In June 2006, the ICC received an invitation from the Socialist Political Alliance, a group based in South Korea which identifies itself with the tradition of the Communist Left, to take part in an "International Conference of Revolutionary Marxists", to be held in the towns of Seoul and Ulsan during October of the same year. We had been in contact with the SPA for about a year, and despite the inevitable difficulties of language had been able to begin discussions in particular on the questions of the decadence of capitalism and the perspectives for the development of communist organisations in the present period.

The spirit in which this Conference was called stands out powerfully in the SPA's introductory statement: "We know very well the various conferences or meetings of Marxists which are held regularly in various places in the world. But we also know very well the fact that those conferences are focusing on discussions about abstract theory in academia and the ritual solidarity between so-called "left" of capitalism. Beyond that, we recognise profoundly the vision that there is a need for true proletarian revolution against barbarism and war in the decadence phase of capitalism.

Although Korean workers express their difficulties on the shop floor and the revolutionary political forces in Korea are in the midst of confusion for the perspectives of future communist society, we have to accomplish the solidarity of world proletariat beyond one factory, one country and one nation, reflecting the desperate defeats neglecting the principles of internationalism in the past revolutionary movement from the bottom."

Even the briefest consideration of the history of the Far East is enough to reveal the immense importance of this initiative. As we said in our salute to the conference: "In 1927, the massacre of the workers of Shanghai was the final episode in a revolutionary struggle that had shaken the world for ten years, since the October Revolution in Russia in 1917. In the years that followed, the world working class, and humanity as a whole, suffered all the horror of the most terrible counter-revolution history has ever seen. In the East, the working population had to suffer the preface to World War II with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, then the Second World War that culminated in the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, then civil war in China, the Korean War, the terrible famine in China during the so-called "Great Leap Forward" under Mao Zedong, the war in Vietnam...

All these fearful, earth-shaking events swept over a proletariat which, in the East, was still young and inexperienced, and which had very little contact with the development of communist theory in the West. As far as we know, no expressions of the communist left were able to survive or even appear among the workers of the East.

Consequently, the fact that today a conference of communist internationalists has been called in the East, by an organisation which explicitly identifies with the communist left, is an event of historic importance for the working class. It holds the promise - perhaps for the first time in history - of building a real unity between the workers of East and West. Nor is it an isolated event: on the contrary, it is a part of a slow world wide awakening to consciousness of the proletariat and its political minorities". The ICC's delegation thus attended the conference with the aim not only of helping to the best of our ability in the emergence of an internationalist, left communist voice in the Far East, but also to learn: what are the most important issues for the workers and revolutionaries in Korea? How are the questions that affect all workers posed there? What lessons can the experience of workers in Korea offer workers elsewhere, especially in the Far East but also more generally world wide? And what lessons can the Korean proletariat draw from the experience of its class brothers in the rest of the world?

The conference was originally intended to discuss the following subjects: the decadence of capitalism, the situation of the class struggle, and the strategy to be adopted by revolutionaries in the present situation. In the days leading up to the Conference, however, the long-term political importance of its goals was overshadowed by the dramatic sharpening of inter-imperialist tensions in the region caused by the explosion of North Korea's first nuclear bomb, and the manoeuverings that have followed it especially on the part of the different powers present in the region (USA, China, Japan, Russia, South Korea). In a meeting prior to the conference, the ICC delegation and the SPA's Seoul group agreed that it was of the first importance for the internationalists to take position publicly on this situation, and decided to present jointly to the conference an internationalist declaration against the threat of war. As we will see, the discussion provoked by this proposed declaration formed an important part of the debates during the conference itself.

In this Report, we propose to consider some of the main themes of the conference's debates, in the hope not only of giving a wider expression to the discussion itself, but also of contributing to the reflection of comrades in Korea by offering an international perspective on the questions that they are confronting today.

The historical context

Before we come to the conference itself, however, it is necessary briefly to place the situation in Korea within its historical context.

In the centuries preceding capitalism's expansion into the Far East, Korea both benefited and suffered from its geographical position as a small country caught between two great historical powers: China and Japan. On the one hand, it has served as a bridge and cultural catalyst for both countries: there is no doubt, for example, that ceramic art in China and especially Japan is greatly indebted to the artisan potters of Korea who developed the now lost techniques of celadon glazing.[1] On the other hand, the country suffered frequent and brutal invasions by its two powerful neighbours, and for much of its recent history the ruling ideology was dominated by a Confucian scholar caste which worked in Chinese and resisted the influx of new ideas that accompanied the arrival of European powers in the region. During the 19th century, the increasingly bitter rivalry between China, Japan, and Russia - the latter's colonial power now extended to the frontiers of China and the Pacific Ocean - led to an intense competition for influence within Korea itself. The influence sought by these powers, however, was essentially strategic: from the point of view of return on investment, the possibilities offered by China and Japan were far greater than those available in Korea, especially given the political instability caused by the internecine struggles between different factions of the Korean ruling classes, who were divided both as to the benefits of "modernisation", and by their efforts to use the influence of Korea's imperialist neighbours to bolster their own positions in power. The beginning of the 20th century saw an intensification of Russia's attempts to establish a naval base in Korea, which in turn could only be seen as a mortal threat to Japanese independence: this rivalry was to lead in 1905 to the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese war, during which the Japanese annihilated the Russian fleet. In 1910, the Japanese invaded Korea and established a colonial regime which was to last until Japan's defeat in 1945.

Industrial development prior to the Japanese invasion was thus extremely hesitant, and the industrialisation that followed was largely geared to the needs of the Japanese war economy: by 1945 there were some two million industrial workers in Korea, largely concentrated in the north. The south of the country remained essentially rural and suffered severe poverty. And as if the working population of Korea had not suffered enough from colonial domination, forced industrialisation, and war,[2] they now found themselves in the border zone of the new imperialist conflict that was to dominate the world until 1989: the division of the planet between the two great imperialist blocs of the USA and the USSR. The decision by the USSR to support the insurrection launched by the Stalinist "Korean Workers' Party" was in effect an attempt to probe the new frontiers of US imperial domination, in the same way as it did in Greece after 1945. The result was also the same, though on a far larger, more destructive scale: a vicious civil war between North and South Korea, in which the Korean authorities on both sides - however much they were fighting to defend their own bourgeois interests - were nothing more than pawns of far greater powers struggling for world domination. The war lasted for three years (1950-53), during which the whole peninsula was ravaged from one end to the other by the successive advances and retreats of the competing armies, and ended with its permanent division into two separate countries: North and South Korea. The United States has maintained a military presence in South Korea to this day, with over 30,000 troops currently stationed in the country.

Even before the end of the war, the USA had already come to the conclusion that military occupation in itself would not stabilise the region[3] and decided to enact what amounted to a Marshall Plan for South-East Asia and the Far East. "Aware that economic and social poverty was one of the main arguments used by the pro-Soviet nationalist factions who came to power in certain Asian countries, the USA created zones on the very borders of China (Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea and Japan) which could serve as outposts of western prosperity. The priority for the USA was to establish a cordon sanitaire against the advances of the Soviet bloc in Asia".[4] This policy had important implications for South Korea: "Lacking in raw materials, and with most of its industrial base limited to the north, the country was drained dry at the end of the war: production had fallen by 44% and employment by 59%. Sources of fresh capital, intermediate means of production, technical competence and managerial capacities were virtually non-existent (...) From 1945 to 1978, South Korea received some $13 billion, or $600 per inhabitant, and Taiwan $5.6 billion, or $4.5 per inhabitant. Between 1953 and 1960, foreign aid contributed almost 90% of fixed capital in South Korea. The aid given by the USA reached 14% of GNP in 1957 (...) But the USA did not restrict itself to supplying military, financial and technical aid to these countries; it also took charge of the whole management of the state and the economy. In the absence of real national bourgeoisies, the only social body capable of carrying out the modernisation that the USA wanted was the army. A highly effective form of state capitalism was installed in each of these countries. Economic growth was spurred on by a system which closely linked the public and private sectors through a quasi-military centralisation, but with the sanction of the market. In contrast to the east European version of state capitalism with its absurd bureaucratic excesses, these countries allied state centralisation with the sanction of the law of value. Numerous interventionist policies were carried out: the formation of industrial conglomerates, laws protecting the internal market, trade restrictions at the frontiers, a form of planning that was imperative but also incited further efforts, state management of the distribution of credit, the orientation of capital and resources towards the key sectors, the handing out of exclusive licenses, management monopolies etc. Thus in South Korea, it was thanks to a unique relationship with the chaebols (equivalent to the Japanese zaibatsus), great industrial conglomerates often founded through state aid or initiative,[5] that the public authorities oriented economic development".

The South Korean working class was thus faced with a policy of ferocious exploitation and forced industrialisation, carried out by an unstable succession of semi-democratic and authoritarian military regimes which maintained their power through the brutal suppression of workers' strikes and revolts, notably the mass uprising in Kwangju at the beginning of the 1980s.[6] Following the events in Kwangju, the Korean ruling class tried to stabilise the situation under the presidency of General Chun Doo-hwan (previously head of the Korean CIA) by giving a democratic veneer to what remained an essentially military authoritarian regime. The attempt failed miserably: the year 1986 saw mass opposition rallies in Seoul, Inch'on, Kwangju, Taegu and Pusan, while in 1987 "More than 3,300 industrial disputes erupted involving workers' demands for higher wages, better treatment, and better working conditions, forcing the government to make concessions to meet some of their demands".[7] The inability of General Chun's corrupt military regime to impose social peace by force led to a change of direction. The Chun regime adopted the "democratisation programme" proposed by General Roh Tae-woo, leader of the governmental Democratic Justice Party, who won the presidential elections held in December 1987. The presidential elections of 1992 brought to power a long-standing leader of the democratic opposition, Kim Young-Sam, and Korea's democratic transition was complete. Or, as the SPA comrades put it to us, the Korean bourgeoisie managed at last to erect a convincing democratic façade to hide the continued power of the alliance between the military, the chaebols, and the security apparatus.

Consequences of the historical context

In terms of the recent experience of its political minorities this historical context has parallels in other countries of the periphery, in Asia but also in Latin America.[8] It has had important consequences for the emergence of an internationalist movement in Korea itself.

At the level of what we might call the "collective memories" of the class, there is clearly an important difference between the accumulated political and organisational experience of the working class in Europe, which was already beginning to assert itself as an independent force in society in 1848 (the "physical force" fraction of the Chartist movement in Britain), and that of the class in Korea. If we remember that the waves of class struggle in Europe during the 1980s saw the slow development of a general distrust for the unions and a tendency for workers to take their struggles into their own hands, it is particularly striking that the movements in Korea during the same period were marked by a tendency to merge the workers' struggles for their own class demands with the demands of the "democracy movement" for a reorganisation of the bourgeois state apparatus. As a result, the fundamental opposition between the interests of the working class and the interests of the democratic fractions of the bourgeoisie were not immediately obvious to the militants who entered political activity in this period.

Nor should we underestimate the difficulties created by the language barrier. The "collective memory" of the working class is strongest when it takes a written, theoretical form. Whereas the political minorities that emerged in Europe during the 1970s had access to the writings, either in the original or in translation, of the left of the social democracy (Lenin, Luxemburg), then of the left of the Third International and the Communist Left that emerged from it (Bordiga, Pannekoek, Gorter, the Bilan group, and the French Communist Left), in Korean the work of Pannekoek (Workers' Councils) and Luxemburg (Accumulation of capital) is only just beginning to appear thanks to the joint efforts of the Seoul Group for Workers' Councils and SPA, with which the SGWC is closely associated.[9]

More specific to the Korean situation, has been the effect of the division between North and South imposed by the imperialist conflict between the US and Russian blocs, the US military presence in South Korea, and US support for the succession of military regimes which came to an end in 1988. Combined with the general inexperience of the working class in Korea and the absence within it of a clear internationalist voice, plus the confusion between the workers' movement and the bourgeois democratic opposition which we have described above, this has led to a general infection of society with a pervasive Korean nationalism, often disguised as an "anti-imperialism" in which only the United States and its allies appear as imperialist forces. Opposition to the military regimes, and indeed to capitalism, tended to be identified with opposition to the United States.

Finally, an important feature of the debates within the Korean political milieu is the question of the trades unions. In particular for the present generation of activists, the experience of trades unionism is based on the struggles in the 1980s and early 1990s, in which the unions were in large part clandestine, not yet "bureaucratised" and certainly both animated and led by profoundly dedicated militants (including comrades who today participate in the SPA and SGWC). Because of the conditions of clandestinity and repression, it was not clear to the militants involved at the time that the unions' "programme" was not only not revolutionary, but could not even defend workers' interests. During the 1980s, the unions were closely linked to the democratic opposition to the military regime, whose ambition was not to overthrow capitalism but quite the reverse: to overthrow the military regime and to take over the state capitalist apparatus itself. By contrast, the "democratisation" of Korean society since the 1990s has brought into the open this integration of the unions into the state apparatus, and caused a considerable disarray among militants as to how to react to this new situation: as one comrade put it "the unions turned out to be the best defenders of the democratic state". As a result, there is a general sense of "disappointment" with the unions and a search for some other method for militant activity within the working class. Again and again, in the interventions in the conference and in informal discussions, we could feel how urgent is the need for Korean comrades to have access to the reflection on the nature of the trades unions in capitalism's decadence which has formed such an important part of the reflection in the European workers' movement ever since the Russian revolution, and especially since the failure of the revolution in Germany.

The new millenium has thus witnessed the development of a real effort among many Korean militants to call into question the bases of their previous activity which had, as we have seen, been strongly influenced by the ideologies of both Stalinism and bourgeois democracy. In an effort to preserve some degree of unity and to provide a space for discussion among those involved in the process, a number of groups and individuals have taken the initiative of creating a more or less formal "Network of revolutionary marxists".[10] Inevitably, breaking with the past is extremely difficult and has led to a great deal of heterogeneity among the different groups in the Network. The historical conditions which we have described briefly above have meant that the differentiation between the principles of proletarian internationalism and the bourgeois, essentially nationalist, outlook that characterises Stalinism and Trotskyism has only begun during the last few years, on the basis of the practical experience of the 1990s, and largely thanks to the efforts of the SPA to introduce left communist ideas and positions within the Network.

In this context, there are two aspects of the SPA's introduction to the conference which are absolutely fundamental in our view:

• First, the explicit declaration that it is necessary for revolutionaries in Korea to place the experience of Korean workers within the wider historical and theoretical framework of the international working class: "The purpose of the international conference is to open widely the horizon of recognition by the theory and the practice with the perspectives of the world revolution. We hope that the revolutionary Marxists go hand in hand for solidarity and unity and accomplish the historical task to crystallise the world revolution with the world proletariat in this important conference".
• Second, that this can only be done on the basis of the principle of the Communist Left: "The international conference of revolutionary Marxists in Korea is the precious meeting and field of discussions between left communists of the world and the revolutionary marxists of Korea and the first manifestation of exposing the political positions [ie of left communists] within the revolutionary milieu."

The debates at the Conference

This article is too short to give an exhaustive account of the Conference's discussions. Rather, we will try to highlight what seem to us the most important points that emerged from them, in the hope of contributing to the continuation of the debates begun at the Conference both among the Korean comrades themselves and more generally within the internationalist movement world wide.

On the decadence of capitalism

This was the first subject under discussion, and before considering the debate itself, we should first say that we wholeheartedly support the underlying preoccupation of the SPA: to begin the Conference by giving a solid theoretical grounding to the other questions under discussion, namely the situation of the class struggle and revolutionary strategy. In addition, we salute the heroic effort of the SPA comrades to present a brief synthesis of the different views on the question that exist within the Communist Left. Given the complexity of the question - which has been a subject of debate within the workers' movement since the beginning of the 20th century, and has exercised some of its greatest minds - this was an extremely bold undertaking.

With hindsight, however, it may have been too daring! While it was very striking to see that the concept of the decadence of capitalism received an "instinctively" favorable reception (if we can put it like that), it was also clear from the questions posed both during the discussion and informally afterwards that most of the participants lacked the theoretical grounding to tackle the question in depth.[11] To say this is in no way a criticism: many of the basic texts are not available in Korean, which is itself an expression - as we said earlier - of the objective inexperience of the Korean workers' movement. We hope at least that the questions raised, and also the introductory texts presented by the SPA and the ICC in particular, will allow comrades to begin to situate themselves in the debate and also - just as importantly - to understand why this theoretical question is not something posed outside the real world and the concrete preoccupations of the struggle, but the fundamental determining factor of the situation in which we live today.[12]

It is worth taking up one question, from a young student, which expressed in a few words a striking contradiction between appearance and reality in present-day capitalism: "Many people feel decadence, we - the undergraduate students - are subject to bourgeois ideology, there is a feeling that there exists an affluent society, how can we express decadence in more concrete words?". It is true that an aspect of bourgeois ideology (at least in the industrialised countries) is the pretence that we are living in a world of "consumerist abundance" - and indeed the city streets of Seoul, the shops groaning with electronic goods, might seem to give a semblance of reality to the ideology. Yet at the same time, it is abundantly clear that Korean youth faces the same problems as young proletarians elsewhere: unemployment, precarious work contracts, a general difficulty in finding work, the high cost of housing. It is part of the task of communists to demonstrate clearly for today's working-class youth the link between the mass unemployment of which they are victims, and the generalised and permanent warfare which is the other fundamental aspect of capitalism's decadence, as we tried to point out in our brief reply to this question.

On the class struggle

Certainly one of the most important issues under discussion, not only at the Conference but within the Korean movement in general, was the question of the class struggle and its methods. As we understood it, again both from the interventions in the Conference and from informal discussion outside, the union question poses a real problem for the militants who took part in the struggles at the end of the 1980s. In some ways, the situation in Korea is analogous with that in Poland following the creation of the Solidarnosc union - and is yet another demonstration of the profound truth of the principles of the Communist Left: in capitalism's decadence, it is no longer possible to create permanent mass organisations of the working class. Even unions formed in the heat of struggle, as was the case in Korea, can only end up becoming an adjunct of the state, a means not for strengthening the workers' struggle but for strengthening the grip of the state over the workers' struggle. Why is this? Fundamentally, the reason is that it is impossible for the working class to win lasting reforms from capitalism in its decadent period. The unions have lost their original function, and remain tied to the preservation of capitalism. They have taken on a national viewpoint often, moreover, restricted to a single trade or industry, instead of an international viewpoint common to all workers: inevitably, they bow to the logic of capitalism, of "what the country can afford", of "what is good for the national economy". This indeed was one reproach we heard made of the unions in Korea - that they had even reached the point of urging workers to limit their demands to what the bosses are prepared to pay, rather than basing them on the needs of the workers themselves.[13]

Faced with this inevitable betrayal of the unions, and their integration into the democratic state apparatus, the Korean comrades were looking to the ideas of the Communist Left for a solution. Consequently, the notion of "workers' councils" has raised a great deal of interest there. The problem, is that there is a general tendency to see the workers' councils not as the organs of workers' power in a revolutionary situation, but in effect as a new kind of trade union able to exist permanently within capitalism. Indeed this idea was even theorised historically in a presentation on "The council movement strategy in the present period in South Korea, and how to put it into practice" by the "Militants group for revolutionary workers' party". We have to say that this presentation turned history completely on its head by claiming that the workers' councils created during the 1919 German revolution actually evolved out of the trades unions, which is the exact opposite of reality![14] In our opinion, this is not simply a matter of historical inaccuracy of the kind which could be settled by academic debate. It springs more profoundly from the fact that it is extremely difficult to accept the fact that outside a revolutionary period it is simply impossible for the workers to be permanently in struggle. Militants who are caught in this logic - independently of their sincere desire to work for the class struggle, and even independently of the proletarian political positions that they may genuinely defend - run the risk of falling into the trap of immediatism, constantly running after "practical" activity which bares no relationship to what is concretely possible within the real historical situation as it exists.

For the proletarian world outlook, posing the question in this way makes it impossible to answer. As one ICC delegate put it: "If the workers are not in struggle, then it is impossible to hold a gun to their heads, and tell them 'You must struggle!'". Nor is it possible for the revolutionaries to struggle "on behalf of" the working class. Revolutionaries cannot provoke the class struggle: this is not a principle, it is simply a historical fact. What they can do, is contribute to the development of the working class' own awareness of itself, of its place in society as a class with its own interests and above all with revolutionary goals which go beyond the immediate struggle, beyond the workers' immediate situation in the factory, the office, or the dole queue. This is one of the keys to understanding apparently "spontaneous" proletarian uprisings such as that of 1905 in Russia: despite the fact the the revolutionaries of the day played little part in the initial upsurge of struggle, the terrain had been prepared for years by the systematic intervention of the Social-Democracy (the revolutionaries of the day), which had played a critical role in developing the workers' awareness of themselves as a class.[15] To put it briefly, outside periods of open workers' struggle, the essential task of revolutionaries is one of propaganda and the development of those ideas which will strengthen the struggle to come.

There is another question raised in the presentations by Loren Goldner and the Internationalist Perspective delegate, which we feel should not go unanswered: the idea that the "recomposition" of the working class - in other words on the one hand the tendency towards the disappearance of the mega-factories characteristic of the late 19th and 20th centuries in favour of geographically widespread production processes, and on the other the increasingly precarious work conditions of the workers, especially young workers (short-term contracts, unemployment, part-time working, etc.) - has led to the discovery of "new methods of struggle" which go "beyond the workplace". The most notable examples of these "new methods of struggle" are the "flying pickets" supposedly invented by the piqueteros movement in Argentina 2001 and the riots in the French suburbs during 2005. We do not propose, in this article, to answer the comrades' enthusiasm for the French riots and the piqueteros movement, which in our view is profoundly misplaced.[16] However, we do think it necessary to take up a more general political error which is expressed in these positions, which is that the workers' revolutionary consciousness in effect depends on their immediate day to day experience in the workplace.

In fact, not only are precarious working conditions and "flying pickets" not new historically,[17] the supposed "new forms of struggle" that are generally held up for our admiration are nothing other than expressions of the workers' powerlessness in a given situation: the riots of the youngsters in the French suburbs in 2005 are a classic example. The reality is that (in the period of capitalism's decadence) whenever the workers' struggle acquires a certain independence it has tended to organise itself not in unions but in mass meetings with elected delegates; in other words, in an organisational form that both is descended from and prefigures the soviets. The most striking example of recent history is of course the struggles in Poland in 1980; another experience, again in the 1980s, was that of the Cobas (rank-and-file committees) formed during the massive teachers' struggles in Italy (hardly a "traditional" industrial sector!). Nearer to us in time we can point to the strikes in Vigo (Spain) [8] in 2006.[18] Here, the engineering workers who began the strike mostly work on precarious contracts in small-scale industry. Since there was no single large factory which could form the focal point for the struggle they held daily mass meetings, not in the workplace but in the town square. These mass meetings in turn looked back to a form of organisation that had already been used in 1972 in the same town.

The question then is this: why is it that at the end of the 19th century the development of mass precarious workforces led to the formation of the first mass unions of unskilled workers, whereas in the 21st century this is no longer the case?

Why did the Russian workers in 1905 invent the workers' council - the soviet - which Lenin called "the finally discovered form of the dictatorship of the proletariat"?

Why has the mass meeting become the typical form of workers' organisation for struggle whenever the workers' succeed in developing their autonomy and strengh?

In our opinion, as we said at the time, the answer lies not in sociological comparisons but in a far broader political understanding of the change in historical period that took place at the beginning of the 20th century, which was described by the Third International as opening up an "epoch of wars and revolutions".

Moreover, the sociological vision of the working class defended by IP and Loren Goldner strikes us as a complete underestimation of the proletariat's political, theoretical capacities. It is almost as if workers were only capable of thinking about what is happening in the workplace, as if their brains switched off as soon as they leave work, as if they do not concern themselves with their children's future (problems of schools, education, social decomposition), about solidarity with the old and sick, and with the generations to come (problems of declining health service facilities, of pensions), as if they were incapable of viewing the problems of the environment or the endless barbarity of war with a critical eye, and tying what they learn about the wider world to their own direct experience of capitalist exploitation in the workplace.

Nor is this broad, political and historical understanding of the world necessary only for the immediate struggle. If the world proletariat is to be successful in overthrowing capitalism, it will have to build a completely new society in its place, a society of a kind that has never existed in humanity's history. To do so, it must be capable of developing the most profound comprehension of human history, it must be able to claim as its heritage humanity's greatest achievements in art, in science, and in philosophy. This is precisely what the political organisations of the working class are for: they are a means by which the workers think more generally about their condition and the perspectives that are open to them.[19]

The Declaration against the threat of war

We have already published the text of the Declaration on our website and in our press, and will not repeat its content here.[20] The debate around its content concentrated on the proposal put forward by a member of the Ulsan Labour Education Committee to lay the major responsibility for the increasing tension in the region at America's door, and in effect to present North Korea as a "victim" of the US policy of containment. This proposal, and the support it received from some of the more Trotskyist tendencies in the Conference was, we think, significant of the difficulty that many Korean comrades have in breaking with the "anti-imperialist" (for which read essentially "anti-American") ideology of the 1980s, and an continuing attachment to the defence of North Korea and so to Korean nationalism, despite their undoubtedly sincere rejection of Stalinism.

Both the ICC and several SPA comrades argued strongly against changing the main thrust of the Declaration. As we pointed out in the debate on the Declaration both in Seoul and in Ulsan, the idea that one country in an imperialist conflict is "more to blame" than another, is exactly the same idea that allowed the Social-Democratic traitors to call workers to support "their" nation in 1914: the German workers against "Tsarist barbarism", the French workers against "Prussian militarism", the British workers in support of "plucky little Belgium", and so on. For us, the period of capitalism's decadence has demonstrated the profound truth of Rosa Luxemburg's understanding that imperialism is not the fault of this or that country, but a fundamental feature of capitalism itself: in this epoch, all states are imperialist. The only difference between the US giant and the North Korean pigmy is the size of their imperialist appetites, and their ability to satisfy them.

Two other objections arose during the discussion, which we feel are worth mentioning. The first, was the proposal by a comrade from the "Solidarity for workers' liberation" group to include a point denouncing the South Korean government's taking the tense situation as an excuse to step up repressive measures. This very justified suggestion was made during the discussion in Seoul, and the final version debated in Ulsan the next day (and since published) was modified accordingly.

The second objection, from a comrade from the "Sahoejueo Nodongja" group,[21] was that the actual situation was not in fact that serious, and that denouncing war now would in effect give credence to a war scare being orchestrated by the bourgeoisie for its own purposes. This objection is a reasonable one, but nonetheless mistaken in our view. Whether or not there is an imminent threat of war in the Far East, there can be no doubt that the threat of war hangs over this region and that the tensions between the different major players on the imperialist scene (China, Taiwan, Japan, USA, Russia) are increasing. In this situation, we consider it of great importance that internationalists should be able to denounce the responsibility of all the imperialist camps: in doing so, we are following in the steps of Lenin, Luxemburg, and the Left of the Second International who fought for the internationalist resolution voted by the 1907 Stuttgart Congress. It is a primary responsibility of revolutionary organisations to take position within the proletariat on the crucial events of imperialist conflict or the class struggle.[22]

To conclude on this point, we would like to salute the fraternal internationalist support for the Declaration given by the IP delegate and other comrades present as individuals at the Conference.

A balance-sheet

At a final meeting before our delegation's departure, the ICC and SPA found ourselves in complete agreement in our overall assessment of the Conference. The most significant points raised were the following:

1. The fact that this Conference could take place is itself an event of historic importance, since it represents the first time that the positions of the Communist Left have been defended and begun to take root in a highly industrialised country of the Far East.
2. The SPA considered that the discussions during the Conference had been of particular importance in demonstrating in practice the fundamental difference between the Communist Left and Trotskyism. In doing so, the Conference reinforced the SPA's determination to develop its own understanding of Left Communist principles, and to make these more widely available in the Korean workers' movement.
3. The joint Declaration about the North Korean nuclear tests were a concrete expression of the internationalist positions of the Communist Left, in particular of the SPA and ICC. The debate over the Declaration revealed the problem of nationalistic tendencies remaining in the Korean workers movement. Within the "network" there are divergences on this, this problem is unsolved in the milieu, and the SPA is resolved to work to overcome this in the future.
4. One of the most important questions for future debate is that of the trades unions. It will be necessary for the comrades in Korea to analyse the history of the unions there, especially since the 1980s, in the light of the historical experience of the world proletariat, as this is concentrated in the positions defended by the communist left.

Perspectives

For all its importance, we are well aware that this Conference is only one step in developing the presence of left communist principles in the Far East, and common work between revolutionaries in East and West. That said, we consider that the fact the Conference was held, and the debates within it, have confirmed two points on which the ICC has always insisted, and which will be fundamental for the construction of the future world communist party of the working class.

The first of these is the political foundation on which such an organisation will be built. On all the fundamental questions - the union question, the parliamentary question, the question of nationalism and national liberation struggles - the development of a new internationalist movement can only be accomplished on the basis of the groundwork laid by the small groups of the Communist Left between the 1920s and 50s (notably by Bilan, the KAPD, the GIK, the GCF), where the ICC draws its origins.[23]

Secondly, the conference in Korea, and the SPA's explicit call to "accomplish the solidarity of the world proletariat", is yet another confirmation that the internationalist movement is not developing on the basis of a federation of existing national parties, but directly on an international level.[24] This is a historical advance over the situation when the Third International was created, in the midst of the revolution and on the basis of the left fractions that had emerged from the national parties of the Second International. It also reflects the nature of the working class today: a class which, more than ever in history, is united in a world wide process of production, and in a global capitalist society whose contradictions can only be overcome by its overthrow on a world scale, to be replaced by a world wide human community.

---

[1] We should also mention the invention, in the 15th century, of the han-gǔl alphabet, perhaps the first attempt to create a notation based on a scientific study of the language in its spoken form.

[2] This included the forced prostitution of thousands of Korean women in the Japanese army's military brothels, and the demolition of the old agrarian economy as Korean farming was more and more directed by the food requirements of Japan itself.

[3] "The United States is interested in the creation of a military barrier between non-Communist and Communist areas. If that barrier is to be effective, the areas behind it must be stable (...) The United States must determine the particular causes of unrest and intelligently and boldly assist in their removal. Our experience in China has shown that it is useless to temporize with the causes of unrest; that a policy looking towards temporary stability is doomed to failure when the general desire appears to be for permanent change", Melvin Conant Jnr, "JCRR: an object lesson", in Far Eastern Survey, May 2nd, 1951.

[4] "The Asian dragons run out of steam", in International Review n°89 (1997)

[5] The first and most important source of finance was the acquisition by the chaebols of assigned goods at prices well under their value. Just after the war this made up 30% of what South Korea inherited from the Japanese. Initially placed under the control of the American office of assigned goods, they were distributed by the office itself and by the Korean government.

[6] We do not propose, in this article, to deal with the situation of the working class in North Korea, which has had to suffer all the horrors of an ultra-militarist Stalinist regime.

[7] Andrew Nahm, A history of the Korean people.

[8] The Philippines, and Brazil are examples that spring immediately to mind.

[9] Some comrades of the SGWC took part in the conference in an individual capacity.

[10] Apart from the SPA, the following Korean groups belonging to the Network gave presentations to the conference: Solidarity for Workers' Liberation, Ulsan Labour Education Committee, Militants' Group for Revolutionary Workers' Party. A presentation on the class struggle was also given by Loren Goldner, in an individual capacity.

[11] This was particularly true of the discussion on decadence, held in Seoul, which was open to the public and therefore included in the audience a number of young students with little or no political experience.

[12] We do not propose to examine here the Internationalist Perspective group's obsession with the "formal and real domination of capital". We have already dealt with the subject at some length in International Review n°60 [9] , published in 1990 at a time when IP still called itself the "External Fraction of the ICC". It is nonetheless worth mentioning that IP's first effort at demonstrating in practice the superiority of its "new" theoretical insight was hardly convincing, since IP continued to insist two years after the collapse of the Berlin Wall that events in Eastern Europe actually represented a strengthening of Russia!

[13] Inevitably, this account remains extremely schematic and open to correction and precision. We can only regret that the presentation by the comrade from ULEC on the history of the Korean workers' movement was far too long to be translated into English and therefore remains inaccessible to us. We hope that it will be possible for the comrades to prepare and translate a shorter version of their text which would summarise its main points.

[14] In fact, the unions during the German revolution were the worst enemies of the soviets. For an account of the German revolution, see the articles published in International Review n°80-82

[15] See our series on the 1905 revolution [10] published in International Review n°120, 122, 123, 125.

[16] For more detail on these subjects, see for example "Riots in the French suburbs: in the face of despair, only the class struggle offers a future [11] ", and "Argentina: the mystification of the 'piquetero' movement [12] ", published in International Review n°119. We have to say also that putting forward the idea of the "disappearance" of a mass industrial workforce came across as somewhat surreal in the town of Ulsan, where the Hyundai factory alone employs 20,000 workers!

[17] If we take as an example the idea that "precarious working" led to the invention of the "flying picket" as a "new form of struggle", we can see that this idea is simply unfounded historically. The flying picket (ie delegations of workers in struggle going to other workplaces to bring other workers into the movement) has been around for a long time: to take the example of Britain alone, the flying picket was famously used in two important struggles during the 1970s: the miners' strikes of 1972 and 1974 when the miners sent pickets to the power stations, and the 1972 building workers' strike, when the builders sent pickets to spread the strike to different building sites. Nor is the existence of a "precarious" workforce anything new. Indeed it was precisely the emergence of a mass unskilled precarious workforce (particularly in the docks) that led to the formation of the revolutionary syndicalist Tom Mann's "General Labourers' Union" in 1889 (Engels and Marx's daughter Eleanor were also involved in the development of this union).

[18] See the article published in World Revolution n°295 [8]

[19] The communists "do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mould the proletarian movement. The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only: 1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. 2. In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole. The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the lines of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement." (Communist manifesto).

[20] The declaration can be found online [13] .

[21] In English, "Socialist Worker": despite the name, this group has nothing to do with the British "Socialist Workers' Party". We apologise in advance if we have misrepresented the comrade's line of thought - the language barrier may have led us to an error of interpretation.

[22] The fact that the internationalists in this conference did not remain voiceless in the face of the threat of war is in our view a real step forward compared to the conferences of the Communist Left at the end of the 1970s, where the other participants - and notably Battaglia Comunista and the CWO - refused any joint statement on the invasion of Afghanistan by the USSR.

[23] According to IP, we have to go "beyond the Communist Left". Nobody, least of all those groups we have cited, would pretend that they had said the final word on these or any other questions: history moves forward, and we come to understand past history better. But it is impossible to build a house without laying the foundations, and in our view the only foundations on which it is possible to build are those of our predecessors of the Communist Left. The logic of IP's position is to throw out the history from which we spring - and to declare that "history starts with us". However much IP may dislike the idea, this is nothing but a variant of the Bordigist position that "the party" (or in the IBRP's case, "the Bureau") is the unique font of wisdom and has nothing to learn from anybody else.

[24] This aspect of the development of the future international organisation was a matter of polemic between in the ICC and the IBRP in the 1980s, the IBRP holding that an international organisation could only be built on the basis of independent political organisation pre-existing in different countries. The real practice of the internationalist movement today completely invalidates this theory of the IBRP.

The concretisation of historical materialism

The theory of decadence is nothing other than the concretisation of historical materialism in the analysis of the evolution of modes of production. It is thus the indispensable framework for understanding the historical period we are living in. Knowing whether society is still progressing, or whether it has had its day historically, is decisive for grasping what is at stake on the political and socio-economic levels, and acting accordingly. As with all past societies, the ascendant phase of capitalism expressed the historically necessary character of the relations of production it embodies, that is, their vital role in the expansion of society's productive forces. The phase of decadence, by contrast, expresses the transformation of these relations into a growing barrier to this same development. This is one of the main theoretical acquisitions left us by Marx and Engels.

The 20th century was the most murderous in the entire history of humanity, both in the scale, the frequency and length of the wars which took up a large part of it, and in the incomparable breadth of the human catastrophes which it produced: from the greatest famines in history to systematic genocide, taking in economic crises which have shaken the whole planet and hurled tens of millions of proletarians and human beings into abject poverty. There is no comparison between the 19th and 20th centuries. During the Belle Epoque, the bourgeois mode of production reached unprecedented heights: it had united the globe, reaching levels of productivity and technological sophistication which could only have been dreamed about before. Despite the accumulation of tensions in society's foundations, the last 20 years of capitalism's ascendancy (1894-1914) were the most prosperous yet; capitalism seemed invincible and armed conflicts were confined to the peripheries. Unlike the "long 19th century" (as the historian EJ Hobsbawm has described it), which was a period of almost uninterrupted moral, intellectual and material progress, since 1914 there has been a marked regression on all fronts. The increasingly apocalyptic character of economic and social life across the planet, and the threat of self-destruction in an endless series of conflicts and ever more grave ecological catastrophes, are neither a natural fatality, nor the product of simple human madness, nor a characteristic of capitalism since its origins: they are a manifestation of the decadence of the capitalist mode of production which, from being, from the 16th century to the First World War,[1] a powerful factor in economic, social and political development, has become a fetter on all such development and a threat to the very survival of humanity.

Why is humanity faced with the question of survival at the very moment that it has achieved a level of development in the productive forces that would enable it to start moving, for the first time in its history, towards a world without material poverty, towards a unified society capable of basing its activity on the needs, desires and consciousness of mankind? Does the world proletariat really constitute the revolutionary force that can take humanity out of the impasse into which capitalism has led it? Why is it that most of the forms of workers' struggle in our epoch can no longer be those of the last century, such as the fight for gradual reforms through trade unionism, parliamentarism, supporting the constitution of certain nation states or certain progressive fractions of the bourgeoisie? It is impossible to find one's bearings in the current historical situation, still less to play a vanguard role, without having a global, coherent vision which can answer these elementary but crucial questions. Marxism - historical materialism - is the only conception of the world which makes it possible to give such an answer. Its clear and simple response can be summed up in a few words; just like the modes of production which came before it, capitalism is not an eternal system: "Beyond a certain point, the development of the productive forces becomes a barrier to capital, and consequently the relation of capital becomes a barrier to the development of the productive forces of labour. Once this point has been reached, capital, ie wage labour, enters into the same relation to the development of social wealth and the productive forces as the guild system, serfdom and slavery did, and is, as a fetter, necessarily cast off. The last form of servility assumed by human activity, that of wage labour on the one hand and capital on the other, is thereby shed, and this shedding is itself the result of the mode of production corresponding to capital. It is precisely the production process of capital that gives rise to the material and spiritual conditions for the negation of wage labour and capital, which are themselves the negation of earlier forms of unfree social production.

The growing discordance between the productive development of society and the relations of production hitherto characteristic of it, is expressed in acute contradictions, crises, convulsions" ("Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy" [also known as the Grundrisse], Collected Works Vol. 29, 133-4).

As long as capitalism fulfilled a historically progressive role and the proletariat was not sufficiently developed, proletarian struggles could not result in a triumphant world revolution; they did however allow the proletariat to recognise itself and assert itself as a class through the trade union and parliamentary struggle for real reforms and lasting improvements in its living conditions. From the moment when the capitalist system entered into decadence, the world communist revolution became a possibility and a necessity. The forms of the proletarian struggle were radically overturned; even on the immediate level, defensive struggles could no longer be expressed, either in form or content, through the means of struggle forged last century such as trade unionism and parliamentary representation for workers' political organisations.

Brought into being by the revolutionary movements which put an end to the First World War, the Communist International was founded in 1919 around the recognition that the bourgeoisie was no longer a historically progressive class: "2. THE PERIOD OF CAPITALIST DECLINE. On the basis of its assessment of the world economic situation the Third Congress was able to declare with complete certainty that capitalism had fulfilled its mission of developing the productive forces and had reached a stage of irreconcilable contradiction with the requirements not only of modern historical development, but also of the most elementary conditions of human existence. This fundamental contradiction was reflected in the recent imperialist war, and further sharpened by the great damage the war inflicted on the conditions of production and distribution. Obsolete capitalism has reached the stage where the destruction that results from its unbridled power is crippling and ruining the economic achievements that have been built up by the proletariat, despite the fetters of capitalist slavery... What capitalism is passing through today is nothing other than its death throes" (‘Theses on Comintern Tactics' in Theses, resolutions and manifestos of the first four Congresses of the Third International, Hessel, p388-9)

From then on, the understanding that the First World War marked the entry of the capitalist system into its decadent phase has been the common patrimony of the majority of the groups of the communist left who, thanks to this historical compass, have been able to remain on an intransigent and coherent class terrain. The ICC has only taken up and developed the heritage transmitted and enriched by the Italian, German and Dutch lefts in the 1930s and 40s and then by the Gauche Communiste de France in the 1940s and 50s.

Decisive class combats are on the horizon. It is therefore more than ever vital for the proletariat to re-appropriate its own conception of the world, which has been developed over nearly two centuries of workers' struggles and theoretical elaboration by its political organisations. More than ever, the proletariat must understand that the present acceleration of barbarism and the uninterrupted increase in its exploitation are not a fact of nature, but are the result of the economic and social laws of capital which continue to rule the world even though they have been historically obsolete since the beginning of the 20th century. It is more vital than ever for the working class to understand that while the forms of struggle it learned in the 19th century (minimum programme of struggle for reforms, support for progressive fractions of the bourgeoisie etc) had a sense in the period of capitalism's ascent when it could "tolerate" the existence of an organised proletariat within society, these same forms can only lead it into an impasse in the period of decadence. More than ever, it is vital for the proletariat to understand that the communist revolution is not an idle dream, a utopia, but a necessity and a possibility which have their scientific foundations in an understanding of the decadence of the capitalist mode of production.

The decadence of capitalism

As a result of historical evolution, labour power becomes a commodity

Under capitalism, labour power has become a commodity:

"In ancient times, we see the exploitation of surplus labour by those who do not work. Slavery in antiquity, serfdom in the Middle Ages, both depend on a certain level of productivity being reached, on the ability of one individual's labour to support several individuals. Each is a different expression of the way in which one social class profits from this productivity by living on the labour of another class. In this sense, the slave of Antiquity and the medieval serf are the direct ancestors of today's wage worker. But neither in Antiquity nor in the Middle Ages had labour power become a commodity, despite its productivity and the fact that it is exploited (...)

The sale of labour power as a commodity implies a whole series of specific historical and social relations. The appearance on the market of the commodity 'labour power' means:

1. that the worker is free as an individual;
2. that he is separated from the means of production, and that the latter are brought together under the ownership of those who do not work;
3. that labour productivity has reached a high level, in other words that it can provide surplus labour;
4. that the market economy has become dominant, in other words that the creation of surplus labour in the form of commodities is the aim of the purchase of labour power" (Rosa Luxemburg, Introduction to political economy,[2] Chapter V, "Wage Labour").

For the proletariat, the result was to introduce a new quality to its destitution, compared to previous epochs:

"The primitive tribe is hungry, occasionally or often, when natural conditions are unfavourable to it; its destitution is that of society as a whole, it was unthinkable that some its members could be destitute while others were rich; inasmuch as the means of life were available for the whole of society, they were equally to all of its members. The same is true of antique and oriental slavery. However pressured and exploited the Egyptian public slave or the Greek private slave, however great a gap between his meagre living conditions and the opulence of his master, his conditions as a slave nonetheless ensured his existence. Slaves were not left to die of hunger, just as nobody left their horse or their cattle to die of hunger. The same is true of medieval serfdom: the whole system of feudal dependence where the peasant was attached to the land and where everyone was either the master or the servant of other men, or both at once, attributed to each individual a determined place within society. However pressured were the serfs, no lord had the right to chase them from the land and therefore to deprive them of their means of existence. Feudal relations obliged the lord to help the peasants in the case of catastrophes, fires, floods, hail, etc. It is only at the end of the Middle Ages, when feudalism begins to collapse and modern capitalism makes its appearance, that the situation changes.

(...)

capitalist commodity production is the first form of economy in human history where the absence of work and of the means of existence for a large and growing part of the population, and the poverty of another, also growing, part are not only the consequence but also a necessity and the condition for the existence of the economy." (Rosa Luxemburg, op.cit.).

Capitalism creates the conditions for communism

The Communist Manifesto emphasises the eminently revolutionary role played by the bourgeoisie, as it swept away all the old limited forms of society, and replaced them by the most dynamic and expansionist mode of production ever seen; a mode of production which, by conquering and unifying the entire planet, and by setting in motion in enormous productive forces, laid the foundations for a higher form of society which will at last be able to do away with class antagonisms.

Communism has thus becomes a material possibility thanks to the unprecedented development of the productive forces by capitalism itself.

The society based on the universal production of commodities is inevitably condemned, by the logic of its own internal functioning, to decline and in the end to collapse. In the Manifesto, the internal contradictions which will lead to capitalism's fall were already identified:

"Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade past, the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the rovolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeoisie and its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put on trial, each time more threateningly, the existence of the entire bourgeois society. In these crises a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity - the epidemic of overproduction. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce." (Manifesto of the Communist Party in Marx: the revolutions of 1848, Pelican Marx Library, p72-73)

Marx's work in the years after he wrote the Manifesto was to look more closely at the relationship between the extraction and the realisation of surplus value, and at the periodic crises of overproduction which, every ten years or so, shook capitalist society to its foundations. In unveiling the secret of surplus value, he showed that capitalism is marked by profound contradictions which will inevitably lead to its decline and final collapse. These contradictions are based on the very nature of wage labour:

• the crisis of overproduction: under capitalism, the majority of the population is, by the very nature of surplus value, made up of over-producers and under-consumers. Capitalism is unable to realise all the value that is produced within the closed circuit of its own relations of production;
• the tendency of the rate of profit to fall: only human labour power can create new value; however, competition constantly obliges capitalism to reduce the quantity of living labour in relation to dead labour (machines, raw materials), which exerts a downward pressure on the rate of profit.

Despite its incredibly expansionist nature and the dynamic by which it subjects the whole planet to its laws, capitalism is - like Roman slave society or medieval feudalism - a historically transitory mode of production. At the end of this vast historical movement, like all modes of production that preceded it, capitalism is therefore condemned to disappear not because of its moral bankruptcy but because its internal contradictions compel it to destroy itself, and because it has produced within itself a class able to replace it by a higher form of social organisation.

Capitalism's contradictions also pointed to their solution: communism. A society plunged into chaos by the domination of commodity relationships can only be superseded by a society which abolishes wage labour and production for exchange, the society of "producers freely associated" for the satisfaction of human needs, where the relationships between human beings will be no longer obscure, but simple and clear.

During the last years of his life, Marx devoted a large part of his intellectual energy to the study of archaic societies. The publication of Morgan's Ancient society and the questions posed to him by the Russian workers' movement on the perspectives for the revolution in Russia, led him to undertake an intensive study which has come down to us in the form of his very incomplete but nonetheless extremely important Ethnographic notes. The same study also underpinned Engels' great anthropological work, The origins of the family, private property and the state.

For Marx and Engels, Morgan's work on the American Indians was a striking confirmation of their ideas about primitive communism: contrary to the conventional bourgeois conception that private property, social hierarchy, and the inequality of the sexes were inherent to human nature, Morgan's study revealed that the more primitive was a social formation, the more property was held in common, the more also the process of decision-making was collective and the more relationships between men and women were based on mutual respect.

Marxist approach to primitive society was founded on his materialist method which considered that the historical evolution of societies is determined, in the last instance, by changes in their economic infrastructure. These changes brought about the end of the primitive community and opened the way to the appearance of more developed social forms. But his vision of historical progress was radically opposed to the trivial bourgeois evolutionism which imagined a purely linear ascension from darkness into light, an ascension whose culmination is of course the brilliant splendour of bourgeois civilisation. Marx's viewpoint was profoundly dialectical: far from rejecting primitive communism as subhuman, his Notes express a profound respect for the qualities of the tribal community: its ability to govern itself, its powers of imagination and artistic creation, its sexual equality. The inevitable limitations of primitive society - in particular, restrictions imposed on individuals and the division of humanity in the tribal units - were necessarily overcomes by historical progress. But the positive side of these societies was lost during this process and would have to be restored at a higher level in the communist future.

The discovery that human beings had lived for hundreds of thousands of years in a society without classes and without a state was to become a powerful instrument in the hands of the workers' movement and served to counterbalance all those proclamations according to which the love of private property and the need for hierarchy are an intrinsic part of human nature.

The imperialist phase, capitalism's apogee and prelude to its decadence

When the Communist Manifesto was written, the cyclical crises of overproduction could still be overcome "by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones": capitalism still had before it a long phase of expansion.

During the 1870s and 1880s a new phase in capitalism's life opened up. The capitalist system entered its last phase of expansion and world conquest, no longer through the class struggle of emerging bourgeoisie seeking to establish viable national states, but through the method of imperialism and colonial conquest. During the last three decades of the 19th century almost the entire planet was conquered and shared out between the great imperialist powers.

With the appearance of the first signs of capitalism's decadent phase - growing tensions between the great powers and incessant conflicts on the periphery - as Engels was to write in 1891 with remarkable prescience: "All the above was said with the reservation that Germany will be able to pursue its economic and political development in peace. A war would change all that. And war is liable to break out at any moment. Everyone knows what war means today. It would be Russia and France on one side; Germany, Austria and perhaps Italy on the other" ('Socialism in Germany' 1891, in Marx and Engels Collected Works vol 27 p241) "But if war is to break out nevertheless, one thing is certain. This war, in which fifteen to twenty million armed men would slaughter one another and devastate Europe as it has never been devastated before - this war would either lead to the immediate triumph of socialism, or it would lead to such an upheaval in the old order of things, it would leave behind it everywhere such a heap of ruins, that the old capitalist society would become more impossible than ever..." (p245).

Before the outbreak of social disaster of World War I, many influential voices within the workers movement tried to convince the working class that capitalism could be transformed peacefully through reforms.

Fortunately at the time, the Marxist left was able to see through the apparently robust health of capitalism as expressed in its economic statistics. In reality, when the war broke out, capitalism was at the height of its economic prosperity and it was by walking in Engels' footsteps that the Marxist left was able to undertake an implacable struggle against the reformists within the social democracy, and to take account of the exacerbating contradictions of the system.

The understanding of the phase of imperialism and of capitalist decadence was to be developed by Marx's successors, and notably by Rosa Luxemburg.

The 20th century: the century of wars and revolutions

Although the Marxist left was far from being united on the fundamental reasons that had led capitalism to World War I - and a qualitatively and quantitatively new phenomenon in social life - it was nonetheless able to agree on its immediate cause: this was a war between great imperialist powers to divide up the world between them. Obviously those who were the most interested in a new division of the world, and were ready to go to war for it, were the least well endowed in colonies: Germany in particular. The others (Britain, France) were equally ready for war to avoid losing their colonial empires.

As an international wave of indignation against the barbarism of World War I was transformed into a world revolutionary wave which could put on the historical agenda the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the creation of a communist society, there were those within the workers' movement who took refuge in "Marxist orthodoxy" to decree that the seizure of power by the working class in Russia was premature because it had not yet been preceded by the political seizure of power by the bourgeoisie. This polarisation on the supposed immaturity of revolutionary conditions in Russia was not only completely mistaken as to the development of industry and the working class in that country, but above all completely missed the fundamental point that conditions were ripe for a worldwide revolution.

Carried by the wave of revolutionary movements which had put an end to World War I, the foundation of the Communist International in 1919 was based, as we have seen above, on the understanding that the historically progressive role of the bourgeoisie had come to an end.

The fact that the revolution was defeated in no way indicates that the objective conditions for revolution were not yet ready in this period. Not only were the preconditions for a society of abundance already present thanks to the development of productive forces but the working class had already demonstrated, in 1905 in Russia and in several industrialised countries from 1917 onwards, its ability to overthrow the bourgeoisie and set up its own political power world wide.

This defeat, due fundamentally to the defeat of the revolution in Germany, in fact expresses the immaturity of the subjective conditions for the revolution, in particular the continued illusions of a large part of the German proletariat in the Social Democracy despite the latter's betrayal during the war.

The economic foundations of capitalist decadence

The world war, the first brutal manifestation of capitalism's entry into its decadent phase, was obviously not unconnected with the contradictions which had developed within society's economic foundations. Indeed it is a pure product of these contradictions.

A) the underlying economic causes of wars in the decadent period

As we have already pointed out, Marx had demonstrated both the absolute necessity for capitalism to realise a part of its surplus value in exchange with the non-capitalist world, and the fact that this necessity is a result of the mode of appropriation of surplus value which is specific to capitalism: wage labour. It is this that forces the capitalist to reduce the workers' wages to the minimum possible, such that the latter are unable to buy commodities which are not strictly necessary for the reproduction of their labour power, and therefore to constitute a factor in enlarging the solvent market within capitalism. Whence the necessity for capitalism constantly to search for outlets outside the sphere of its own relations of production:

"Secondly he overlooks the fact that the output level is by no means arbitrarily chosen, but the more capitalist production develops, the more it is forced to produce on a scale which has nothing to do with the immediate demand but depends on a constant expansion of the world market. He has recourse to Say's trite assumption, that the capitalist produces not for the sake of profit, surplus-value, but produces use-value directly for consumption - for his own consumption. He overlooks the fact that the commodity has to be converted into money. The demand of the workers does not suffice, since profit arises precisely from the fact that the demand of the workers is smaller than the value of their produce, and that it [profit] is all the greater the smaller, relatively, is this demand. The demand of the capitalists among themselves is equally insufficient." (Theories of Surplus Value part 2, 'Ricardo's theory of profit - (e) Ricardo's explanation for the fall in the rate of profit and its connection with his theory of rent', p468).

The necessity for global capitalism to exchange with the extra-capitalist world affects each capitalist power with more or less force, and pushes each to try to acquire its own colonial empire in order to avoid dependence on other great powers for access to such a market. As a result, even before World War I, the world and colonial markets had all come under the domination of the great economic powers. From then on a country could only acquire new colonies at the expense of its rivals.

Thus although the world war was not a direct consequence of an economic crisis caused by capitalism's insurmountable economic contradictions, it was nonetheless their product in the last instance. The same is true of World War II and of the wars which have followed.

As capitalism plunged further into its own contradictions, a qualitative modification took place in the nature of these wars themselves as they became increasingly irrational from the economic point of view.

This economic irrationality existed already in World War I, in as much as, far from allowing capitalism to develop, it brought capitalism's development to a brutal halt. The economies of most of the combatant countries, in whichever camp they fought, were also hard hit by the war. Only the United States came out an overall winner.

After World War I, the economic objectives of war - in other words seizing the markets of one's rivals - tended to give way to purely strategic considerations aimed at maintaining or improving the balance of power in one's own favour. The example of today's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is a striking illustration, since the control of oil is also here fundamentally a strategic motive not an economic one.

At the global level therefore, it is the absence of any way out economically which pushes each state into the flight towards militarism and war.

B) the crisis of 1929 and the 1930s and the explosion of structural mass unemployment

The history of capitalism is the history of its conquest of the planet. This development is inextricably tied to the development of trade with extra-capitalist economy, and to the latter's integration into capitalist relations of production:

"The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce whiat it calls civilization into their midst, ie, to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image." ('Bourgeois and Proletarians', The manifesto of the Communist Party, in Marx: the Revolutions of 1848, Pelican Marx Library, p71).

The result of this movement is the diminution of the extent of extra-capitalist markets, without any diminution in capitalism's need for their existence to absorb part of its production in order to be able to continue accumulating in "normal" conditions.

The crisis of 1929 was the first direct expression, at a strictly economic level, of the insurmountable contradictions of decadent capitalism. Just like the cyclical crises of the ascendant phase, it was a crisis of overproduction. But unlike the former, it could not be resolved by the opening of new markets which would provide a lasting basis for new growth. It was the expression of the global and growing tendency towards the saturation of extra-capitalist markets relative to capitalism's need to realise surplus value in order to fuel new cycles of accumulation.

The slight improvement in the economic situation during the 1930s was in fact a product of state capitalist measures aimed at controlling the economy, and transforming it to meet the needs of military production in the new world war to come. Far from offering a solution to capitalism's insurmountable contradictions, such measures could do no more than hold them off for a time.

World War I had already forced capitalism to adopt a number of state capitalist measures. Once the conflict ended however the bourgeoisie still laboured under the illusion that it could return to its pre-war golden age. In the years that followed, this tendency towards the state's domination of the whole of social and economic life (state capitalism) has become irreversible.

The crisis of 1929 opened a period of permanent economic crisis, broken only by the atypical years of prosperity that followed World War II. It was marked in particular by the development of structural mass unemployment, which was only temporarily absorbed by the policies of public works and arms production during the 1930s, by the war during 1939-45, and then by the relatively short-lived period of reconstruction that followed World War II.

Both quantitatively and qualitatively, unemployment since 1929 has differed from that of the 20th century, when the unemployed formed an industrial reserve army necessary for capital. It is the expression of the permanent crisis of overproduction affecting the world economy. In a context where the world economy has not enough room to develop, each national capital and each individual capitalist is forced to reduce its workforce as much as possible in order to remain competitive. This expression of permanent overproduction reveals the full extent of capitalism's contradictions, on two levels:

• In order to maintain social stability, the bourgeoisie is forced to introduce unemployment benefits, especially in those countries where the proletariat is most concentrated and most experienced; this is completely unproductive expenditure which weighs heavily on the economy.
• By expelling from the productive process the only value-creating productive force, the proletariat, the bourgeoisie constantly weakens the foundations of a system based on the exploitation of the working class.

The post-1945 period of reconstruction: a new lease of life for capitalism, or the reaction of a diseased social body?

The growth rates during the two decades that followed World War II were higher than the best rates achieved during capitalism's ascendancy, and were used as an argument by its supporters to claim that capitalism had definitively overcome its crises. They also engendered considerable scepticism in the revolutionary camp as to the reality of capitalism's decadence.

This was all the more true in that these growth rates were made possible by an equally substantial increase in labour productivity, accompanied to some extent by an improvement in working class living conditions,[3] and although the first signs of capitalism's return to open crisis appeared at the end of the 1960s, the 1970s also experienced relatively high growth rates.

But when we look back on the 20th century as a whole, with the hindsight that our position at the beginning of the 21st century allows us, it is much easier to see that the Reconstruction years are in fact an exception in a period characterised by capitalism"s irreversible slide into crisis.

We should also point out that:

• Unlike previous society's, and contrary to what Trotsky had believed in the 1930s, capitalism's entry into decadence is marked, not by a halt in the development of the productive forces, but by the presence of a constant fetter on their development. This is essentially because critical technical development is vital to capitalism's existence, as it was not for previous societies, even when the full use of this development is constrained by the inadequacy of the market.
• A general epoch of decadence is not incompatible with short periods of rising prosperity, as the ruling class tries to hold back the decline in its mode of production through the intervention of the state.

We can give a general explanation here of the economic boom of the Reconstruction period.

Firstly, we need to bear in mind the reality underlying the gross statistics for growth, which include a substantial share of unproductive capital, notably in arms production.

Consequently, although as we have said the bourgeoisie was able to profit from an important increase in labour productivity thanks in large part to state intervention in the national economy, these gains in productivity were in part "lost" to capitalist accumulation due to their sterilisation as unproductive capital.

Secondly, we should highlight the following factors underlying this period of relative prosperity:

• The impetus given by the reconstruction of Western Europe and Japan, thanks to the essentially imperialist programme of the Marshall Plan.
• The development of state capitalism within each country, and the adoption of state capitalist measures at the level of the imperialist blocs (IMF, EEC, World Bank, COMECON etc.), made it possible to modulate growing economic contradictions and thus temporarily avoid the sanction of the market.
• The beginning of a substantial rise in debt.
• A more efficient exploitation of the remaining extra-capitalist markets. Technical development, the falling costs of communications and transport all facilitated a more intensive penetration of the surviving extra-capitalist markets. In addition, the policy of decolonisation relieved the great powers of a costly burden (the expense of colonial administration and the military presence needed to support it), which made it possible to increase sales to the ex-colonies.

Once the specific factors underlying the economic boom of the Reconstruction period were exhausted, a general rise in debt became an increasingly important palliative to the inadequacy of solvent markets. Far from being a miracle cure for capitalism's contradictions, this could only lead to a long series of bankruptcies among the most indebted states, beginning with a number of African states during the 1970s and spreading to many of the "Tigers" and "Dragons" in 1998. The list of bankrupt states is obviously neither exhaustive nor closed.

The most barbaric century that humanity has ever known

Even the most enthusiastic apologists for the capitalist mode of production are forced to recognise that the 20th century has been one of the darkest that humanity has ever suffered.

Human history is not lacking in cruelty of every kind: tortures, massacres, mass deportation or extermination of whole populations on the basis of religion, language, culture, or race. The obliteration of Carthage by the Roman legions, the invasions of Attila in the mid-5th century, Charlemagne's execution of 4,500 Saxon hostages on a single day in 782, the torture chambers and burnings of the Inquisition, the extermination of the Indians of America, the selling into slavery of millions of Africans between the 16th and 19th centuries: these are just a few examples that any schoolboy can find in his history books. Similarly, human history has already seen other examples of long and tragic periods of decadence and disaster: the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, the Hundred Years War between France and England during the Middle Ages, the Thirty Years War which devastated Germany during the 17th century. Yet even if we were to take account of all the catastrophes of this kind which have befallen humanity, we would be hard put to find an equal to the suffering that capitalism has visited on the 20th century:

• World War I: five million refugees, ten million dead, twice that number injured or mutilated, and an aftermath of disease (the influenza epidemic of 1918) which struck a population weakened by the deprivations of war and killed even more than had the war itself.
• The terrible civil war unleashed by the bourgeoisie against the Russian revolution between 1918 and 1921: six million dead.
• More than twenty million dead in the wars that preceded World War II (Sino-Japanese war, Spanish Civil War) and in Stalin's gulag.
• World War II: 40 million refugees, more than fifty million dead, as many or more injured and mutilated.
• The "era of peace" which began in 1945 - and which has never, in reality, known a day of peace - counts between 150 and 200 localised wars (including major conflicts such as the Korean and Vietnam wars), with as many deaths or more than those caused by World War II.

Apart from the sheer numbers, there are two particular aspects of the situation today which we should highlight:

1. The fact that, for the first time in history, the disasters visited on humanity by a historically decadent society cover the entire planet, sparing no corner of it, nor any fraction of our species.
2. The fact that there has never been such an immense gap between the society that exists, and the possibilities opened up by the development of its historically created wealth.

It is capitalist society that has laid the foundations of this potential wealth through the mastery of science and its extraordinary increase in labour productivity. Thanks to its ferocious exploitation of the working class, capitalism has created the material conditions which allow it to be superseded by a society which will be driven, not by the need for profit and the satisfaction of the needs of a minority, but by the satisfaction of the ever-expanding needs of the whole of humanity. These material conditions have existed since the beginning of the 20th century. Capitalism has completed its historic task of allowing an unprecedented expansion of the productive forces, including the most important of these: the working class. The time has long since come for capitalism to quit the stage of history, like the slave-holding and feudal societies that preceded it. But it cannot disappear by itself: as the Communist Manifesto said in 1848, it is up to the proletariat to execute the sentence of death that history has already pronounced on capitalist society.

The implications of capitalism's decadence

Why is it so important to understand the reality of the decadence of capitalist society? Because the transition from capitalism's ascendant period to its decadence has fundamentally changed the material conditions within which the proletariat struggles. The underlying principles of the proletarian struggle - internationalism, the communist future towards which the struggle tends historically - remain the same; however the concrete manner in which these principles are put into practice by the struggle itself has changed profoundly. The workers' organisation for struggle (the union question, the question of parliamentary activity), their relationship with other classes in society (the national question, the question of so-called "partial struggles") are determined today by the new period in capitalism's history that was opened up by the first world imperialist war of 1914, and by the proletariat's first world assault on power that began in Russia in 1917.[4]

The opening of the decadent phase in capitalism's history has dramatically raised the stakes of the workers' struggles. In the 19th century, workers fought to protect their living conditions and to reduce their exploitation by the capitalist class: today, the workers' struggles in their own defence are the only real barrier against a slide into generalised warfare and barbarism. In the 19th century, workers organised their self-defence within an expanding economic system that could allow them a certain "place" in society: today, every workers' struggle tends immediately to pose the question of power, of the balance of forces not just between the workers and the bosses of this or that enterprise, but between the whole working and capitalist classes.

International Communist Current, October 2006

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[1] Properly speaking from the 16th century up to the bourgeois revolutions in the context of feudal decadence, and from the bourgeois revolutions to 1914 in the context of the ascendant phase of capitalism.

[2] Our translation from the French. As far as we know, this book has never been translated into English.

[3] At least in the industrialised countries of the American bloc. It should nonetheless be remembered that this was a period of severe penury in the Eastern bloc countries (workers' revolts in East Germany 1953, in Hungary 1956, and in Poland), not to mention the millions of deaths from famine during China's so-called "Great Leap Forward" (1958-62).

[4] See in particular our article on the understanding of decadence by the Communist International in International Review n°123 (https://en.internationalism.org/ir/123_decadence [14])

The question that we want to address in this presentation is this: how are we to analyse the class struggle? How are we to determine at any given time - and notably today - the general condition of the working class, and the possibilities that are determined by the balance of class forces, in other words by the balance of power between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

Understanding the balance of class forces is not simply a matter of counting strike days lost, or of measuring the degree of workers' militancy. If we take the 1930s in France as an example - where massive strikes, demonstrations, and even factory occupations involving several million workers for several weeks broke out after the electoral victory of the Popular Front in 1936 - we can see that even a massive degree of workers' militancy is no guarantee of the proletariat's ability to struggle for its own class goals: the  demonstrations held on the 14th July (the celebration of French nationalism) after the strikes,  saw workers marching for the first time behind both the Red Flag of the workers' movement and the Tricolor of the bourgeois state. Indeed, the workers were under the illusion that it was thanks to the election to power of their "defenders" that the bosses had been forced to make concessions. Three years after the Popular Front came to power, and three years after this massive mobilisation of the working class, the working class was marched off to six years of imperialist slaughter in defence of the bourgeoisie's national interest.

It is necessary therefore to remain true to the method of historical materialism, and to take as our starting point a general, overall understanding of the historical period in which we find ourselves, and of the different elements that determine the balance of forces between proletariat and bourgeoisie.

This was the method of Marx and Engels, as we can see for example in these words written by Engels for the Preface to the 1888 English edition of the Communist Manifesto: "The Manifesto was published as the platform of the Communist League, a working men's association, first exclusively German, later on international, and under the political conditions of the Continent before 1848, unavoidably a secret society. (...) The defeat of the Parisian insurrection of June 1848 - the first great battle between proletariat and bourgeoisie - drove again into the background, for a time, the social and political aspirations of the European working class. (...) Wherever independent proletarian movements continued to show signs of life, they were ruthlessly hunted down. (...) When the European workers had recovered sufficient strength for another attack on the ruling classes, the International Working Men's Association sprang up. But this association, formed with the express aim of welding into one body the whole militant proletariat of Europe and America, could not at once proclaim the principles laid down in the Manifesto...". 

The lesson that we draw from all the work of Marx and Engels, and from the concrete experience of the working class, is this: revolutionary action is not possible at any moment, it is not the product of the "will" of revolutionaries. When the working class suffers a heavy defeat, as it did in 1848, then the balance of class forces shifts decisively, for a period, in favour of the bourgeoisie. Time is necessary for the working class to recover from defeat.

The one point in the workers' favour is that capitalist society without the proletariat is impossible: the bourgeoisie produces its own gravediggers, as Marx put it. Capitalism cannot live without exploiting the proletariat, and consequently the proletariat will always be forced to struggle. When the proletariat has been defeated, there has always been new strength, new generations, to arise from the defeats of the past and to take up the struggle again.

1914 opens up a new period

With the outbreak of war in 1914 a new period opened up in the life of capitalist society: the period of capitalism's decadence. Suddenly, the proletarian struggle was being fought out for higher stakes than ever before in history. The choice was no longer between greater or lesser exploitation, greater or lesser periods of reaction: now it was between war and revolution, between the life and death not just for the proletariat but for the whole of humanity. The Communist International, founded in 1919 to lead the world wide revolution, described this new period as "the epoch of wars and revolutions" and understood its implications all too clearly: if the working class were to be taken in by the sermons of the opportunists, "capitalist development would celebrate its restoration in new, more concentrated and more monstrous forms on the bones of many generations, with the prospect of a new and inevitable world war."[1]

What are the principal features of this new epoch - in which we are still living - that concern us today?

1. The tendency towards world wide inter-imperialist war has become a permanent feature of capitalist society.
2. It would no longer be possible to launch a revolution in the middle of an imperialist war. After the incomplete defeat of the working class in 1914, which meant that it was able to launch a revolutionary assault in Russia in 1917 and in Germany in 1919, the ruling class has become aware of the danger of revolution. The defeat of the revolutions in Russia and Germany were followed by the most barbaric counter-revolutions that the proletariat had ever suffered, but the bourgeoisie has never forgotten the fear it felt at the threat posed by the working class. The end of World War II was marked by a systematic obliteration of any possibility of workers' revolt especially in the defeated countries: the Allies left the German army to suppress ruthlessly the revolts of Italian workers in 1943, Stalin's Red Army stopped before Warsaw to allow the Nazis time to exterminate the Warsaw rising, and the British and Americans undertook a massive bombardment of Germany's industrial cities, deliberately aimed at the working class districts rather than the factories. As Germany collapsed, the Allies occupied the entire country, ignoring all the secret proposals for surrender made by the German army and secret services, to avoid facing a situation like that in 1918, when the war ended in workers' and soldiers' uprisings.
3. More than ever, the overall balance of class forces is determined internationally, not country by country. We are living in an epoch of world war and world revolution. This means that an apparently revolutionary situation in one country (for example, in France or Spain in 1936) cannot reverse a course towards war which is determined by an international defeat of the working class. And conversely, a defeat for the working class in one country does not necessarily mean a general defeat of the course towards revolution.
4. Contrary to what revolutionaries had thought on the basis of the experience of the 1870 Paris Commune (and which seemed to be confirmed by the experience of the Russian revolutions in 1905 and 1917), a historic course towards war and a historic course towards revolution cannot be simultaneous. On the contrary, they are antithetical. For the bourgeoisie to be able to undertake all-out generalised imperialist war, the working class must be prepared to die on the battlefield and to accept the greatest material privation on the home front: in other words, it must be utterly defeated.

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As we have said, the defeat of the revolutionary wave begun in 1917 was followed by the most terrible counter-revolution in history. Not only was the class physically smashed, the ideological disaster was even worse. What had once been the highest expressions of working class consciousness (the Social-Democracy prior to 1914, the Communist International after 1919) were destroyed, or worse still were defending rampant counter-revolution in the name of the proletariat itself. It is important to distinguish the defeat which made possible the First World War - which the working class overcame three years later - and the physical and political defeat that followed the revolutionary wave. This defeat was made still worse by many workers' belief in the existence of a "socialist fatherland" in the USSR whose consequences were twofold: under the influence of the Stalinist parties, they were made subject to the imperialist interests of Russia, while at the same time they were divided from those workers who, rejecting the barbarity of the Stalinist USSR, saw no other solution than to turn back to the Social Democratic parties. Things were made still worse by the fact that the Allies victory over fascism was presented not as a victory of imperialist powers, but as a victory of the working class.[2] The internationalists were reduced to a tiny handful of militants in little groups completely bereft of any influence on the action of their class.

So profound was the defeat that during the economic boom of the post-war Reconstruction period, it became quite the fashion for self-proclaimed revolutionary ideologues like Marcuse to pronounce the disappearance of the working class' revolutionary nature; its place was henceforth supposedly to be taken by other social strata - the students, black people in the USA, the peasants in the Third World, etc. 

The Reconstruction period also gave birth to another illusion within the bourgeoisie: that it had definitively overcome its economic problems, that the terrible crisis of 1929 was no more than a memory. But by the end of the 1960s the illusion was wearing thin as the first signs of a return of the economic crisis returned to haunt the capitalist world. And with the return of the crisis, came the renewed danger of war. Like Germany in 1939, the USSR at the end of the 1960s found itself encircled militarily by its main imperialist rival, encumbered with a war machine whose enormous expense could only be compensated by the fruits of victorious war. Around the world, the armies and proxies of the two greatest imperialist powers fought in innumerable conflicts of "national liberation" (Vietnam, Africa, Latin America); in Germany, they confronted each other on either side of the "Iron Curtain" with the most gigantic accumulation of military power the world had ever seen, backed up with the apocalyptic threat of nuclear war.

Yet imperialist war did not break out. Why? 

The answer lies in the events of May 1968 in France - or rather in the reawakening of the working class and the end of the counter-revolution of which these events were an expression.

The ideologues of the bourgeoisie would like us to think of May 1968 as a "students' revolt", so it is worth taking a moment to remember the reality of these events: in fact, France in 1968 witnessed the biggest strike in history, with more than nine million workers on strike and the entire country at a complete standstill: so frightened was the French President (de Gaulle) that he disappeared to Germany to meet the officer commanding French occupation forces there, and to assure himself of the support of the army in case it became necessary to crush the revolt with troops. And France was only the beginning: 1969 in Italy, workers' revolts in 1970 in Poland, then again in 1976, a miners' strike in Britain in 1973 which forced the government to impose a three-day working week for want of coal in the power stations, the famous "Cordobaza" in Argentina in May 1969 which saw the workers virtually taking control of the industrial region of Cordoba. These are only a few examples of a wave of class struggle that swept the world's industrial areas, in both developed and Third World countries, and on both sides of the Iron Curtain dividing the two imperialist blocs. 

At the same time, this awakening of the class struggle was accompanied by a burgeoning political awareness which found expression in the development of existing groups and the emergence of new ones: one of the most important aspects of this new proletarian political movement was the effort to overcome the separation between the generations: as revolutionaries sought to renew their links with the class struggle of the past they worked to rediscover the positions of the Communist Left: the works of Pannekoek, Gorter, the KAPD, Rosa Luxemburg, and Bordiga were published once again. They also worked to renew the international ties that had been broken by the counter-revolution: one example was the international network of correspondence and discussion that led to the formation of the ICC in 1975.

Clearly, these groups were in a tiny minority and had no significant, direct impact on the class struggle itself. But they were symptomatic of a process going on within the working class, and especially within the new generation of workers who had not experienced either the counter-revolution or the world war. This new generation was confronted with the end of the post-war boom and the beginning of the economic crisis, and reacted against it in a wave of struggles that held great promise for the future. 

A decade later, in 1979, this upsurge of class struggle was put to the test by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. With all that has happened since, it is easy to forget, or to neglect, how critically important this event was: for the first time since 1945, the Soviet Union invaded a country outside its own bloc, outside its own immediate glacis: the USSR was increasingly crippled by the economic crisis, and by the enormous weight of the arms production needed to maintain its status as the world's second imperialist power, against its stronger US rival. As with Germany in 1914 and 1939, the weaker of the imperialist powers threatened once again to plunge the world into generalised war, this time with the threat of nuclear weapons looming in the background. The world was faced with a critical question: what would be the reaction of the working class? Would the course towards revolution opened up by the struggles of the 1970s be overturned? Would the bourgeoisie be able to impose its own solution to the economic crisis of decadent capitalism: world war?

The answer was given by the magnificent struggle of the Polish workers in 1980, who showed without a shadow of a doubt that the working class in Europe - which was where the crucial confrontation between the two blocs was bound to take place - was not prepared to lay aside its own interests in the interests of the nation state, whether it be the "socialist" states of the Soviet bloc, or the "democratic" states of the US bloc. The Polish workers who developed their own organisations on the same basis as the workers' councils (mass meetings, elected and revocable delegates responsible to the mass meetings that elected them, negotiations with the government conducted in the open where all could hear...) were certainly not prepared to be drafted into the armies of the Warsaw Pact and marched off to war. 

We should mention here that the history of the 1970s and early 1980s also led the ICC to modify its view of the historic alternative: "course towards war or course towards revolution". Whereas a course towards war necessarily means that the proletariat has been physically and ideologically defeated, and is no longer able to prevent the outbreak of war, the reverse is not true of the course towards revolution since the bourgeoisie remains the dominant class in capitalist society right up to the moment of the world wide seizure of power - not even the victory of the Russian revolution was able to guarantee the victory of revolution world wide, despite the optimistic predictions of the Communist International which we have quoted above. Consequently, the ICC 5th Congress in 1983 adopted a term better adapted to historical reality: "The existence of a course towards class confrontations means that the bourgeoisie does not have a free hand to unleash a new world butchery: first, it must confront and beat the working class. But this does not prejudge the outcome of this confrontation, in one way or the other. This is why it is preferable to talk about a 'course towards class confrontations' rather than a 'course towards revolution'"(Resolution on the international situation, published in International Review n°35).

The Polish struggles of 1980 had averted the threat of imperialist war - but history does not stand still and the question remained open whether the working class would continue to maintain its resistance to the development of the crisis and bar the way to war. In the event, the continued uneven development of the class struggle during the 1980s showed that the working class remained undefeated, and that the road to world war remained closed. Some of the struggles in these years reached heights not seen since the beginning of the 20th century, or in certain cases ever. A few examples:

• a strike wave that hit Holland in the 1980s was the biggest seen in that country since the mass strike of 1903;
• the British miners went on strike in 1985 and held out for an entire year, while the Thatcher government set up what almost amounted to a military occupation of the mining districts
• Denmark saw in 1985 the biggest strike in its entire history
• in spring 1986, the entire state sector in Belgium came out on strike;
• France saw at the end of 1986 a massive rail strike that last for several weeks, and at the end of 1988 a massive strike of hospital workers: in both cases the unions had great difficulty keeping up with events;
• in 1987, the entire education sector in Italy undertook a massive series of struggles against the government: here too, the workers called into question the "classical" union organisations.

This wave of struggle was by no means limited to Europe, as we can see in the example of the Korean workers' movement and the struggles in towns like Kwangju during the 1980s. However, it was above all the struggles in Europe that determined whether the bourgeoisie of each bloc would be able to launch an imperialist war, for several reasons:

• because Europe is where the working class is the most concentrated, and has the longest historical experience, both politically and organisationally, the working class globally could not be defeated without a crushing defeat of its main battalions;
• because Europe is also where the bourgeoisie is the most concentrated, and the most experienced in dealing with the working class;
• because Europe, at the time the most concentrated industrialised area of the planet was the main prize for the bourgeoisie of the USSR, a prize which would have enabled the Russian bourgeoisie both to eject its American rival from the European subcontinent, and to grab the advanced industrial capacity which the USSR lacked, thus increasing its own military potential.

What were the main characteristics of this period?

• A constantly reaffirmed militancy of the workers in defence of their own living standards, in particular in struggles against redundancies.
• A profound distrust of government.
• A growing distrust of the trades unions as "organisers" of the struggle, which led to the development of rank-and-file union structures (controlled by political organisations of the far left), especially in France and Italy, whose aim was to pre-empt the workers' own mass meetings and to keep the organisation of the struggle firmly within the hands of the trades unions.

The period of the 1980s was thus characterised by both a fundamental strength, and a fundamental weakness of the working class:

• On the one hand, the strength of the class struggle, and above all the fact that - unlike the 1930s - the workers continued to fight in defence of their own living conditions and refused to allow themselves to be enrolled under the banners of the "defence of the socialist fatherland" or the "defence of democracy", meant that it was impossible for the ruling class to unleash its own "solution" to its crisis: imperialist war.
• On the other hand, the proletariat as a whole was unable to develop its struggles beyond an immediate defence of its existence within capitalism. To a large extent, the workers still lived with the illusion that it was possible to return to the conditions of the 1960s and the Reconstruction period, that it was enough to strike for improved wages or against redundancies to push back the attacks of the capitalist class: they completely underestimated the fact that the attacks of the bourgeoisie were not due to the "bad policies" of this or that head of state (the "reactionaries" Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan for example), but to the inexorable descent of world capitalism into its insoluble crisis. The continued weakness of the communist left around the world was itself an expression of the proletariat's inability to rediscover its own historically determined goal: the overthrow of capitalism and the creation of a new, communist society.

In effect, the social situation at the end of the 1980s was marked by a stalemate: the bourgeoisie unable to go to war, the proletariat unable to launch a revolutionary offensive.

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As a result of this stalemate, the Cold War came to an end, not with a general imperialist bloodbath like that of 1914 or 1939, but with a historically unprecedented event: collapse of one of the two imperialist blocs, followed by the disintegration of the other for lack of an imperialist rival.

The period that followed was to be one of profound disorientation for the working class:

• The collapse of Stalinism, and the revelation to the eyes of workers all over the world of the weakness, corruption, and backwardness of the Stalinist regimes allowed the victorious democratic bourgeoisie around the world to mount an enormous campaign which said in effect: "Look! This is what you get when you try to create communism", or alternatively "Communism is a nice idea, but it could never work in practice - just look at the USSR".
• The counterpart to the "defeat of communism" was of course the "victory of capitalism". Capitalism, we were told, might not be perfect but it was the only society possible: there is no point struggling against its effects. Indeed, one bourgeois ideologue even went so far as to declare the "end of history". There seemed to be no possible perspective outside the continued development of the capitalist economy no matter how much misery it created for humanity as a whole and for the working class in particular.
• This ideological blow to the proletariat's sense of itself as a class able to play a part in history, was combined with the apparent boom of the so-called "new economy" fuelled by the Internet. This tended to reinforce the idea that nothing was possible outside capitalism.

These elements explain why, despite continued expressions of working class militancy in a number of countries, the 1990s marked a serious reflux both in the broad class struggle, and in the fortunes of the organisations of the Communist Left. Those who still held high the flag of proletarian revolution and internationalism were regarded as, at worst, the henchmen of Stalinism, and at best, as dreamers lost in an unrecoverable past. And yet, despite this, the working class as a whole - above all in the most developed countries where the proletariat's political and organisational experience is greatest - had not been defeated in a head-on confrontation with capital, nor did the bourgeoisie succeed in gaining the workers' willing or enthusiastic adherence to the ideology of bourgeois nationalism. The proletariat, in short, remained undefeated. The course towards generalised imperialist war remained closed.

A turning point in the class struggle

The large-scale mobilisations of the spring of 2003 in France and Austria represented a turning point in the class struggles since 1989. They were a first significant step in the recovery of workers' militancy after the longest period of reflux since 1968. Of course the 1990s had already seen sporadic expressions of this militancy. However, the simultaneity of the movements in France and Austria showed the evolution of the situation since the beginning of the new millennium. In reality, these events brought to light the growing impossibility for the class - despite its continuing lack of self confidence - to avoid the necessity of struggle faced with the dramatic worsening of the crisis and the increasingly massive and generalised character of the attacks.

This change affects not only the militancy of the class, but also the mood within its ranks, the perspective within which its actions are placed. We are witnessing signs of a loss of illusions not only concerning the typical mystifications of the 1990s (new technological revolution, individual enrichment via the stock exchange, the profitability of "wars for oil"), but also regarding the hopes of the post World War II generation about a better life for the coming generation and a decent pension for those who survive the horrors of wage labour.

Not every turning point in the class struggle is as significant, or as dramatic, as those of 1917 or 1968. These dates stand for alterations in the historic course, whereas 2003 merely marks the beginning of the end of an ebb within the continuity of a course towards massive class confrontations. More generally, we must be able to distinguish between situations where, so to speak, the world wakes up the next morning and it is no longer the same world, and changes that take place at first almost unnoticed by the world at large, like the almost invisible alteration between the ebb and flow of the tide. The evolution begun in 2003, and continuing today three years later, is undoubtedly of the latter kind.

A particularly significant aspect of the 2003 struggles in France and Austria is that they broke out in reaction to attacks by the state on workers' pensions. The aggravation of the crisis has forced the bourgeoisie to raise the retirement age. In doing so, it has sacrificed a social shock-absorber, which played a large part in making the working class accept the increasingly intolerable levels of exploitation imposed in recent decades, and in hiding the full extent of unemployment.

The bourgeoisie responded to the return of mass unemployment in the 1970s with a series of state capitalist welfare measures, which made absolutely no sense from an economic standpoint and which are today one of the main factors underlying the enormous rise in state debt. The current dismantling of the Welfare State can only provoke a profound questioning of the real perspective that capitalism offers society.

Not all capitalist attacks provoke the same defensive reactions from the working class. It is easier to struggle against wage cuts or the lengthening of the working day, than against the reduction in the relative wage as a result of the growth in labour productivity (thanks to technical improvements), which is part of the process of capital accumulation. As Rosa Luxemburg put it: "A wage cut, leading to the reduction of the real living standard of the workers, is a visible assault of the capitalists against the workers and as a rule (...) it will be replied to as such with immediate struggle, and in the best of cases be beaten back. As opposed to this, the lowering of the relative wage apparently takes place without the least personal involvement of the capitalists, and against this the workers, within the wage system, i.e. on the terrain of commodity production, have not the slightest possibility of struggle and resistance" (Introduction to national economy).

The rise in unemployment poses the same difficulties for the working class as the intensification of exploitation (the attack on the relative wage). When unemployment affects young people who have never worked, it does not have the same explosive effect as do redundancies. The existence of mass unemployment tends, indeed, to inhibit the immediate struggles of the working class not only because it is a constant threat for a growing number of those still in work, but also because it tends to pose questions which cannot be answered without raising the issue of radically changing society. Concerning the struggle against the relative decline in wages, Luxemburg added: "The struggle against the lowering of the relative wage therefore also signifies the struggle against the commodity character of the labour force, in other words against the capitalist production as a whole. The struggle against the fall of the relative wage is thus no longer a struggle on the terrain of commodity production, but a revolutionary, insurrectionary movement against the existence of this economy, it is the socialist movement of the proletariat" (idem).

The 1930s revealed how, with mass unemployment, absolute pauperisation explodes. Without the prior defeat of the proletariat, the "general, absolute law of capitalist accumulation" risked becoming its opposite, the law of the revolution. With the re-emergence of mass unemployment from the 1970s on, the bourgeoisie responded with measures of state capitalist welfarism; measures which economically make no sense, and which today are one of the main causes of the unfathomable public debt. The working class has an historical memory. Despite the loss of class identity, with the deepening crisis, this memory slowly begins to be activated. Mass unemployment and the slashing of the social wage today conjure up memories of the 1930s, visions of generalised insecurity and pauperisation. The demolition of the "Welfare State" will confirm the marxists' predictions.

When Luxemburg writes that the workers, on the terrain of commodity production, have not the slightest possibility of resistance against the lowering of the relative wage, this is neither resigned fatalism, nor "the revolution or nothing" pseudo radicalism of the later Essen tendency of the KAPD[3], but the recognition that this struggle cannot remain within the boundaries of the "minimum programme" (immediate economic demands) and must be entered into with the greatest possible political clarity. In the 1980s the questions of unemployment and the increase in exploitation were already posed, but often in a narrow and local manner: "saving British miners' jobs", for example. Today the qualitative advance of the crisis can permit questions like unemployment, poverty, exploitation, to be posed more globally and politically, as are the questions of pensions, health, the maintenance of the unemployed, working conditions, the length of a working life and the ties between the generations. This, in a very embryonic form, is the potential revealed by the recent movements in response to the pension attacks. This long term lesson is by far the most important one, of greater significance than questions such as the pace with which the immediate militancy of the class is likely to recover. In fact, as Luxemburg explains, being directly confronted with the devastating effects of the objective mechanisms of capitalism (mass unemployment, the intensification of relative exploitation) makes it more difficult to enter the struggle. For this reason, even if the development of struggles becomes slower and more torturous, the struggles themselves become politically more significant.

Solidarity at the centre of the class struggle

A striking feature of many recent struggles, which the ICC has highlighted in its press, is the centrality of workers' solidarity to both the aims and the methods of the struggle:

• solidarity between workers in different plants against attempts at management blackmail, as we saw in the strikes by Daimler-Chrysler workers at Sindelfingen and Bremen in 2004 - and in the support they received from their comrades in Spain;
• solidarity with laid-off workers, for example in the Gate Gourmet strike at Heathrow (August 2005) and the SEAT strikes in Spain (December 2005);
• solidarity between the generations, expressed in the strike on the New York transit system ( December 2005) to defend the pay of future workers, and powerfully in the struggles to defend pensions or against the CPE labour contract in France (spring 2006);

In the aims and the slogans of these struggles, there is the clear sign of a slowly maturing political awareness within the working class: an awareness that the continued survival of capitalism threatens the very future of humanity, and that the solidarity that lies at the heart of the proletariat's very nature is both a critical factor in the struggle itself, and the key to a new society: communism. For communist society is based on the rediscovery, at a higher, world wide level, of the fundamental basis for all human society: the solidarity which will be the foundation for the construction of a world human community.

The inexorable development of the capitalist crisis and capitalism's descent into an inferno of imperialist war and ecological disaster, and the assertion in struggle of workers' solidarity as one of the fundamental weapons of the working class, form the objective and subjective conditions which determine the possibilities open to revolutionaries; which determine also, the enormous responsibilities that they confront in participating to the utmost of their abilities to the development of the course towards the decisive class confrontations that must open the road towards the proletarian revolution itself.

ICC, October 2006

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[1]   Manifesto of the CI's First Congress, quoted in International Review n°107.

[2]   Since the defeat of the revolutionary wave, it has become a common tactic of the ruling class to present to the workers their own worst defeats as if they were victories.

[3]   Kommunistische Arbeiter-Partei Deutschlands: founded in April 1920 in Heidelberg after its militants were expelled from the Communist Party (KPD). Originally the party remained a "sympathising member of Communist International." In 1922 the KAPD split into two factions, both of whom kept the name but are referred to as the KAPD Essen Faction and the KAPD Berlin Faction. Among the militants active in the KAPD was Jan Appel, who was present at the founding congress of the ICC.

What do we mean by revolutionary strategy? Fundamentally the question we want to raise today is to understand how the internationalist groups and organisations that exist around the world today can fulfil their role and function within the working class struggle for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. However if we are to determine their revolutionary strategy we need first to be able to understand two things:

• First of all what exactly are these revolutionary organisations? In other words what is the goal that our strategy is aiming for?
• Secondly where are we now? In other words what are the material conditions within which we work and which will determine the means available to us to reach our common goal?

What precisely is a revolutionary organisation? 

We think that we should start by remembering Marx's words in the Communist manifesto: "The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer. They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes. The abolition of existing property relations is not at all a distinctive feature of communism".

What Marx says here applies equally to the nature and to the function of the organisation: both are determined by the historical nature and experience of the working class, and by the material conditions of its struggle.

Throughout its history the proletariat has produced two types of organisation:

• its mass organisations whose purpose is to group together all the workers in common struggle and defence of their immediate economic needs;
• its political organisations whose purpose is to contribute to the development of class consciousness and especially to the proletariat's consciousness of itself, of its own revolutionary nature and goals.

This last point is critical for the proletariat. All past revolutionary classes - that is to say, classes which at a given moment in history were the bearers of a new mode of production capable of overcoming the contradictions within which the old mode of production had plunged society - possessed an economic power based on the ownership of property within the old society which they could use as a lever in the seizure of political power. But the proletariat has no such economic power: its only material strength lies in its organisation. 

Moreover, while all revolutionary classes must have some form of consciousness of their future project, this is critical for the proletariat:

• Because it is an exploited class whose aim is to put an end to all exploitation, it has no interest in hiding the purpose of its revolution, nor in concealing the nature of the new communist society that it proposes to create.
• Because it is an exploited class with no economic power or ownership in capitalist society, its consciousness of itself as a class and of its own goals is a vital component in its victory.

These two types of organisation - the organisation of mass struggle, and the political organisation -  have always existed in history, but as we have said their forms have changed as the historical conditions within which the proletariat struggles have also changed. We can see these two forms coming into existence right from the beginnings of the working class:  for example, if we look at the history of the world's first working class in Britain, we can see on one hand the clandestine mass organisations which emerged at the end of the 18th in conditions of terrible repression, essentially to organise strikes and in some cases violent actions aimed at defending wages and working conditions. Secondly, we can see the appearance of what at the time were called "corresponding societies" (the best-known of these was the London Corresponding Society) which were essentially propaganda groups whose aim was to bring together the most determined revolutionary members of the working class in a single national network.[1] 

Let us look first, briefly, at the evolution of the mass working class organisations.

During the 19th-century the emergence of the working class and its need to carve out within an expanding, ascendant capitalist society some kind of decent living conditions, led to the development of mass organisations which took a number of different forms. The most important of these was of course the trade unions, but at the same time we can also see developing alongside the trade unions such groupings as workers' co-operative societies, "friendly societies" designed for mutual help in times of unemployment or illness and even sporting clubs or cultural associations which also had the important goal of raising the mass of the workers' educational level. 

With the beginning of the 20th century however, the changing historical conditions of the class struggle led to a corresponding change in forms of class organisation.

This period, marked above all by the outbreak of world war in 1914 and by the revolution in Russia first in 1905, then in 1917, dramatically raised the stakes in the class struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie. The question now was no longer only the defence of working class living conditions, but the historic alternative: either repeated world wide conflicts between capitalist nations which could only lead to the destruction of the proletariat and of humanity itself; or the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism by the world working class and the creation of a communist society.

The trade unions, created for the struggle within capitalism, proved completely inadequate for the revolutionary struggle for power: in Russia in both 1905 and in 1917, the proletariat created the mass organisation of the new period of decadent capitalism: the workers' soviet, no longer simply an organisation for the defence of workers interests within capitalist society but an organisation for the seizure of power by the working class and the overthrow of the capitalist order. In other words the end of the period of capitalism's ascendancy is marked by a change in the organisational form of class struggle. The soviet form based on mass meetings and elected and revocable delegates tends to appear in all the workers' struggles of the decadent period of capitalism, most spectacularly in the struggles in Poland in 1980. 

Just as we have seen in the case of the workers' mass organisations, the form and function of the working class' political organisations has also changed as a result of changing material conditions. But before we begin to look at how these organisations have changed, it is worth recalling the overall view expressed in the Communist Manifesto:

"In what relation do the Communists stand to the proletarians as a whole?

The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to the other working-class parties.

They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole.

They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mould the proletarian movement.

The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only: 1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. 2. In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.

The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the lines of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement."

Very schematically - and we are well aware that such schemas cannot encompass all the richness of historical reality - we can distinguish the following kinds of working class political organisation which have emerged since the appearance of the working class on the historical stage. 

Let us look first of all at the period leading up to 1848 and the revolutions or attempted revolutions which swept across the European continent in that year. This period saw the emergence for the first time of the working class as an independent actor on the historical stage, conscious of itself as a separate class with its own interests but still are unaware of how long the road would be to the day when it could envisage the overthrow of capitalist society. Consequently the political groups which the working class gave rise to were still very small, tiny minorities in fact; yet at the same time they were able to see far beyond the immediate possibilities of the class struggle to the future that the working class contains potentially within itself, and of course by far the clearest and historically the most important expression of this tendency was the Communist League which was able to give theoretical form to the proletariat's ultimate goal of world revolution, and perhaps above all, to declare the great principle of proletarian internationalism in the famous words: "Workingmen of all countries, unite!".

The period that followed may be described as the beginning of the mass formation of the working class within capitalist society. It is a period where the working class is still detaching itself from the influence of the petty bourgeoisie and where it is experimenting all kinds of new organisational forms in a process of constant struggle both against repression by the ruling class and against the political influence of newly proletarianised strata looking back to their lost status as independent artisans. The highest expression of this period is the First International, founded by British and French workers to resist the import of scab labour during strikes. One of the most important legacies of the First International was the understanding that the seizure of power by the working class is not something that can be done "on behalf of the people" by a small group of dedicated revolutionaries. Against this view, which characterised the groups inspired by such figures as Auguste Blanqui and Bakunin, the First International declared in the first sentence of its 1864 statutes: "the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves". 

The First International disappeared following the defeat of the Paris Commune in 1871 and the wave of reaction that followed. The renewal of the class struggle in Europe during the 1880s led to the formation of the Second International. This is not the place to undertake the history of the Second International, but in the context of this presentation we can point to one of its most important achievements: with the Second International, marxism becomes a widespread theoretical and practical political current. The heirs to the enormous theoretical achievement of Marx and Engels during the 19th century are the marxist left wing of the Second International: Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in Germany; Anton Pannekoek and Herman Gorter in Holland; Amadeo Bordiga in Italy; John Maclean in Britain; Lenin, Bukharin, Trotsky in Russia - these are names that have come down to us in history but they are only the best-known figures of a current of the revolutionary marxist left which was to rise to the challenge of the Russian revolution and create the Third International.

The Third International declared that capitalism had entered a new epoch: "Ours is the epoch of the breakdown of capital, its internal disintegration, the epoch of the Communist revolution of the proletariat" (Platform of the International). For the first time in history, the Third International aimed to create a world wide centralised political organisation of the proletariat which would play a critical role in the workers' seizure of power - not as a distant perspective, but as an immediate, urgent, and practical necessity. 

The world revolution begun in Russia in 1917 was defeated, but the epoch of capitalist decadence is still with us and humanity's need for communism is more urgent than ever. If the proletariat is to win power, then it must create its own, international political organisation and it can only do so on the basis of the lessons learned from the experience of the Third International. We will turn, then, to the three left currents that were expelled from the Comintern as it lost its proletarian content and degenerated into a mere tool of the imperial ambitions of Stalin's counter-revolution.

The Trotskyist current was not the first to fight against the degeneration of the International and the Stalinist counter-revolution (it was preceded both in time and in its critique of the degeneration of the October revolution by the Dutch/German and Italian lefts to which we will return, and also by the Russian left). The history of Trotskyism until Trotsky's assassination demonstrates all too clearly the disastrous consequences of mistaking the real situation of the balance of class forces - the course of history as we put it in our previous presentation on the class struggle. Because he failed to see that the proletariat had suffered a decisive defeat internationally, and because he was never able to accept the idea that the USSR had become another capitalist and imperialist nation, Trotsky constantly mistook each new link that chained the proletariat to one or other camp in the coming world war, to a potential revolutionary upheaval. Because he did not understand that the party does not "create" the revolutionary proletariat, but on the contrary that the appearance of the party is itself an expression of a maturing consciousness within the proletariat, he was led into one opportunist manoeuvre after another as he attempted to create a "Fourth International" in a period of profound proletarian defeat. The tragedy of Trotskyism is that the great revolutionary who played such a decisive and vital role in the revolution of 1917, and who has left us the most luminous descriptions of the soviets in action, was unable to contribute anything to the generation that was to bring the period of counter-revolution to an end. The Trotskyist movement, by supporting the democratic imperialisms during World War II, and by supporting every war waged by the monstrous regime of Stalinism, has abandoned the camp of proletarian internationalism.[2]

The workers' movements of Holland and Germany were very closely linked, both geographically and in terms of the relations between the revolutionary marxist currents in both countries.[3] The positions of the Dutch/German Communist Left are associated with the names of militants such as Pannekoek, Gorter, and Jan Appel.[4] They were from the outset forged in the heat of the German working class' revolutionary struggle, not against reactionary Tsarism but against the Social Democratic executioners of the German revolution and their trades union henchmen. The Dutch/German Communist Left were the first to arrive at an understanding of many implications of the change in period brought on by the war and the revolutions in Russia and Germany: the impossibility of using parliament to defend working class interests, the betrayal and reactionary nature of the Social Democracy, the fact that the trades unions had become the defenders of the capitalist state and the recruiting sergeants for imperialist war, and that proletarian struggle in the new period demanded a new form of organisation based on the same principles as the soviets.

The Dutch/German Left was vulnerable, however, on the question of the political organisation itself, and on the question of the historic course (the balance of class forces). During the 1930s, faced with the crucial question of how to understand the defeat of the revolution in Russia, it mistook the transformation of the Bolshevik Party into an organ of state capitalism for a cause of the revolution's defeat, rather than an effect. It thus came to theorise the inevitably counter-revolutionary nature of the party, considering the workers' councils as the only possible form of proletarian organisation in the present period. In effect, what became the "councilist" current ended up theorising its own uselessness - or worse still, its own destructiveness - for the workers' movement.

The theoretical development of the Italian Left was essentially born by a group of young Italian workers, who had been forced to flee Mussolini's Italy and take refuge in France and Belgium. Expelled from the Stalinised Italian Communist Party, they formed the group Bilan with the explicit aim of learning the lessons of the Russian revolution's defeat in order to prepare the theoretical framework for the party of the future. The theoretical contributions made by this current - which later on encompassed fractions in Belgium, France and Mexico - were immense and indeed irreplaceable. In its analysis of the degeneration of the Russian revolution - which never led it to question the proletarian character of 1917; in its investigations into the problems of a future period of transition; in its work on the economic crisis and the foundations of capitalism's decadence; in its rejection of the Communist International's position of support for "national liberation" struggles. But as far as the question of revolutionary strategy is concerned, one of its most important contributions was its understanding of the relationship between the party and the fraction. The Bilan group understood the party as both an active factor in the development of class consciousness, and as an expression of the development of consciousness within the class as a whole. When Bilan declared that the revolution was impossible without the party, this did not mean that it was enough to form the party for the revolution to become possible, but that the formation of the party was itself an expression of the ability of the proletariat as a whole to pose the question of the revolution.

Tragically, this profound understanding was not shared by the internationalist Italian Left "of the interior" which had spent the war in Mussolini's goals or in "internal exile" in Italy and which had not taken part in the theoretical development achieved by the Left fractions outside Italy. At the end of World War II, the internationalists within Italy fell victim to the same error that Trotsky had made during the 1930s, mistaking the massive strikes by Italian workers against the effects of the war and the German occupation for a new revolutionary situation which could justify the formation of a new Party... in Italy. Inevitably, the formation of the new Internationalist Communist Party (which was to give rise to the various Bordigist "Parties" and to the Battaglia Comunista group which is the main constituent element of today's "International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party"), in a situation when the level of consciousness within the working class as a whole offered no material basis for the party's existence, was marked both by a high degree of opportunism as they tried to incorporate elements from the anti-fascist partisans and the Stalinist party, and by an exacerbated sectarianism towards the Left Fractions which refused to follow them down this road.

We can perhaps best summarise the relationship between the Italian Left and the Dutch/German Left by saying that the clarity of the councilist current on the union question and the importance of the soviets could only bear fruit in a synthesis with the clarity of the Italian Left on the organisational question. This synthesis began to be developed by Bilan (which integrated the principles of the German Left on the national question in particular), and was continued by the tiny French Communist Left in the period following World War II. It acquired a fully-fledged organisational form with the creation of the International Communist Current in 1975. 

Clearly we cannot, in this short presentation, give a complete view of all the elements of this synthesis of the Communist Left that we believe holds the key to the future development of the world communist party: what will, in effect, be the next International. Here we want simply to emphasise what we consider to be the key points that we need to take from the method of the Italian Left:

• On the nature of the future party itself:
• The party does not take power on behalf of the class, it is the proletariat as a whole that takes and exercises power through the workers' councils; but the party is a vital element in the development of class consciousness and organisation.
• The party is international. The proletariat no longer has any "national tasks" to accomplish, and it can only take power on a world basis: the party itself will thus be formed directly on a world basis, not as a federation of national groups or parties.
• The creation of the party will depend on the development of the working class' own consciousness and combativeness: for the party to be possible, the working class must have reached a point at which it is able to recognise the party as its own, and to put its political orientations into action. By "party", we therefore mean an international organisation which is able to have a decisive influence on events.
• The party's programme will be based on the work and the positions elaborated by the Communist Left.
• On the process which leads to the creation of the party:
• The possibility of creating the party depends on the development of class consciousness - but this does not mean that it will be an "automatic" process. It will depend also on the conscious efforts undertaken by revolutionary groups and organisations today. In effect, they must be able to fulfil their role as fractions. In that sense, the work of this conference is part of the world wide effort towards the formation of the future party.
• For today's revolutionary groups to play a positive role in this process, they must be able to combine firmness on internationalist principles with openness in debate, a readiness to listen to and learn from others.

What are the material conditions within which we are working?

We have already, in our previous presentation, outlined the material conditions of the class struggle within which we are acting, and which determine the potential and the responsibilities of today's revolutionary groups.

We want here to consider the evolution of the Communist Left, and more broadly the state of what we can call the "internationalist camp". 

The enormous upsurge of class struggle that followed the May 1968 strike in France was accompanied by a rediscovery, by a new generation of revolutionaries, of the positions of the Communist Left - and consequently by an important growth in the existing organisations and the appearance of new ones. What has happened to them since then?

The "councilist" successors to the Dutch/German Left Communists

As we have said above, the great organisational weakness of the councilists is that they theorise the "uselessness" of the political organisation. This is a serious weakness in a situation when simply maintaining a regular organisational existence (intervention in the class struggle and theoretical development) is itself a difficult task.[5] Since the 1970s, the two main historic organisations (Spartakusbund and Daad en Gedachte) have disappeared, as has, for example, ICO (Informations et Correspondances Ouvrières) which was one of the most important councilist groups existing in 1968 and underwent a considerable expansion during and after the May events in France. Although the councilist tradition continues to exist in small groups and discussion circles, it is hampered by its obsession with the "danger" of forming an organisation, and with the supposed "inevitability" of any organisation becoming bureaucratised. For the councilist groups to play a positive role in the development of an international organisation, it will be necessary for them to undertake a critique of their own past experience, and to look anew - and without any taboos - at the experience of the Italian Left.

The descendants of the PCInt

Today's descendants of the Partito Comunista Internazionalista founded at the end of World War II, all have their origins in the split of 1952 which formed the "Bordigist" Partito Comunista Internazionale (PCI) and the Battaglia Comunista group which was one of the two founding groups of the "International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party" (IBRP) formed in 1983.

These organisations have never been able to overcome the fundamental opportunism and sectarianism which presided at their foundation, and which have led them to reject the experience and theoretical heritage of the Italian Left as this was developed by the Bilan group. 

During the 1970s, the most important of the different PCIs[6] experienced considerable growth - but a great deal of this growth was on the basis of an extremely opportunist attitude towards "national liberation" movements, in particular Arab (especially Palestinian) nationalism. The result was the explosion of the PCI in 1982, reducing what had once been the biggest organisation of the Communist Left to a few tiny scattered groups which all remain entirely closed in on themselves - and all call themselves "The Party".

The Battaglia Comunista group, which initially proved more open to the new situation of the 1970s and showed a readiness to work together with other organisations (notably the ICC and the CWO) in the three International Conferences of the Communist Left during the 1970s, finally forming the IBRP with the CWO, has since returned to its "first love": declaring itself "the only possible basis for the future party", it has proven unable to rise to the challenge presented by the new period and has systematically refused any kind of joint work with other organisations of the Communist Left - although they have had a number of flirts in other directions.[7] 

In effect, the tradition formed by the offspring of the PCInt has become the coelacanth[8] of the proletarian movement. A living fossil, emerging occasionally from the depths of its own sectarianism but incapable of adapting to the new, slowly maturing upsurge in the class struggle above all as it is expressed in the development of today's internationalist movement. 

The new internationalist movement

What do we mean by the "new internationalist movement". During the last five years, the ICC has been making contact with a growing number of new groups and elements around the world - though note that when we say "new" we mean "new to us": in some cases they are groups which have existed for a number of years but which we have only just encountered. There are two factors here: on the one hand, the appearance of new groups, on the other, the general impetus towards international contact on the part of both new and existing groups and individuals.

In part, this development of new contacts is thanks to the Internet, but only in part.[9] Fundamentally, it is the expression of the new development of the international class struggle since the beginning of the decade - a class struggle which is developing very slowly, but which can already feel the need to go further and deeper than the struggles of the 1970s and 80s. The ICC is today in contact with groups and individuals in almost every country of Latin America, in Turkey, in Russia and the Ukraine, in Asia - and of course in Korea.

In some cases, such groups explicitly identify themselves with the Communist Left: this is true of the comrades of SPA for example, but also of EKS in Turkey. In some cases, they have evolved separately and have only recently begun to study the ideas of the Communist Left - ideas with which they do not necessarily agree completely: this is true of OPOP in Brazil, and the ISPRC in Russia. In other cases, they have emerged from a crisis of Trotskyism or Maoism. But all these comrades share the fundamental principle which has always been the touchstone of the workers' movement: internationalism. They also share two of the most fundamental legacies of the Italian Left: a conviction that the working class is international or that it is nothing, that international contacts are therefore of fundamental importance, and that only through an open and fraternal debate can we prepare the conditions for the future formation of the world communist party, the new International without which the working class will not be able to "storm the heavens", overthrow this decadent and barbaric capitalist society and create the new, world wide human community. 

International Communist Current, 2006

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[1] It should be said that this underlying distinction between mass unitary organisations and political organisations remained more or less clear during the 19th century. For example, the IWA grouped together both political organisations and trades unions, while even in the Second International we can cite the case of the British Labour Party which was created originally as a "Labour Representation Committee" to organise the representation of the trades unions in Parliament.

[2] It is worth citing here the words of Natalia Trotsky in 1951, when she refused any longer to caution the Fourth International's support for Stalinism: "The most intolerable is the position on war to which you have committed yourselves. The third world war threatening humanity places the revolutionary movement before the most difficult and complex situations, the gravest decisions (...) But faced with the events of recent years, you continue to call for the defence of the Stalinist state, and to commit the whole movement to it. Now, you even support the Stalinist armies in the war which is crucifying the Korean people (...) I cannot and will not follow you on this point (...) I find that I must tell you that I find no other way out than to say openly that our disagreements make it impossible for me to stay any longer in your ranks".

[3] Pannekoek for example was Dutch, but spent much of his life as a militant in Germany. When Hitler seized power in Germany, many militants of the German Left took refuge with comrades in Holland, which they used as base for continued clandestine activity in Germany.

[4] Jan Appel was the KAPD (German Communist Workers' Party) delegate to the Third Congress of the Communist International. He passed on the torch to a new generation of revolutionaries when he took part in the founding congress of the International Communist Current in 1976.

[5] Indeed, we can say that maintaining a revolutionary organisation will always and inevitably be an arduous task, since a truly revolutionary

[6] The sectarianism of the PCI has led to a series of absurd splits - all of which call themselves "the" one and only Party in the world.

[7] For example, it has refused all the ICC's proposals for joint leaflets against the wars in Iraq and Kosovo, or for joint meetings in Germany, as it has refused any participation in the conferences proposed by the NCI in Argentina. Its absence from this present conference (at least at time of writing) is equally noteworthy.

[8] Although now represented by only two living species, as a group the coelacanths were once very successful with many genera and species that left an abundant fossil record from the Devonian to the end of the Cretaceous period, at which point they apparently suffered a nearly complete extinction, and past which point no fossils are known.

[9] We cannot resist citing the Manifesto here: "Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of the workers. This union is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by modern industry, and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another. (...) that union, to attain which the burghers of the Middle Ages, with their miserable highways, required centuries, the modern proletarian, thanks to railways, achieve in a few years."

At the end of October 2006 , a conference of internationalist organisations, groups and militants was called by the Socialist Political Alliance (SPA) in the South Korean towns of Seoul and Ulsan. However modest the numbers present, the SPA is the first organised expression in the Far East (as far as we are aware) of the principles of the Communist Left, and this conference was certainly the first of its kind. As such, it has a historic significance, and the ICC gave its whole hearted support by sending a delegation to address the Conference.[1] [15]

In the days leading up to the Conference, however, the long-term political importance of its goals was overshadowed by the dramatic sharpening of inter-imperialist tensions in the region caused by the explosion of North Korea’s first nuclear bomb, and the manoeuverings that have followed it especially on the part of the different powers present in the region (USA, China, Japan, Russia, South Korea). Consequently, the question was extensively debated during the conference and gave rise to the adoption, by the participants whose names appear below, of the following declaration:

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Internationalist Declaration from Korea against the threat of war

Following the news of the nuclear tests in North Korea, we, the communist internationalists meeting in Seoul and Ulsan:

1. Denounce the development of a new nuclear weapons capability in the hands of another capitalist state: the nuclear bomb is the ultimate weapon of inter-imperialist warfare, its only function being the mass extermination of the civilian population in general and the working class in particular.
2. Denounce unreservedly this new step towards war taken by the capitalist North Korean state which has thereby demonstrated once again (if that were necessary) that it has absolutely nothing to do with the working class or communism, and is nothing but a most extreme and grotesque version of decadent capitalism's general tendency towards militaristic barbarism.
3. Denounce unreservedly the hypocritical campaign by the United States and its allies against its North Korean enemy which is nothing but an ideological preparation for unleashing – when they have the capacity to do so – their own preemptive strikes of which the working population would be the principal victim, as it is today in Iraq. We have not forgotten that the United States is the only power to have used nuclear weapons in war, when it annihilated the  civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
4. Denounce unreservedly the so-called "peace initiatives" which are bound to appear under the aegis of other imperialist gangsters such as China. These will be concerned not with peace, but with the protection of their own capitalist interests in the region. The workers can have no confidence whatever in the "peaceful intentions" of any capitalist state.
5. Denounce unreservedly any attempt by the South Korean bourgeoisie to take repressive measures against the workng class or against activists in their defense of internationalist principles under the pretext of protecting national freedom or democracy.
6. Declare our complete solidarity with the workers of North and South Korea, China, Japan, and Russia who will be the first to suffer in the event of military action breaking out.
7. Declare that only the world wide workers' struggle can put an end for ever to the constant threat of barbarism, imperialist war, and nuclear destruction that hangs over humanity under capitalism.

The workers have no country to defend!

Workers of all lands, unite!

This declaration was signed by the following organisations and groups:

International Communist Current
Socialist Political Alliance (Korea), Seoul group meeting of 26th October 2006
Internationalist Perspectives

A number of comrades present at the Conference also signed the declaration on an individual basis:
SJ (Seoul Group for Workers’ Councils)
MS (Seoul Group for Workers’ Councils)
LG
JT
JW (Ulsan)
SC (Ulsan)
BM

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[1] [16] We will be writing in more detail about the conference later.