting the working class in Japan as a show case of a docile, subservient, defeated and humiliated class, working terribly long hours and receiving very little pay.

When, in 1968, after the massive strikes in Europe, in particular in France, the working class world wide managed to appear on the stage of history again, ending a more than 50 year long period of counter- revolution, the class gave birth to a series of small revolutionary groupings out of whom some managed to turn towards the tradition of the Communist Left. However, in Japan the groups of the capitalist Left completely dominated the political scene. As far as we know no forces have appeared which have established contact with the international and historical political proletarian milieu, i.e. the groups claiming to defend the tradition of the Communist Left.

Since the economy of what was once the showcase of the reconstruction period, has been in crisis and open recession for almost a decade, it is only a question of time before the working class in Japan will be forced to defend itself against the attacks of the crisis on a qualitatively higher level.

These class confrontations will require the most determined intervention of revolutionaries. However, for revolutionaries to fulfil this task, the emerging politicised proletarian elements

must establish a link with the international proletarian political milieu and conceive themselves as a part of this international entity.

More than 100 years of relative political isolation and lagging behind must be overcome. The conditions for tackling this task have never been so good.

Dav

In previous issues of the International Review[1]we have published a considerable amount of correspondence with the Marxist Labour Party in Russia. The main focus of this exchange has been our disagreements about the problem of capitalism’s decadence and its implications for certain key questions, notably the class nature of the October revolution and the problem of “national liberation”.

Following an ICC trip to Moscow in October 2002, we encountered different elements claiming adherence to the MLP, and heard news of a split within the group. There are now two MLPs, one which refers to itself as the MLP (Bolshevik) and the other – the current with which we have conducted the debate so far – the MLP (Southern Bureau). In order to clarify a rather confusing situation, and to understand better the real position of the MLP concerning fundamental questions of proletarian internationalism, we wrote to the MLP (SB) with a series of questions (for the rest of this article, MLP refers to the MLP (SB) unless otherwise stated). These questions are reproduced (in italics) in the MLP’s reply, which we reprint below. There then follows our reply to the MLP’s letter, which again concentrates on our differences over the national question.

There has since been a further response by the MLP, which we will come back to in the next issue of the Review, as well as developing our response to other issues raised by the letter printed below, in particular anti-fascism and the nature of the Second World War.

Letter From the MLP

Comrades!

Though your letter was addressed to the “South Bureau of the MLP”, we have brought its contents to our fellows in the organisation who live not only in the south of Russia.

Our collective answer to you is such:

1) Do you consider the support of national liberation struggles possible in the 20th century?

We hold that before speaking for or against the support of national-liberation struggles in the 20th century, one should gain an understanding of what itself the national-liberation struggle on the whole is. But in its turn, it is difficult to be done, if a more or less clear determination to “nation” has not been previously given.

Besides, in our opinion, one should clarify, what was Marx and Engels’ attitude towards this question in their time, as well as what was the position of the Bolsheviks-Leninists in this connection - both before and after the October revolution 1917. Finally, one should consider the evolution of views of the Comintern on the given problems…

2) Do you recognise a “right of nations of self-determination” or do you reject such a formula?

The national-liberation movement is an objective thing. Having set a high standard, it indicates that one or another people has embarked on the path of its own capitalist development and that the corresponding ethnic group either is on the threshold of turning into the BOURGEOIS nation, or has already turned into it.

In contrast to what the Bolshevik-Comintern tradition orders, offering not only to support national-liberation movements as progressive-bourgeois ones, but even orientating to create communist(!) parties in backward countries, parties consisting of the peasantry under the leadership of the national progressive-revolutionary intelligentsia, and to fight for the establishment of Soviet power in the absence or minimum presence of the industrial proletariat there (the notorious theory of “non-capitalist development” or “socialist orientation in developing countries”), the MLP (not to be confused with the MLP(B)!) considers that the support for national-liberation movements creates only an illusion of solving the social problems in national borders. In particular, this illusion finds its expression in the “Marxist-Leninist” slogan: “From the national liberation to the social one!”

It is only the world social revolution that will be able to solve national problems among other ones.

The participation in whichever national-liberation movement, i.e. in the fight for the state separation of one more bourgeois nation, is not a special task for marxists.

At the same time we are not opponents of national-liberation movements. As, for instance, of the political movement coming out in favour of separating Chechnya from Russia, in which some members of the MLP (B) actively participate.

If the majority of the population of a certain nationality and on a determined historical territory has decided to use the “right of nations to self-determination” against the “imperialist expansion”, we shall not come out against such a position under two conditions:

a) if the territorial separation is able to stop the bloody slaughter with multiple victims amongst the working people from both sides;

b) if the state independence of a new bourgeois nation leads more quickly to the situation where inside this nation its own industrial proletariat will emerge and get stronger, which will then launch its class struggle against the local national bourgeoisie, no more digressing on the illusion of any “liberation” besides the social one. Before the proletarians of all countries can unite, proletarians in these countries must simply exist!

3) Do you consider all factions of the bourgeoisie equally reactionary in the 20th century – i.e. since the beginning of World War 1 – and if not – what are your criteria?

And here again it is necessary first to define what should be understood under “reaction(ism)”. The word “reactionary” in its primary sense means “counteracting progress” or, more exactly, “counteracting the advancement onward”. It is clear, however, that this definition is highly general.

Being marxists, we can and must speak of that sort of reactionism which prevents the longing to finish with both the bourgeois-capitalistic mode of production and the secondary (private-ownership and exploiting) formation as a whole, which prevents mankind from advancing to the “tertiary formation” - communism.

At the same time, the classics of marxism taught us to understand the progressiveness of the bourgeois-capitalistic mode of production with respect to the modes of production preceding it and to the more retarded social-economic structures co-existing with it within the framework of the secondary formation. They also taught us to distinguish the progressive stages of development of this mode of production itself. In our opinion, any other approach would be scholastic and dogmatic but not historical-dialectical!

In the 20th century petty bourgeois and peasant production was giving place to the large-scale capitalist one. From the marxist standpoint, the productive forces change the social structure of society in the course of their development. This is objectively progressive.

Hereinafter. In our opinion, with reference to the 20th century one should speak not of the decay of the capitalism as such, but only of the process by which the national-state form of capitalism outlives its necessity, i.e. a definite next-in-turn stage of its development becomes exhausted.

And we cannot say that with the beginning of WW1 the capitalism has unambiguously exhausted its progressiveness. In our opinion, this process gets under way only from the second half of the 20th century. The clear evidence of it being the present globalisation and economic unification of Europe, for example.

It is in our time that the capitalism has begun to exhaust its progressiveness.

There approaches the time to sweep it away on the international scale by means of the world social revolution.

(...)

ICC Reply

Communists and the National Question

Among the different questions posed in this correspondence we have chosen to answer first one question that to us is particularly important to clarify. It is also a question that is posed by the emerging elements and political groups in Russia. This is the national question and particularly the communist position in relation to national liberation struggles and the famous slogan of Lenin on the “rights of nations of self-determination”.

Although the MLP in their reply to our letter state that they do not support national liberation movements, because they “create only an illusion of solving the social problems in national borders”, they at the same time find certain occasions when they would not oppose them. This is when “the majority of the population of a certain nationality and on a determined historical territory has decided to use the ‘rights of nations for self determination’ against the ‘imperialist expansion’…”

These occasions are either when the separation would stop a bloody slaughter or if a new independent state would lead to the growth of the proletariat in that state and later lead to class struggle against the local national bourgeoisie.

What that means concretely for the MLP is that they are “not opponents of national-liberation movements. As for instance, of the political movement coming out in favour of separating Chechnya from Russia, in which some members of the MLP (B) actively participate”.

First of all we find it very strange when the MLP says they are not against national liberation movements but at the same time not in favour. Is the MLP indifferent or just only not actively fighting the ideology of national liberation, although according to them it can “create only illusions of solving the social problems in national borders”? What does the MLP mean when they write that participation in national liberation movements “is not a special task of marxists”? And yet the MLP do not oppose the activities of the membersof the MLP(B) who “actively participate” in a Chechyan separatist movement. What are we to make of this?

For us this expresses a highly opportunist position on the question of national liberation movements. We get the impression that this vagueness about taking position is only an opening for participation in these movements by certain members of the MLP. In fact the MLP’s position opens the door to support for any national liberation struggle, because it will always be possible to find a criterion that would apply.

It should be possible for the MLP to argue that national separation would stop a bloody slaughter on many occasions. For example, this position would logically have led the MLP in 1947 to have supported the separation of Pakistan from India to stop the massacres between Muslim and Hindu. The ensuing dispute over Jammu and Kashmir between Pakistan and India is perhaps also a good example how the “right of nations of self-determination” (now in the name of the British Independence Act) will only lead to further bloody slaughter. Today we see how the dangerous conflicts and constant tensions between Pakistan and India are threatening this highly populated area with millions of deaths through nuclear war between Pakistan and India – and this in addition to the all the deaths from the conflict over Kashmir.[2] This example shows just how absurd and completely un-marxist is the criterion that the MLP put forward as reasons for “not opposing” the separation of a new state.

The other criterion which the MLP uses is the hypothesis that a separation would lead to a development of industry and hence a development of the proletariat, and, in the end, the increase of the class struggle against the “local national bourgeoisie”.

As the MLP does not have the concept of a “decay of capitalism” (capitalism’s entrance into a phase of decadence from its progressive phase), at least not until the end of the 20th century, which for them was brought about by the globalisation of capitalism and the economic unification of Europe, they could logically apply it to a number of cases in the 20th century. For example there were several groups in the seventies in Europe which were close to proletarian positions in other respects, but on the question of national liberation during the 70s “critically” supported the NLF in Vietnam because, they argued, it would establish a new bourgeois state which would further industrialisation and develop the proletariat. As soon as the national bourgeoisie was victorious, they said, the proletariat should immediately turn itself against its own bourgeoisie. This false application of marxism was and is still today (at best) a cover for opportunist concessions to bourgeois ideology. This position is very close to Trotskyism which always find an excuse for supporting so-called national liberation struggles, when actually in this epoch these are nothing other than a cover for world wide imperialist conflicts.

These initial remarks oblige us to return to the question which we think is necessary to pose in a marxist framework (and which is also posed in the beginning of the MLP’s reply to our questions): what was the attitude of Marx and Engels in relation to national liberation struggles, and what was the position of communists on this question from within the Zimmerwald left up to the Comintern? Finally what must be the communist position on this today?

The Nation State

The MLP states correctly that before we take a position for or against national liberation struggles it is necessary to understand the nature of these struggles, and also to have a clear understanding what the concept of a nation means for marxists.

The concept of a nation is not an abstract and absolute concept but can only be understood within a historical context. Rosa Luxemburg gives one definition of this concept in her Junius Pamphlet:

“The national state, national unity and independence were the ideological shield under which the capitalist nations of central Europe constituted themselves in the past century. Capitalism is incompatible with economic and political divisions, with the accompanying splitting up into small states. It needs for its development large, united territories, and a state of mental and intellectual development in the nation that will lift the demands and the needs of society to the plane corresponding to the prevailing stage of capitalist production, and to the mechanism of modern state capitalist class rule. Before capitalism could develop, it sought to create for itself a territory sharply defined by national limitations.”

It was in this understanding that Marx and Engels on different occasions argued for support for certain national liberation struggles. But they never did that as a principle, only in cases where they thought the creation of new nation states could lead to a real development of capitalism against the feudal forces. The creation of new nation states could in Europe at that time only be accomplished by revolutionary measures and play a historically progressive role in the class struggle of the bourgeoisie against the feudal power:

“The national programme could play a historic role only so long as it represented the ideological expression of a growing bourgeoisie, lusting for power, until it had fastened its class rule, in some way or other, upon the great nations of central Europe and had created within them the necessary tools and conditions of its growth” (Rosa Luxemburg, The Junius Pamphlet)

The method Marx and Engels used was not based on any abstract slogan but always on an analysis of each case, on an analysis of the political and economical development of the society. “Marx did not pay any attention to that abstract formula [of the “right of nations to self-determination”], and hurled thunderbolts at the heads of the Czechs and their aspiration for freedom, aspirations which he regarded as a harmful complication of the revolutionary situation, all the more deserving of severe condemnation, since, to Marx, the Czechs were a dying nationality, doomed to disappear soon.” (R. Luxemburg, The national question and autonomy)

Marx and Engels were not always right in their analysis, as Rosa Luxemburg was able to show for example with the case of Poland.

The definition of a nation is not based on some general abstract criterion like a common language and culture but on a precise historical context. In class society a nation is not something homogeneous but is divided into classes with antagonistic interests, views, cultures, ethics, etc. The abstract notion of “rights” of nations can only be “rights” of the bourgeoisie.

From this there can be no such thing as a uniform will of a nation, of a will to self-determination. Behind this slogan lies a concession to the idea that in order to reach socialism it is necessary to pass over the democratic stage. Behind this lies also the idea that there should be a way to determine the “will” of the people. The MLP uses the expression “The majority of the population of a certain nationality”. In this expression there are two abstract concepts. First the “will of the population” assumes that there is a peaceful way, over and above real class antagonisms, of deciding (maybe through a referendum – as was proposed by the Bolsheviks) the fate of nations. Secondly the use of the term “nationality” is very vague. If it denotes a specific ethnic or cultural group the relationship to national self-determination is very unclear.

The nation is a historical category and the creation of the nation state plays a certain role for the bourgeoisie historically. The nation state is not only a framework for the bourgeoisie to develop and defend its economy and system of exploitation, it is at the same time also an offensive against other nation states for political conquest and domination, for the suppression of other nations. So the “right of nations to self-determination” is in real life a “right”, like any other bourgeoisie, to suppress the “rights” of other nations, other ethnic groups, languages and cultures. The “rights of nations to self-determination” is nothing else than an abstract utopia, which can only let in by the back door the nationalism of the bourgeoisie.

Debate in the Zimmerwald Left

Within the Zimmerwald left - the internationalist current that most resolutely opposed the first world war - there arose a discussion on the question of the slogan “right of nations to self-determination”.

This slogan emanated from the Second International: “In the Second International it played a double role: on the one hand, it was supposed to express a protest against all national oppression, and on the other hand the readiness of Social Democracy to “defend the fatherland”. The slogan was applied to specific national questions only to avoid the necessity of investigating its concrete content and the tendencies of its development.” (‘Imperialism and National Oppression’[3])

The Dutch and Polish adherents of the Zimmerwald left rejected the slogan of the Bolsheviks. This was a position the Bolsheviks had inherited from social democracy. Rosa Luxemburg had very early - already in 1896 in relation to the congress in London of the Second International, and later together with Radek and others in the SDKPiL - criticised this slogan which they thought was an opportunist concession. Also within the Bolshevik party, represented by Pyatakov, Bosh and Bukharin, there was a critique of the slogan of the “right of nations to self-determination”. They based their critique on the fact that during the imperialist epoch:

“The answer to the bourgeoisies’ imperialist policy must be the socialist revolution of the proletariat; Social Democracy must not advance minimum demands in the fields of present-day foreign policy.

1. It is therefore impossible to struggle against the enslavement of nations other than through a struggle against imperialism. Ergo a struggle against imperialism; ergo a struggle against finance capital; ergo a struggle against capitalism in general. To turn aside from this path in any way and advance ‘partial’ tasks of the ‘liberation of nations’ within the limits of capitalist society diverts proletarian forces from the true solution of the problem and unites them with the forces of the bourgeoisie of the corresponding national groups.” (Theses on the Right of Nations to Self-determination, Pyatakov, Bosh, Bukharin, from the book Lenin’s struggle for a revolutionary International, Pathfinder Press 1986).

Lenin had another answer to this question, which really underpinned the whole question of advancing minimum demands and the link between the national question and the question of democracy.

“It would be a radical mistake to think that the struggle for democracy was capable of diverting the proletariat from the socialist revolution or of hiding, overshadowing it, etc. On the contrary, in the same way as there can be no victorious socialism that does not practise full democracy, so the proletariat cannot prepare for its victory over the bourgeoisie without an all-round, consistent and revolutionary struggle for democracy.”[4]

There is in this passage a certain tendency to conflate “democracy” with the dictatorship of the proletariat, and more particularly, to see the forms of bourgeois democracy in the future proletarian dictatorship. This is false at many levels – not least because whereas proletarian rule can only maintain itself on a world scale, capitalist democracy is inevitably national in form, and inseparably connected to the nation state. Of even more immediate importance was the confusion between the struggle for democratic demands – including the “rights of nations” –and the struggle for proletarian power and the destruction of the bourgeois state. It was a mistake of Lenin to take up the old social democratic slogan of the “right of nations to self-determination” - which really expressed the opportunist view that socialism could only be achieved through democracy, through the peaceful gaining of power via parliament – and try to graft it on to a revolutionary programme. It also indirectly supported the arguments of the Mensheviks that the revolution in Russia had to pass over a period of bourgeois democracy before being ready for socialism. Lenin and the Bolsheviks drew completely different conclusions from this idea, in that they supported and worked for revolutionary struggle, while the Mensheviks opposed any struggle that according to their theory would surpass the “objective reality” of capitalism. This reformist idea had still a great influence among the Bolsheviks as revealed by the first reactions of the majority of “Old Bolsheviks” inside Russia to the revolution in February. This position – which was not supported by the most radical layers of the party – was the dominant position in the leading organs before Lenin arrived at the Finland station in Petrograd and immediately attacked this opportunism, which implied a support for the Kerensky government and its war effort. Lenin developed this later in his famous “April Theses”.

Now Lenin came to understand that the revolution in Russia was not merely a bourgeois revolution but the first step of the proletarian revolution. It was the real revolutionary practice of Lenin and the Bolsheviks that would disprove the Menshevik dogma of a necessary democratic stage before the socialist revolution was possible. In fact history shows (and quite contrary to Lenin’s beliefs in 1916 when he defended the “right to self-determination”) that not only in Russia were illusions in democracy the most dangerous poison against the revolution: in almost all the countries affected by the Russian revolution, the question of democracy was the main weapon put forward by the bourgeoisie to counter-act the revolutionary movement.

Against the idea that all countries had to pass over a certain stage in their mode of production to arrive at new mode of production Rosa Luxemburg wrote:

“Therefore historically speaking, the idea that the modern proletariat could do nothing as a separate and conscious class without first creating a new nation-state, is the same thing as saying that the bourgeoisie in any country should first of all establish a feudal system, if by some chance it did not come about normally by itself, or had taken on a particular form, as for instance in Russia. The historical mission of the bourgeoisie is the creation of the modern “national” state; but the historical task of the proletariat is the abolition of this state as a political form of capitalism, in which they themselves, as a conscious class, come into existence to establish the socialist system.” (The National Question and Autonomy, Rosa Luxemburg- our emphasis)

Rosa Luxemburg had this to say of the decision at the London congress of 1896 to adopt the slogan of the “right of nations to self-determination”: “the nationalist position is to be smuggled in under the international banner”.[5] Although Lenin’s position is not to be mixed up with the social chauvinism of the old social democratic parties when they came to “defend the fatherland”, Lenin’s effort to make it part of the revolutionary programme is still a mistake.

The National Question in the Russian Revolution

The revolution in Russia must be seen in a world historic framework, at the same time part of and signal to a world revolution. The February revolution was not the necessary bourgeois revolution before the socialist revolution could take place, but the first phase in the proletarian revolution in Russia, establishing a situation of dual power to prepare the next step of taking power in October. This is also more or less the view of Lenin in his April Theses, which de facto is an attack against the mechanical, national, opportunist view of the proletarian revolution. In Lenin’s preface to the first edition (August 1917) of his State and Revolution he clearly states his view on the Russian revolution when he writes:

“Lastly, we sum up the main results of the experience of the Russian revolutions of 1905 and particularly of 1917. Apparently, the latter is now (early August 1917) completing the first stage of its development; but this revolution as a whole can only be understood as a link in a chain of socialist proletarian revolutions being caused by the imperialist war.”

It is also from within this view of the Russian revolution as expressing nothing else than the dynamic of a world wide proletarian revolution, that Rosa Luxemburg reiterated with even greater intransigence her critique of the “right of nations to self-determination” slogan, and its use by the Bolshevik party in power:

“Instead of acting in the same spirit of genuine international class policy which they represented in other matters, instead of working for the most compact union of the revolutionary forces throughout the area of the Empire, instead of defending tooth and nail the integrity of the Russian Empire as an area of revolution and opposing to all forms of separatism the solidarity and inseparability of the proletarians in all lands within the sphere of the Russian Revolution as the highest command of politics, the Bolsheviks, by their hollow nationalistic phraseology concerning the ‘right of self-determination to the point of separation,’ have accomplished quite the contrary and supplied the bourgeoisie in all border states with the finest, the most desirable pretext, the very banner of the counter-revolutionary efforts. Instead of warning the proletariat in the border countries against all forms of separatism as mere bourgeois traps, they did nothing but confuse the masses in all the border countries by their slogan and delivered them up to the demagogy of the bourgeois classes. By this nationalistic demand they brought on the disintegration of Russia itself, pressed into the enemy’s hand the knife which it was to thrust into the heart of the Russian Revolution.” (The Russian Revolution, Rosa Luxemburg).

In all the cases where the “right to self-determination” slogan of the Bolsheviks has been applied, it has opened up illusions in democracy and nationalism – sacred myths which the bourgeoisie itself has always trampled underfoot when it came to fighting for its life against the proletarian revolution. Faced with this danger, the national bourgeoisies have always turned away from the idea of national independence and quickly given up their national dreams to cry for support from antagonistic foreign bourgeoisie powers to help them crush “their own” proletarian class.

At the same time, and for precisely the same reason, the entire history of the “epoch of wars and revolutions” (the Communist International’s term for the epoch of capitalist decline) shows that whenever the proletariat had any illusions of conducting a common struggle with the bourgeoisie, this only led to massacres of the proletariat.

Finland and Georgia are striking examples of how the national bourgeoisie immediately asked, as soon as it got its “independence”, for help to crush the proletarian bastion in Russia - all under the banner of national independence. In Finland German troops were sent to crush the Finnish Red Guard and the Finnish revolution turned into a terrible defeat for the proletariat. The Red Army was forced to be “neutral” according to the treaty of Brest-Litovsk and did not intervene officially (although many Bolsheviks in the Red Army aided the Finnish Red Guards). The Finnish bourgeoisie mobilised the poor peasants to fight against the “Russian enemy” – many of those recruited into the Finnish “White Guard” thought they were fighting Russian troops. In Georgia the Mensheviks (now part of the national bourgeoisie – defending the “right for national self-determination”) also turned for help from German imperialism.

There were certain changes by the Bolsheviks on the national question at the beginning of the Russian revolution, seeing the slogan as merely a tactical necessity rather than a political principle. This was expressed in the fact that the slogan for “self-determination” was not only watered down inside the Bolshevik party itself, but was approached with much greater clarity at the First Congress of the 3rd International, which focussed much more on the international struggle of the proletariat, on the independence of the proletariat in relation to all national movements, never letting it be subordinated to the national bourgeoisie.

But with the development of greater opportunism within the Communist International, which was linked to the growing confusion between the policy of the CI and the foreign policy of the degenerating Soviet state, there was a real falling back on the national question, a tendency to lose sight of the relative clarity of the First Congress. One expression of this was the policy of supporting alliances between Communist parties in Turkey and China and the nationalist bourgeoisies, which in both cases led to a massacre of the proletariat and the decimation of the Communists by their erstwhile “national revolutionary “ allies. In the end the mistakes of the Bolsheviks and Lenin on these issues have been turned into an ideology in defence of imperialist war, particularly by Trotskyism. What was once an opportunist mistake by the Bolsheviks has today enabled the left of capital to use the name of Lenin to defend imperialist wars. Instead of going back to these errors, communists must base their positions on the more consistently internationalist critique which was developed by the Marxist left, from Luxemburg to Pyatakov and from the KAPD to the Italian Left Fraction.

Olof 15/6/03

NOTES