The dramatic situation of a Middle East that has been plunged into chaos reveals the profound cynicism and duplicity of the bourgeoisie in all countries. Each one of them pretends that it wants to bring peace, justice and democracy to the populations who have been subjected to daily horrors and massacres for years. But their fine speeches are just a mask for the defence of sordid imperialist interests and a justification for military and diplomatic interventions which are the main cause behind today's worsening conflicts. The cynicism and hypocrisy of it all have been confirmed in particular by the hurried execution of Saddam Hussein, which is just one illustration of the bloody settling of scores between rival bourgeois factions.

Why the hurry to execute Saddam Hussein?

The judgement and execution of Saddam Hussein were spontaneously hailed by Bush as a "victory for democracy". There's some truth in this: the bourgeoisie has so often justified its crimes in the name of democracy. We have already devoted an article to the subject in this Review (International Review n°66, 1991, "The massacres and crimes of the great democracies"). With boundless cynicism, Bush also announced on 5 November 2006, when he was in Nebraska in the middle of an election campaign, that the death sentence handed out to Saddam was "a justification for the sacrifices willingly accepted by the US forces" since March 2003 in Iraq. So for Bush the hide of a murderer is worth the more than 3000 young Americans killed in Iraq (that's more than the victims of the destruction of the Twin Towers), most of them in the flower of their youth. And the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead since the beginning of the American intervention count for nothing at all. In fact, since the US occupation began, there have been more than 600,000 deaths and the Iraqi government is no longer counting so as not to "undermine morale".

The USA had every interest in ensuring that the execution of Saddam took place before the next round of trials. The reason for this is they would have brought up far too many compromising facts. It has been deemed necessary to obscure all memory of the total support given by the US and the Western powers to Saddam's policies between 1979 and 1990, and in particular during the war between Iraq and Iran between 1980 and 1988.

One of the main accusations against Saddam was the deadly use of chemical weapons against 5000 Kurds in Halabjah in 1988. This massacre was part of a war which cost 1,200,000 dead and twice as many wounded, and throughout which "the Butcher of Baghdad" was supported by the US and most of the Western powers. Having been taken by the Iranians, the town was then re-taken by the Iraqis who decided to carry out an operation of repression against the Kurdish population. The massacre was only the most spectacular in a campaign of extermination baptised "Al Anfal" ("war booty"), which claimed 180,000 Iraqi Kurdish victims between 1987 and 1988.

Saddam began this war by attacking Iran with the full support of the Western powers. After the emergence of a Shi'ite Islamic republic in Iran in 1979, with Ayatollah Khomeini denouncing the US as the "Great Satan", and after US president Carter's failure to overturn the regime, Saddam Hussein took on the role regional cop for the US and the Western bloc by declaring war on Iran and weakening it through 8 years of war. The Iranian counter-attack would have resulted in victory for Tehran if Iraq had not been given US military support. In 1987, the Western bloc led by the US mobilised a formidable armada in the waters of the Gulf, deploying more than 250 war-ships from nearly all the major Western countries, with 35,000 men on board and equipped with the most sophisticated war-planes. Under the guise of "humanitarian intervention", this force destroyed an oil platform and several of the Iranian navy's most effective ships. It was thanks to this support that Saddam was able to sign a peace agreement which allowed Iraq to keep its pre-war borders.

Saddam originally came to power with the support of the CIA, executing his Shi'ite and Kurdish rivals but also other Sunni chiefs within the Baath party, who were falsely accused of conspiring against him. He was courted and honoured as a great statesman for years, being recognised for example as a "great friend of France" (and of Chirac and Chevènement in particular). The fact that he distinguished himself throughout his political career by bloody executions and massacres of all kinds (hangings, beheadings, torturing opponents, use of chemical weapons, slaughter of the Shi'ite and Kurdish populations) never bothered any bourgeois politician until it was "discovered" on the eve of the Gulf War that Saddam was a bloody and frightful tyrant.1 We should also remember that Saddam was lured into a trap when he believed that he had been given the green light by Washington to invade Kuwait in the summer of 1990, thus providing the US with a pretext to mount a gigantic military mobilisation against him. Thus the US set up the first Gulf War of January 1991 and from now on Saddam Hussein would be deemed public enemy number one. The Desert Storm campaign, presented by the official propaganda as a "clean war", a kind of video war game, actually cost 500,000 lives in 42 days, with 106,000 air raids dropping 100,000 tons of bombs, experimenting with the whole gamut of murderous weapons (napalm, cluster bombs, depression bombs...). Its essential aim was to make a demonstration of the crushing military superiority of the US and to force its former allies, now becoming potentially dangerous imperialist rivals, to take part in the war under US command at a moment when the old bloc alliances were falling apart.

With the same degree of Machiavellianism, the US and its "allies" were soon involved in further machinations. Having called upon the Kurds in the North and the Shi'ites in the South to rise up against the Saddam regime, they left him with the elite troops he needed to drown these rebellions in blood, since they had every interest in keeping Iraq together. The Kurdish population in particular was subjected to the most atrocious massacres.

The hired hacks of European media, even joined by Sarkozy the hitherto pro-American French presidential hopeful, are now hypocritically denouncing the "poor choice", the "mistake", the "botched job" of Saddam's hurried execution. It is true that the circumstances of the execution will further exacerbate hatred between the religious groupings. It may have pleased the more fanatical Shi'ite groupings but certainly not the Sunnis, while the fact that it took place at the beginning of Eid, a very important festival in Islam, shocked most Muslims. What's more, Saddam Hussein may now be seen by generations who have not lived under his iron heel as a martyr.

But none of the bourgeoisies had a choice in the matter because they had the same interest as the Bush administration in seeing this execution rushed through in order to hide and erase the memory of their complicity in the atrocities of the past and their responsibility in the spiral of barbarism going on today. The situation in the Middle East is reaching the heights of absurdity, but it is only a symbol of the total impasse the system has reached everywhere.2

The headlong flight into war in the Middle East

Recent developments in the conflict between Israel and the various Palestinian factions, who have also been at each others' throats, have reached the height of absurdity. What is striking is the way that the different bourgeoisies involved have been pushed by the force of circumstances to take decisions which are altogether contradictory and irrational, even from the standpoint of their short-term strategic interests.

When Ehud Olmert offered his hand to the president of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas, along with a few concessions to the Palestinians such as the withdrawal of a number of roadblocks and the promise to unfreeze $100 million in "humanitarian aid", the media immediately began talking about the revival of the peace process. Mahmoud Abbas has certainly tried to cash in on these offers in his competition with Hamas, since the aim of these pseudo-concessions was to show that his policy of cooperation with Israel could bring advantages.

But it was Ehud Olmert himself who largely sabotaged any common approach with the president of the Palestinian Authority when he was compelled by the pressure from the ultra-conservative factions in his government to renew the policy of implanting Israeli settlements in the occupied territories and to step up the destruction of Palestinian houses in Jerusalem.

The accords between Israel and Fatah resulted in Israel authorising Egypt to deliver arms to Fatah in order to give it an advantage in its struggle against Hamas. However, the umpteenth Sharm-el-Sheikh summit between Israel and Egypt was totally overshadowed by the Israeli army's new military operation in Ramallah on the West Bank and by the renewed air-raids in the Gaza Strip in response to sporadic rocket fire. So the message about wanting to revive peace talks was drowned out and Israel's intentions made to look very contradictory.

Another paradox is that at the moment that Olmert and Abbas met, and just before the Israel-Egypt summit, Israel announced that it possesses nuclear weapons and made open threats about using them. Although this warning was directed essentially against Iran, which is trying to attain the same status, it goes out indirectly to all Israel's neighbours. How were the latter to start negotiations with such a belligerent and dangerous power?

Furthermore, this declaration can only push Iran to move further in the same direction and legitimate its ambitions to becoming a gendarme and a protector of the region, resorting to the same logic of "deterrence" as all the great powers.

But it is not just the Zionist state which is acting in this way - it looks as if each protagonist is becoming increasingly incapable of acting for the best defence of its strategic interests.

Abbas for example has taken the risk of unleashing a test of strength with the militias of Hamas and has poured oil on the fire by announcing his aim of holding elections in Gaza. This could only be seen by Hamas, which was "democratically" elected only last January, as a real provocation. But this test of strength, which has also taken the form of bloody street-fighting, was the only way that the Palestinian Authority could try to break out of the Israeli blockade and the blocking of international aid in force since Hamas came to power. Not only has the blockade been a disaster for the local population, which has been unable to go to work outside the areas boxed in by the Israeli army and police, it has also provoked the strike by 170,000 Palestinian civil servants in Gaza and the West Bank who have not been paid any wages for months (especially in vital sectors like health and education). The anger of the civil servants, which extends into the ranks of the police and the army, has been exploited both by Hamas and by Fatah as a means to recruit people for their respective militias, each one blaming the situation on the other, while young kids between 10 and 15 are being enrolled en masse as cannon fodder in this murderous conflict.

Hamas meanwhile has been trying to take advantage of the confusion by negotiating directly with Israel for an exchange of prisoners, proposing to swap the Israeli corporal captured in June for some of its own activists.

The bloody chaos that has come out of a year's explosive co-habitation between the elected Hamas government and the president of the Palestinian Authority remains the only prospect. Given this suicidal policy, there should be no illusions about the truce agreed at the end of the year between the Fatah and Hamas militias. It will certainly be punctuated by murderous confrontations: car bombs, street battles, kidnapping, all of it sowing terror and death among the already impoverished population of the Gaza strip. And to cap it all, the Israeli raids on the West Bank or the brutal searches by the Israeli army and police mean that children and school students are regularly being killed in the crossfire, while the Israeli proletariat, already bled white by the war effort, is subjected to revenge operations by Hamas on the one hand and Hezbollah on the other.

At the same time, the situation in South Lebanon, where UN forces have been deployed, is far from being secure. Instability has increased since the assassination of the Christian leader Pierre Gemayel. There has been a major demonstration of force by Hezbollah and other Shi'ite militias, as well as by the Christian faction led by General Aoun who has provisionally rallied to Syria, besieging the presidential palace in Beirut for several days, while at the same time armed Sunni groups were threatening the Lebanese parliament and its Shi'ite president Nabil Berri. Tension between the rival factions is reaching a peak. As for the UN mission - disarming Hezbollah - no one takes that seriously.

In Afghanistan, the deployment of 32,000 troops under NATO's international forces and of 8500 Americans has proved ineffective. The struggle against al Qaida and the Taliban, who have carried out at least a hundred attacks in the south of the country, is getting inexorably bogged down. The balance sheet of this guerrilla war is 4,000 dead for 2006 alone. Pakistan, which in principal is the USA's ally, still serves as a base for al Qaida and the Taliban.

Each state, each faction is pushed headlong into military adventurism, regardless of the defeats they suffer.

The most revealing impasse is the one facing the world's strongest power. The policy of the American bourgeoisie is caught up in all sorts of contradictions. The report by James Baker, former adviser to Bush senior and appointed by the federal government, concluded that the war in Iraq has been a failure and advocated a change of policy: opening diplomatic relations with Syria and Iran and gradually withdrawing the 144,000 troops stuck in Iraq. And what happened? Bush junior was forced to renew part of his administration, notably by replacing Rumsfeld with Robert Gates as Defence Secretary; a number of people were made scapegoats for the Iraq fiasco and have been got rid of, notably two major commanding officers of the occupation forces in Iraq. But above all Bush has announced a new "surge" of US troops to Iraq: 21,500 reinforcements, for an army already heavily dependent on reservists, are to be sent to "secure" Baghdad. The shift in the majority in both houses of Congress, now dominated by the Democrats, has changed nothing: any disengagement or refusal to release new military credits for the war in Iraq will be seen as an admission of weakness by the US and the Democrats don't want to assume responsibility for this. The whole American bourgeoisie, like all the other bourgeois cliques or states, is caught in the infernal machine of militarism, where every new attempt to defend its imperialist interests against its rivals only ends up making matters worse.

The African continent: another edifying illustration of capitalist barbarism

Terrible atrocities are commonplace on the African continent today. After decades of slaughter in Zaire and Rwanda, after the confrontation between cliques in the Ivory Coast, further exacerbated by rivalries between the great powers, other regions are being bathed in blood and fire.

In Sudan, the "rebellion" against the pro-Islamist government in Khartoum is today split up into a myriad of different factions, all fighting among themselves, manipulated by this or that power in an increasingly unstable game of alliances. In the last three years, the Darfur region in the west of Sudan has seen 400,000 deaths and more than a million and half refugees; hundreds of villages have been destroyed and the former inhabitants pushed into immense camps in the desert, dying of hunger, thirst and disease, regularly suffering the attacks of various armed gangs or of the Sudanese government forces. The flight of rebel forces has led to the conflict being exported to other regions, notably the Central African Republic and Chad. This has in turn compelled France to get more and more involved militarily in order to preserve its remaining hunting grounds in Africa, in particular by taking an active part in the battles launched against the Sudanese government from Chad.

Since the overthrow of the former dictator Siyad Barre in 1990, which accompanied the fall of his protector, the USSR, Somalia has been in state of chaos, torn apart by a non-stop war between innumerable clans, mafia gangs of killers and pillagers ready to sell their services to the highest bidder, imposing a reign of terror and desolation across the whole country. The Western powers, which descended on this country between 1992 and 1995, have had to fight a losing battle in the face of this chaos and decomposition: the spectacular landing of the US marines ended in a pathetic fiasco in 1994, leaving the way open to total anarchy. The settling of scores between these gangs of assassins has left 500,000 dead since 1991. The Union of Islamic Courts, which is one of these gangs hiding under a veneer of Sharia law and "radical" Islam, finally grabbed hold of the capital Mogadishu in May 2006 with a few thousand armed men. The transitional government exiled to Baidoa then called on its powerful neighbour, Ethiopia, to save the day.3 The Ethiopian army, with the overt support of the US, bombarded the capital, forcing the Islamic troops to flee within a few hours, most of them going to the south of the country. Mogadishu is a frightful ruin whose population has been reduced to living hand to mouth. A new provisional government supported from a discreet distance by the Ethiopian army has been set up but its appeal to the population to hand in its weapons has had no result. After the clear victory of Ethiopia, the truce could only be provisional and precarious because the Islamic "rebels" are in the process of re-arming, in particular through the porous southern border with Kenya. But the rebels may get support from elsewhere, such as Sudan, Eritrea - Ethiopia's traditional rival - and Yemen. This uncertain situation is worrying for the US given that the Horn of Africa, with the military base in Djibouti and Somalia's position on the route to the Middle East and Asia, is one of the most strategic zones in the world. This is what prompted the US to intervene directly on 8 January, bombing the south of the country where the rebels have taken refuge; the White House claimed that they are being directly manipulated by Al Qaida. Neither the US, nor France, nor any other great power can play a stabilising role or act as a barrier to the spread of military barbarism in Africa or any other part of the world, whatever government is in power. On the contrary, their imperialist interests are pushing them to step up the death and destruction in an increasingly uncontrolled manner.

The plunging of a growing part of humanity into this kind of barbarism and chaos is the only future that capitalism can offer. Imperialist war is today mobilising the wealth of science, technology and human labour not to improve humanity's well-being, but to destroy these riches, to accumulate ruins and corpses. Imperialist war, which is undermining the heritage of centuries of human history and threatens to engulf and overwhelm the whole of humanity, is an expression of a profoundly aberrant social system whose survival has become an insane disaster for human society.

More than ever, the only possible hope lies in the overthrow of capitalism, in the establishment of social relations freed from the contradictions which are strangling society, by the only class that can bring humanity a future: the working class.

Wim 10.1.07

1 Another of the region's tyrants, Hafez-el-Assad of Syria, has since his death been dubbed a great statesman in reward for rallying to the Western camp during the period of the blocs, despite a career that was just as bloody as Saddam's.

2 Certain bourgeois writers are quite capable of seeing the unbearable accumulation of barbarism in the world today: "Barbarism follows barbarism to give birth to more barbarism. A video circulates on the internet, the latest contribution to the festival of unspeakable images, from the beheadings carried out by Zarkawi to the humiliated bodies piled up by GI's at Abu Ghraib (...) The terrible secret services of the former tyrant are succeeded by the Interior Ministry's death squads dominated by the pro-Iranian Badr Brigades (...) Whether in the name of Bin Ladenist terrorism, the struggle against the Americans, or the Shi'ite power, the murders directed against the Iraqi civilians have this in common: they are carried out under the law of individual impulse. Scoundrels of all kinds are springing up in the ruins of Iraq. Lying is the norm; the police practise kidnapping and banditry; men of God decapitate and eviscerate; the Shi'ite does to the Sunni what he himself has suffered" (the French weekly Marianne, 6.1.07). But all this is put down to "individual impulses" and in the end to "human nature". What such writers cannot understand is that this barbarism is a historical product of the capitalist system; and that there exists a historic class capable of bringing it to an end: the proletariat.

3 Ethiopia, also a former bastion of the USSR, has become a US stronghold in the region since the fall of Mengistu in 1991.

In continuity with the series on revolutionary syndicalism which we began in International Review n°118 [2] , the article below is the first in a series of articles on the experience of the Spanish CNT.

Today, a new generation of workers are gradually getting involved in the class struggle against capitalism. This confrontation raises a great many questions, one of the most frequent of which is the union question. It is no secret that the workers remain suspicious of the official unions, and the idea of a "revolutionary unionism" continues to hold a certain attraction; the idea, that is, of organising outside the state structure with the aim of unifying the immediate struggle and also the revolutionary struggle.

By examining the experience of the French CGT and the IWW in North America we have shown that this idea is unrealistic and utopian but the example of the CNT shows is even more striking, as we will now see. From the beginning of the 20th century history has repeatedly shown by experience that syndicalism and revolution are contradictory terms that cannot possibly be united.1

The contradictions of Spanish capitalism and the influence of Anarchism

Today, the CNT and anarchism are seen as inseparable. Anarchism, which played a minor part in the great workers' movements of the 19th and 20th centuries,2 presents the CNT as the proof that its ideology is able to build an extensive mass organisation that can play a decisive role in the workers' struggles, as did the Spanish CNT from 1919 to 1936.

However it was not anarchism that created the CNT because at its inception it had a revolutionary syndicalist orientation, although this does not mean that anarchism was completely absent from its foundation or that it did not leave its mark on the development of the organisation.3

As we have already shown in other articles in this series - we will not go back over this here - revolutionary syndicalism is an attempt to respond to new conditions: capitalism was no longer at its zenith and was gradually entering its decadent phase, which was clearly demonstrated by the immense slaughter of the First World War. Confronted with this reality, larger and larger sectors of the working class became aware of the rampant opportunism of the socialist parties - corrupted by parliamentary cretinism and reformism - as well as the bureaucratisation and conservatism of the unions. There were two kinds of reaction to this; on the one hand a revolutionary tendency within the socialist parties (the left formed by those groups whose best known militants were Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Pannekoek, etc) and on the other hand revolutionary syndicalism.

These general historic conditions are equally valid for Spain although they were also marked by the backwardness and the specific conditions of Spanish capitalism. Two of these particularities had a decisive, negative weight on the proletariat of the period.

The first contradiction was the obvious absence of any real economic unity among the various zones of the Iberian peninsula. This produced localist and regionalist dispersion which gave rise to a series of uprisings within the various regions, the most important of which was the republican cantonal insurrection of 1873. Because of its federalist positions anarchism proved a suitable representative of these archaic historic conditions: the autonomy of each region or zone, which declared itself sovereign and only accepted the fragile and random union of the "solidarity pact". As Peirats4 says in his work, The CNT in the Spanish revolution, "this programme, that of Bakunin's Alliance, suited the temperament of the Spanish underprivileged very well. The federal vision introduced by the Bakuninists was like rain upon damp soil because it resurrected memories of local rights, of village charters and the free municipalities of the Middle Ages" (page 3, volume 1).5

Given the general backwardness and the explosive differences in economic development of the various regions, the bourgeois state, although constitutional in form, in fact depended on the brute force of the army to ensure social cohesion. It unleashed periodic repression mainly against the proletariat and, to a lesser extent, against the middle classes in the towns. Not only the workers and the peasants, but also wide sections of the petty bourgeoisie, felt completely excluded from a state that was liberal in theory but violently repressive and authoritarian in practice and which was controlled by bosses who ignored the parliamentary system and its policies. This gave rise to a visceral apoliticism that was expressed in anarchism but which was also very strong within the working class. These general conditions resulted in the weakness of the Marxist tradition in Spain on the one hand and the strong influence of anarchism on the other. The group around Pablo Inglesias6 remained faithful to the Marxist current in the IWA and formed the Socialist Party in 1881.7 However the organisation was always extremely weak politically, to the point that Munis8 said that many of its leaders had never read anything by Marx: "The most fundamental and important works of theory had not been translated. And the few that had been published (the Communist Manifesto, Anti-Dühring, Misery of Philosophy, Utopian and Scientific Socialism) were read more by bourgeois intellectuals than by the socialists" (Signposts to Defeat, Promise of Victory, p59).9 This is why the party moved so rapidly towards opportunism and was one of the most right wing parties of the whole Second International.

As regards the anarchist tendency, it would take a detailed study to understand all its various currents and the many positions contained within it. We would also have to distinguish the majority of militants sincerely committed to the proletarian cause and those who passed themselves off as their leaders. In general, the latter, apart from a few honest ones, betrayed at every step those "principles" that they ostensibly defended. We need do no more than recall the shameful actions of Bakunin's followers in Spain at the time of the cantonal insurrection of 1873, which Engels denounced so brilliantly in his pamphlet, The Bakuninists at work: "The same people who rejected the Hague resolution on the political attitude of the working class and who trampled under foot the Rules of the [International Working Men's] Association, thus bringing division, conflict and confusion into the Spanish Section of the International; the same people who had the effrontery to depict us to the workers as ambitious place-hunters, who, under the pretext of establishing the rule of the working class, sought to establish their own rule; the same people who call themselves autonomists, anarchist revolutionaries, etc., have on this occasion flung themselves into politics, bourgeois politics of the worst kind. They have worked, not to give political power to the working class -- on the contrary this idea is repugnant to them -- but to help to power a bourgeois faction of adventurers, ambitious men and place-hunters who call themselves Intransigent (irreconcilable) Republicans."10

After this episode and in the context of the international reflux of struggles that followed the defeat of the Paris Commune, the Spanish bourgeoisie unleashed a violent repression which lasted many years. In the face of state terror and its own ideological confusion, the anarchist current had only two inalienable certainties: federalism and apoliticism. These certainties aside, it constantly came up against a dilemma: should it carry forward an open struggle in order to create a mass organisation? Or should it carry out minority and clandestine actions on the basis of the anarchist slogan "the propaganda of the deed"? This dilemma plunged the movement into complete paralysis. In Andalusia this oscillating sometimes took the form of a "general strike" in the form of local, isolated uprisings which were easily crushed by the Guardia Civil and were followed by brutal repression. At other times it was expressed in "exemplary actions" (setting fire to crops, plundering farms, etc) which the government exploited to unleash new waves of repression.11

1900 - 1910: the international tendency towards the mass strike

The CNT was born in Barcelona, the main industrial concentration in Spain, on the basis of the historic conditions which existed internationally during the early decades of the 20th century. As we have shown elsewhere,12 the workers' struggle was tending to develop into the revolutionary mass strike, the most advanced example of which was to be seen in the 1905 Russian Revolution.

In Spain also, the change in historical period was expressed in new forms of workers' struggle. Two episodes, which we will describe briefly, illustrate this tendency: the 1902 strike in Barcelona and the Tragic Week of 1909, which also took place in Barcelona.

The former started in December 1901 with the engineering workers demanding the 9-hour day. When they were confronted with repression and the outright refusal of the bosses, the solidarity of the Barcelona proletariat spilled onto the streets. They arose massively and spontaneously at the end of January 1902 without the least encouragement from any union or political organisations. For several days, mass meetings united workers of all trades. However, as there was no echo in the rest of the country, the strike got progressively weaker. There were various factors that contributed to this situation. On the one hand the open sabotage of the Socialist Party, which even went so far as to block the solidarity funds from the British trade unions. On the other hand, there was the passivity of the anarchist societies.13 At the same time the Workers' Federation of the Spanish Region, which had been newly formed (1900) on an "apolitical" basis,14 was also absent and defended this by saying that "the metal workers of Barcelona have never belonged to any political or social grouping and were not disposed to collective action"15 This experience shook the existing workers' organisations profoundly because it did not follow the traditional "schema" of the struggle: it was neither a general strike according to the anarchist conception nor actions intended to put pressure on employers within a strictly trade and economic framework, in accordance with the vision of the Socialists.

The Tragic Week of 1909 came about as a massive popular reaction against the embarkation of troops for Morocco.16 In this movement too we see expressed active class solidarity, the extension of the struggles and the demonstrators taking

possession of the streets. All of this was done on the immediate initiative of the workers without any previous planning or calls from the political organisations. The economic struggle and the political struggle were united. There were two aspects; firstly there was the solidarity of all sectors of workers with the strikers in the textile industry, the most important in Catalonia. Secondly, the refusal of imperialist war was expressed by the mobilisation against the embarkation of soldiers for the war in Morocco. Under the destructive influence of bourgeois republicanism, led by the famous demagogue Lerroux,17 the movement degenerated into violent and sterile actions, the most spectacular of which were the setting fire to churches and convents. The government made use of all this to unleash another wave of repression, which took a particularly barbaric and sadistic form.

This was the situation in 1907 which saw the birth of Workers' Solidarity (which would become the CNT three years later). Workers' Solidarity united five tendencies that were present in the workers' milieu:

• "pure" trade unionism, which was very radical, but apolitical and corporatist;
• the Catalan socialists, who acted independently of the rigid and schematic directives from the centre in Madrid;
• the revolutionary syndicalists, a tendency recently emerged from the socialist unions, though influenced by anarchism;18
• the anarchists who, in Catalonia, participated in union action;
• finally, the members of the demagogic republican party of Lerroux, cited above.

The predominant concern was to form a single, unitary organisation which would weld together the entire class for struggle.

During this period, the theories of French revolutionary socialism were widely circulated. Anselmo Lorenzo, a prominent Spanish anarchist , had translated the The Union by Emile Pouget in 1904; José Prat translated and distributed other works, those by Pouget, Pelloutier and Pataud19 for example. In his own work The Bourgeoisie and the Proletariat (1908), Prat summarised revolutionary syndicalism by saying that it "in no way accepts the present order; it suffers it in the hope that union power can destroy it. By means of increasingly generalised strikes it gradually revolutionises the working class and moves towards the general strike. It snatches from the bourgeois bosses all the immediate improvements that are positive but its aim is the complete transformation of the present society into a socialist society. Through its action as a political agent it brings about economic and socialist revolution."

The founding of the CNT at the 1910 Congress

Workers' Solidarity had intended to hold its Congress at the end of September 1909 in Barcelona. However the congress could not take place because of the events of the Tragic Week and the repression that followed it. The First Congress of the CNT was therefore put off until 1910.

This organisation, that has been presented ever since as the model of anarcho-syndicalism, was in fact founded on the basis of revolutionary syndicalist positions: "there was not the slightest reference to anarchism, either as an aim or a basis for action or in terms of principles, etc. Moreover during the Congress the discussions, the resolutions and the Manifestos of the Confederation made not the slightest allusion to the theme of anarchism in a way that would suggest that there was a preponderant weight of this political current or at least that it had a certain influence on the new Confederation. It came across as a completely neutral organ, if the exclusive practice of revolutionary syndicalism can be understood in this way. It was apolitical in the sense that it did not participate in the game of politics or in the process of the government of society. However it was political in the sense that it proposed to replace the present system of social government by a different system based on its own union organisation." (A. Bar, The CNT in the red years).20

Nevertheless, it would of course be wrong to think that the CNT was not influenced by anarchist positions. This can be seen in the three pillars of revolutionary syndicalism that we have examined in the previous articles in this series that analysed the experience of the French CGT and the American IWW: apoliticism, direct action and centralism.

Apoliticism

As we have seen in our previous articles, revolutionary syndicalism claims above all to be "sufficient unto itself": the union should provide the working class with its unitary organ of struggle, the means of organising future society, and even the framework for its theory, although the latter was generally under-estimated. Political organisations were often considered not so much as dangerous as useless. In France, this current nonetheless produced theoretical thinking and writing, thanks to which, for example, its positions reached Spain. But in Spain itself, revolutionary syndicalism remained entirely "practical"; it produced practically no theoretical work and its most important documents were the resolutions adopted at the Congress, in which the level of discussion was very limited. "Spanish revolutionary syndicalism was faithful to one of the basic principles of syndicalism: to be a means of action, a practice and not just a theory. For this reason, contrary to what happened in France, it is very unusual to find theoretical works from Spanish revolutionary syndicalism... The clearest declarations of revolutionary syndicalism are in fact the documents of the organisations, the manifestoes and agreements of Workers' Solidarity as well as of the CNT." (A. Bar, ibid)

It is remarkable that the Congress did not devote a single session to the international situation or to the problem of war. It is even more significant that there was no discussion around the recent events during the Tragic Week which encapsulated a multitude of burning issues (war, direct solidarity in the struggle, the extremely negative role of Lerroux's republicanism).21 From this we can draw the conclusion that there was a reluctance to analyse the conditions of the class struggle and the historic period, difficulty in carrying out theoretical reflection and consequently in drawing the lessons of the experience of the struggle. Instead there was a whole session devoted to a confused and interminable debate on how to interpret the phrase "the emancipation of the workers must be the task of the workers themselves". This ended up with the declaration that only manual workers could carry out this struggle and that intellectual workers must be kept to one side and accepted only as "collaborators".

Direct action

This was considered by the majority of workers to be the main difference in practice between the new organisation, the CNT, and the socialist UGT. In fact we can say that this was the very basis of the constitution of the CNT as a national union (no longer restricted to Catalonia). "The initiative to transform Workers' Solidarity into a Spanish Confederation did not come from the Confederation itself but from numerous entities outside Catalonia. The latter were motivated by the desire to unite with the societies which had not belonged to the General Workers' Union up to then and were interested in the means offered by the direct struggle" (José Negre, quoted by A. Bar in the work quoted above).

Many regroupments of workers in other regions of Spain had had enough of the reformist cretinism of the UGT, of its bureaucratic rigidity and its "quietism" - as many critical socialists recognised. So they greeted with enthusiasm the new workers' union which advocated direct mass struggle and a revolutionary perspective, even if this remained pretty vague. However there is one misunderstanding that ought to be cleared up: direct action is not the same thing as the mass strike. Struggles that break out without the workers having been called out but as a result of a subterranean maturation; general assemblies in which the workers reflect and decide together; massive street demonstrations; the organisation taken in hand directly by the workers without waiting for directives from the leaders: these characterise the workers' struggle in the historic period of capitalist decadence. But they have nothing whatever to do with direct action, by which groups constituted spontaneously by affinity carry out minority actions of "expropriation" or of "propaganda by the deed". The methods of the mass strike spring from the collective and independent action of the workers whereas the methods of direct action depend on the "sovereign will" of small groups of individuals. Enormous confusion has been caused by the amalgamation of "direct action" and the new methods of struggle developed by the class such as in 1905 in Russia or those of Barcelona in 1902 and 1909, that we have mentioned above.This confusion has dogged the CNT throughout its history.

This confusion was expressed in sterile debate between those for and those against the "general strike". The members of the PSOE were against the general strike, seeing in it the abstract and voluntarist attitude of anarchism which throws itself into this or that struggle in order to "transform it arbitrarily into revolution". They were no more capable than their colleagues in Europe's other socialist parties of understanding that the change in historic conditions meant that the Revolution was no longer a distant ideal, it had become the main axis around which must be united all efforts as regards the struggle and class consciousness.22 Rejecting the anarchists' "sublime, great and majestic Revolution", they remained equally ignorant of the concrete changes in the historic situation.

On the other hand, the revolutionary syndicalists wanted sincerely to take the struggle in hand, to develop assemblies and massive struggles but they dressed this up in the old clothes of the general strike, completely dependent on the unions. Although the theses of "direct action" and the "general strike" seemed very radical they were of necessity limited to the economic terrain and so took the form of a more or less radical union economism. It did not express the depth of the struggle, on the contrary it expressed its limitations: "The Confederation and the sections integrated into it must always fight on a purely economic terrain, that is on the terrain of direct action" (CNT Statutes).

Centralism

A large part of the discussion at the Congress was devoted to the organisational question: how should a national union be structured? The rejection of centralisation and extreme federalism meant that the anarchist position prevailed on this point. So in the early period of its existence (up until the 1919 congress) the CNT adopted a structure that was completely anachronistic, formed of a juxtaposition of trade based societies on the one hand and of local federations on the other.

The events in Russia in 1905 proved that the unity of the working class was a revolutionary social force which organised in a centralised fashion. The Petersburg soviet regrouped workers regardless of sector or category and was also open to the intervention of revolutionary groups. Unfortunately the CNT passed motions that went in quite the opposite direction.

On the one hand, influenced by federalism, in response to the extreme misery and hateful brutality of the capitalist regime local groups threw themselves periodically into insurrections that resulted in the declaration of libertarian communism in one locality. These met with brutal repression from bourgeois forces. In the five years preceding the First World War, this happened frequently in Andalucia and also in regions such as Valencia, where agriculture was more developed. One well-known example is the movement that broke out in 1912 in Cullera, a wealthy farming and industrial centre: a movement of day labourers took over the local council building and declared "libertarian communism" in the region. Completely isolated, they were brutally suppressed by the armed forces and the Guardia Civil together.

On the other hand whole groupsof workers were embroiled in corporatism.23 The method of the latter is to model the workers' organisation on the myriad of subdivisions and complexity of the capitalist organisation of production . The effect of this is to develop among the workers a narrow mindedness of the "every man is master in his own house" type. For corporatism, unity is not the unity of all workers, irrespective of trade, industry, or company, in a single and unique collective but the formation of a "pact for solidarity and mutual defence" between independent and sovereign parts of the working class. This vision is expressed in the rules adopted by the Congress which went so far as to accept the existence of two distinct societies for the same trade in the same locality.

Conclusion

One highly significant theme ran through the 1910 Congress. The very day that it began the workers of Sabadell (an industrial area near Barcelona) were engaged in a generalised strike in solidarity with their comrades of Seydoux, who had suffered several disciplinary sackings. The strikers sent delegates to the Congress to ask that it call for a general strike in solidarity. The Congress showed great enthusiasm and sympathy. However it adopted a resolution based on outworn union ideas that were increasingly being overtaken by the fresh wind of the mass workers' struggle: "We propose to the Congress that it adopt as a measure of solidarity with the strikers of Sabadell that all delegates here present encourage their respective entities to perform their solemn duty. That is, that they carry out the decisions of the delegate assemblies of Workers' Solidarity of Barcelona by materially aiding the strikers." This confused and hesitant motion was a real cold shower for the workers of Sabadell and they ended up by going back to work completely defeated.

This episode symbolises the contradiction which was to mark the evolution of the CNT in the period to come. It held the heart of an impetuous proletarian life beating within it, one that wanted to respond to the increasingly explosive situation within which capitalism was locked. However, by the way it responded, revolutionary syndicalism, was shown to be increasingly inadequate and counterproductive and would, in the end, be a hindrance rather than a help.

We will examine this question in the next article, in which we will analyse the action of the CNT in the difficult period of 1914-1923: the CNT faced with war and revolution.

RR and CMir (15th June 2006)

1 CGT - Confédération Générale du Travail, CNT - Confederación Nacional del Trabajo, IWW - International Workers of the World.

2 Its influence was very limited during the Paris Commune and its presence was insignificant in 1905 and 1917 in Russia, as it was in Germany 1918-23.

3 The preface to a book on the proceedings of the Constituent Congress of the CNT (Editorial Anagramme 1976) acknowledges that the CNT "was neither anarcho-collectivist nor anarcho-communist and not even completely revolutionary syndicalist but was rather apolitical and federalist."

4 Among anarchist historians Peirats is one of the best known and is widely recognised for his rigour. The work referred to is considered to be a point of reference in the Spanish anarchist milieu.

5 On the next page, Peirats develops the following idea: "in contrast to the unitary spirit, which is the reflection of a unified landscape - that of the meseta - the borders of the peninsula , with their mountain chains, their valleys and plains form a circle of compartments which house an infinite variety of peoples, languages and traditions. Every zone or nook of this uneven landscape is a sovereign entity, jealous of its institutions, proud of its freedom. This is the birthplace of Spanish federalism. This geographic configuration was always a seedbed of abutting autonomous zones, some of which were separatist, a retort to the absolutism of the East (...) Between separatism and absolutism, federalism lost its way. The latter is based on the free and voluntary connection of all the autonomous units; from individuals to natural regions or those with affinitary links and including free districts. The warm welcome that was accorded in Spain to certain ideological influences coming from abroad by no means contradicts the existence of a home grown federalism that was scarcely mitigated by centuries of extortion. It rather confirms it. (...) The Bakuninist ambassadors sowed their federalist seed - libertarianism - among the Spanish working class" (ibid, p18). Through associated labour at an international level, the working class represents the conscious unification - freely undertaken - of the whole of humanity. This is radically opposed to federalism which is an ideology that reflects dispersion, the fragmentation of the petty bourgeoisie and of the archaic modes of production that preceded capitalism.

6 Pablo Iglesias (1850-1925) founder and leader of the PSOE until his death.

7 IWA - International Workingmen's Association (the First International), PSOE - Partido Socialista Obrero Español.

8 Spanish revolutionary (1911-1989). He came from Trotsky's Left Opposition but broke with it when it capitulated by participating in the Second World War, and continued to defend class positions against the Trotskyists. Founder of the group FOR (Fomento Obrero Revolucionario). See our article in the International Review n°58, "In memory of Munis, a militant of the working class".

9 See our commentary on this book in our Spanish language brochure: "1936: Franco and the Republic massacre the workers"

10 See Archive of Marxist authors: 'The Bakuninists at Work [3]'.

11 In 1882-1883, the state unleashed ferocious repression against day labourers and anarchists under the pretext that it was fighting against a society that organised such attacks; La Mano Negra. The existence of this society has never been proved.

12 See our series on the 1905 revolution beginning in the International Review n°120.

13 The openly anarchist historian, Francisco Olaya Morales makes the following statement in his book History of the Spanish Workers' Movement (1900-1936): "at the end of December, the strike committee contacted some anarchist societies but they refused to join the committee on the grounds that it had transgressed the rule of direct action" (sic) (page 54).

14 We will come back to this experience latter.

15 See Olaya's book referred to in a previous note, p54.

16 Spanish capital was engaged in a costly war in Morocco in defence of its imperialist interests (to take possession of a number of colonial zones by picking up the remains left by the big powers). This war made it necessary to send a continuous supply of troops, so sacrificing a large number of workers and peasants. Many young men knew that being sent to Morocco meant, not only that they would have to suffer the misery of life in the barracks, but also that they would die or be invalids for the rest of their lives.

17 A dubious individual and an adventurer, founder of the radical party, which was important in Spanish politics until the 1930s.

18 Unlike the French experience (see the articles from this series in International Review n°118 and 120), or that of the IWW in the USA (see n°124 and 125 of the Review), in Spain no revolutionary syndicalist tendency found a clear expression in written works or even in articles. It was made up of trades unions which had broken from the Socialist Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT), and some anarchists like José Prat (of whom more later) who were more open to the different tendencies existing in the workers' movement.

19 Theoreticians of French revolutionary syndicalism. See the articles in this series previously referred to.

20 When the anarchist historian, Francisco Olaya Morales, talks about the period of the CNT's founding in his book History of the Spanish Workers' Movement (1900-1936), he says clearly (p277 onwards) that the socialists participated in the founding and in the early life of the CNT. He quotes José Prat, an anarchist author although independent (mentioned above) who was in favour of this participation.

21 There was only a brief mention in passing about the painful problem of the number of prisoners.

22 This is the problem that Rosa Luxemburg clarified in this period, when she examined the huge mass strike of 1905: "On the other hand, the incessant economic war waged by the workers against capital keeps combative energy on the alert even in times of political calm. It constitutes a sort of permanent reservoir of energy from which the political struggle continually draws fresh forces. At the same time the tireless work of chipping away for reforms unleashes here or there sharp conflicts from which political struggles suddenly burst forth. In brief, the economic struggle provides a continuity, it is the thread that ties together the various political knots; the political struggle is a periodic fertilisation that prepares the soil for the economic struggles. Cause and effect succeed one another and alternate constantly. So, in a period of mass strike, the economic factor and the political factor, far from being completely distinct or even mutually exclusive, as the schema of the pedants affirms, represent two complementary aspects of the proletarian class struggle in Russia." (Mass strike, party and unions)

23 The following example illustrates the weight of corporatism. In 1915 the Federation Committee of Reus, an industrial zone near Tarragona - dominated by the socialists - signed an agreement with the bosses behind the backs of the striking workers which resulted in the defeat of the latter. The petitions that the workers circulated, asking that the Committee campaign for a general solidarity strike, were buried. The Committee, which was dominated by men, was suspicious of the demands of the women and gave preference to the interests of the sector - the engineering workers - that the majority of them came from. They did so to the detriment of the basic interests of the working class as a whole, which lay in expressing an indispensable solidarity with the female comrades in struggle.

In the first part of his article, we saw that, contrary to what is often asserted, it is not the mechanism of the tendency towards the fall in the rate of profit which is at the heart of Marx's analysis of the economic contradictions of the capitalist system, but the fetter that the wage labour relationship places upon the ultimate demand of society: "The ultimate reason for all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses, in the face of the drive of capitalist production to develop the productive forces as if only the absolute consumption capacity of society set a limit to them" (Marx, Capital, Vol 3, Chapter 30: "Money capital and real capital: 1", p615). [1] This is the consequence of the subordination of the world to the dictatorship of wage labour, which enables the bourgeoisie to appropriate a maximum of surplus labour. But as Marx explains, the frenetic production of commodities engendered by the exploitation of the workers gives rise to a piling up of products which grows more rapidly than the solvent demand of society as a whole: "When considering the production process we saw that the whole aim of capitalist production is appropriation of the greatest possible amount of surplus-labour ... in short, large-scale production, i.e., mass production. It is thus in the nature of capitalist production, to produce without regard to the limits of the market." [2] This contradiction periodically provokes a phenomenon hitherto unknown in the whole history of humanity: the crises of overproduction: "an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity - the epidemic of over-production."[3] "The immense but intermittent elasticity of the factory system, combined with its dependency on the universal market, necessarily gives birth to feverish production, followed by a glut on the markets, whose contraction then leads to paralysis. The life of industry is thus transformed into a series of periods of average activity, prosperity, overproduction, crisis, and stagnation".[4]

More precisely, Marx situates this contradiction between the tendency towards the frenetic development of the productive forces and the limitations to the growth of society's ultimate consuming power given the relative impoverishment of the wage labourers: "To each capitalist, the total mass of all workers, with the exception of his own workers, appear not as workers, but as consumers, possessors of exchange values (wages), money, which they exchange for his commodity."[5] Now, following Marx, "the consumer power of society is not determined either by the absolute productive power, or by the absolute consumer power, but by the consumer power based on antagonistic conditions of distribution,[6] which reduce the consumption of the bulk of society to a minimum varying within more or less narrow limits."[7] It thus follows that "Over-production is specifically conditioned by the general law of the production of capital: to produce to the limit set by the productive forces, that is to say, to exploit the maximum amount of labour with the given amount of capital, without any consideration for the actual limits of the market or the needs backed by the ability to pay"[8] This is the heart of the marxist analysis of the economic contradictions of capitalism: the system must ceaselessly increase production while consumption cannot, within the present class structure, follow an identical rhythm.

In the first part of our article, we also saw that, in its internal mechanism, the tendency for the rate of profit to fall could well run alongside the emergence of crises of overproduction. Indeed, this idea appears in many places in Marx's work, for example in the chapter of Capital on the internal contradictions of the law of the falling rate of profit: "Over-production of capital is never anything more than overproduction of means of production (...) a fall in the intensity of exploitation below a certain point, however, calls forth disturbances, and stoppages in the capitalist production process, crises, and destruction of capital."[9] However, for Marx it was neither the exclusive nor even the main cause of the contradictions of capitalism. Furthermore, in the Preface to the 1886 English edition of Book 1 of Capital, when Engels is summarising Marx's conception, he does not refer to the tendency for the rate of profit to fall but to the contradiction which Marx constantly underlined between "the absolute development of the productive forces" and "the limitations on the growth of society's ultimate consuming power": "While the productive power increases in a geometric, the extension of markets proceeds at best in an arithmetic ratio. The decennial cycle of stagnation, prosperity, over-production and crisis, ever recurrent from 1825 to 1867, seems indeed to have run its course; but only to land us in the slough of despond of a permanent and chronic depression".[10]

Thus, as we will show, and as will be clear to anyone who approaches this question in a serious and honest way, the CWO[11] defends, on the question of the fundamental causes of the economic crises of capitalism and of the decadence of this mode of production, a different analysis from the one defended in their day by Marx and Engels. They have every right to do so, and even the responsibility to do so if they consider it necessary. Whatever the depth and value of his contribution to the theory of the proletariat, Marx was not infallible and his writings should not be seen as sacred texts. The writings of Marx must also be subjected to a critique by the marxist method. This is the approach that Rosa Luxemburg adopts in The Accumulation of Capital (1913) when she brings to light the contradictions in Volume II of Capital with regard to the schemas of enlarged reproduction. This said, when you put a part of Marx's work into question, political and scientific honesty demands that you openly and explicitly take responsibility for such an approach. This is exactly what Rosa Luxemburg did in her book and it was this which provoked such hostility among the "orthodox marxists" who were so scandalised by anyone putting Marx's writings into question. Unfortunately this is not what the CWO does when it moves away from Marx's analysis while claiming to remain loyal to it, and at the same time accusing the ICC of distancing itself from materialism and thus from marxism. For our part, if we take up Marx's analyses here, it is because we consider them to be correct and because they take into account the reality of capitalism.

Thus, having examined this question on the theoretical level in the first part of this article, we are going to show how empirical reality totally invalidates the theory of those who make the evolution of the rate of profit the alpha and omega of the explanation of crises, wars and decadence. To do this, we will continue to base ourselves on the critique of Paul Mattick's analysis adopted by the IBRP, which argues that on the eve of World War I the economic crisis had reached such proportions that it could no longer be resolved through the classic means of devalorising fixed capital (i.e. bankruptcies) as it had during the 19th century, but now demanded the physical destruction that comes with war: "Under 19th century conditions it was relatively easy to overcome over-accumulation by means of crises that more or less affected all capital entities on an international scale. But at the turn of the century a point had been reached where the destruction of capital through crisis and competition was no longer sufficient to change the total capital structure towards a greater profitability. The business cycle as an instrument of accumulation had apparently come to an end; or rather, the business cycle became a cycle of world wars. Although this situation may be explained politically it was also a consequence of the capitalist accumulation process (...) The resumption of the accumulation process in the wake of a ‘strictly' economic crisis increases the general scale of production. War, too, results in the revival and increase of economic activity. In either case capital emerges more concentrated and more centralised. And this both in spite and because of the destruction of capital." (Paul Mattick as quoted in the article in Revolutionary Perspectives n°37).[12]

This is the IBRP's analysis of capitalism's entry into its phase of decadence. On this basis, the latter accuses us of idealism because we do not advance a clearly economic analysis to explain every phenomenon in society and decadence in particular: "In the materialist concept of history the social process as a whole is determined by the economic process. The contradictions of material life determine the ideological life. The ICC is asserting, in the most casual way, that an entire period of capitalism's history has ended and another has opened up. Such a major change could not occur without a fundamental change in the capitalist infrastructure. The ICC must either support its assertions with an analysis from the sphere of production or admit that they are pure conjecture." (Revolutionary Perspectives n°37). This is what we are now going to discuss.

Historical materialism and a mode of production's entry into decadence

In the belief that it is making good use of the marxist method, the IBRP has found, in the councilist Paul Mattick, the "material bases" for the opening up of capitalism's period of decadence. Unfortunately for the IBRP, if the marxist method - historical and dialectical materialism - could be summed up as looking for an economic explanation for every single phenomenon in capitalism, then, as Engels said, "the application of the theory to any period of history would be easier than the solution of a simple equation of the first degree."[13]. What the IBRP quite simply forgets here is that marxism is not just a materialist method of analysis but also a historical and dialectical one. So what does history tell us about a mode of production's entry into decadence on the economic level?

History tells us that no period of decadence has begun with an economic crisis! There is nothing surprising in this because a system at its apogee is in its period of greatest prosperity. The first manifestations of decadence can therefore only appear in a very weak manner at this level; they appear above all in other areas and on other levels. Thus, for example, before plunging into endless crises on the material level, Roman decadence first of all expressed itself in the halting of its geographical expansion in the second century AD, by the first military defeats at the edges of the Roman empire during the third century, as well as by the first simultaneous outbreak of slave revolts all over the colonies. Similarly, before getting stuck in economic crises, famines, plague and the Hundred Years War, the first signs of the decadence of the feudal mode of production appeared in the end of the land clearances for new estates in the last third of the 13th century.

In both these cases, economic crises as products of blockages in the substructure only developed well after the entry into decadence. The passage from ascendance to decadence of a mode of production on the economic level can be compared to the changing of the tides: at its highest point, the sea seems to be at its most powerful and its retreat is almost imperceptible. But when contradictions in the economic underpinnings begin to gnaw away at society at a deep level, it is the superstructural manifestations which appear first.

The same goes for capitalism: before appearing on the economic and quantitative level, decadence found expression as a qualitative phenomenon at the social, political and ideological level, through the exacerbation of conflicts within the ruling class, leading to the First World War, by the state taking control of the economy for the needs of war, through the betrayal of social democracy and the passing of the unions into the camp of capital, through the eruption of a proletariat that demonstrated its capacity to overthrow the domination of the bourgeoisie and through the introduction of the first measures aimed at the social containment of the working class.

It is thus quite logical and fully coherent with historical materialism that capitalism's entry into decadence did not express itself first of all through an economic crisis. The events which took place at this point did not yet fully express all the characteristics of its phase of decadence; they were an exacerbation of the dynamics that belonged to its ascendant period, in a context which was in the process of profound modification. It was only later on, when the blockages at the substructural level had done their work, that the economic crises now began to fully unfold. The causes of decadence and of the First World War are not to be found in a certain rate of profit or an economic crisis that was nowhere to be seen in 1913 (see below) but in a totality of economic and political causes, as explained in International Review n°67.[14] The prosperity of capitalism during the Belle Epoque was fully recognised by the revolutionary movement at the time of the Communist International (1919-28). At its First Congress, in the Report on the World Situation written by Trotsky, the CI noted that "the two decades preceding the war were a period of particularly powerful capitalist growth".

An empirical invalidation of the thesis of Mattick and the IBRP

This theoretical and empirical observation drawn from the evolution of past modes of production is fully confirmed by capitalism. Whether we examine the rate of growth, the rate of profit, or other economic parameters, there is no confirmation of the theory of Mattick and the IBRP, according to which capitalism's entry into its phase of decadence and the outbreak of the First World War was the product of an economic crisis following a fall in the rate of profit, necessitating a massive devalorisation of capital through the destruction caused by war.

The growth-rate of GNP, measured in volume by inhabitant (thus with inflation deducted) was on the rise throughout the ascendant period of capitalism, reaching a culminating point on the eve of 1914. All the figures we publish below show that the period leading up to the First World War was the most prosperous in the whole history of capitalism up to that point. This observation remains constant regardless of what indicators we use:

The same is true if we examine the evolution of the rate of profit, which is the variable taken into account by all those who make this question the key to understanding all the economic laws of capitalism. The graphs for the USA and France which we reproduce below also show that there is no confirmation of the theory of Mattick and the IBRP. In France, neither the level, nor the evolution of the rate of profit can in any way explain the outbreak of the First World War since the rate had been on the rise since 1896 and had been rising even more sharply from 1910 on! Nor can the rate of profit explain the USA's entry into the 1914-18 war: oscillating around 15% since 1895, it was on the rise after 1914 and reached 16% at the time the US entered the war in March-April 1917! Neither the level, nor the rate of profit on the eve of the First World War are able to explain the outbreak of the war or capitalism's entry into its phase of decadence.

Nevertheless, it is undeniable that the first perceptible economic signs of a turning point between ascendance and decadence did begin to emerge at this time: not at the level of the evolution of the rate of profit as Mattick and the IBRP wrongly claim, but at the level of a lack of final demand, with the appearance of the premises of a saturation of markets relative to the needs of accumulation on a world scale, as had been predicted by Engels and Rosa Luxemburg (see the first part of this article). This was also noted by the same report by the Third International cited above, which goes on to say "Having tested out the world market through their trusts, cartels and consortiums, the rulers of the world' destiny took into account that this mad growth of capitalism must run up against the limits of the world market's capacity". Thus, in the USA, after a vigorous growth over 20 years (1890-1910), during which the index of industrial activity multiplied by 2.5, the latter began to stagnate between 1910 and 1914 and only picked up in 1915 thanks to the export of military equipment to Europe. Not only did the American economy lose its dynamism on the eve of 1914, but Europe also experienced certain conjunctural difficulties linked to the limitations of world demand, and tried, more and more vainly, to turn towards external markets: "But, under the influence of the crisis that was developing in Europe, the following year (1912) saw a reversal of the conjuncture (in the USA)....Germany then went through a period of accelerated expansion. In 1913 industrial production was 32% above the 1908 level... With the internal market being incapable of absorbing such a level of production, industry turned towards external markets, with exports rising by 60% as against 41% for imports... the turn-around took place at the beginning of 1913... unemployment began to develop in 1914. The depression was mild and short-lived: a temporary recovery began in the spring of 1914. The crisis, having begun in Germany, then spread to the UK... the repercussions of the German crisis were felt in France in August 1913...In the US, it was not until the beginning of 1915 that production began to develop under the influence of war demand" (all these figures, as well as this passage, are taken from the Les crises économiques, PUF no.1295, 1993, p42-48).

These conjunctural difficulties developing on the eve of 1914 were so many precursors of what would become a permanent economic difficulty for decadent capitalism: a structural lack of solvent markets. However, it has to be said that the First World War broke out in a general climate of prosperity and not of crisis, i.e., of a continuation of the Belle Epoque: "The last years of the pre-war period, like the years 1900-1910, were particularly good ones for the three great powers who participated in the war (France, Germany and Britain). From the point of view of economic growth, the years 1909 to 1913 without doubt represented the four best years in their history. Apart from France where the year 1913 was marked by a slow-down in growth, this year was one of the best years of the century, with an annual growth rate of 4.5% in Germany, 3.4% in Britain, with France at a mere 0.6%. The bad results in France can be entirely explained by the 3.1% fall in agricultural production."[15]The war thus broke out before the beginning of a real economic crisis, almost as if the latter had been anticipated; indeed this was noted in the above-cited report from the First CI Congress: "...they tried to find a way out of this situation by a surgical method. The sanguinary crisis of the World War was intended to supersede an indefinitely long period of economic depression". This is why all the revolutionaries of the time, from Lenin to Rosa Luxemburg via Trotsky and Pannekoek, while pointing to the economic factor among the causes of the outbreak of the First World War, did not describe it as an economic crisis or a fall in the rate of profit but as the exacerbation of the previous imperialist tendencies: the continuation of the imperialist scramble to grab the remaining non-capitalist territories of the globe[16] or the dividing up of the markets and no longer the conquest of new ones.[17]

Alongside these "economic" observations, all these illustrious revolutionaries wrote at length about a series of other factors in the political, social and inter-imperialist domains. Thus, for example, Lenin insisted on the hegemonic dimension of imperialism and its consequences in the decadent phase of capitalism "(1) the fact that the world is already partitioned obliges those contemplating a redivision to reach out for every kind of territory, and (2) an essential feature of imperialism is the rivalry between several great powers in the striving for hegemony, i.e., for the conquest of territory, not so much directly for themselves as to weaken the adversary and undermine his hegemony. (Belgium is particularly important for Germany as a base for operations against Britain; Britain needs Baghdad as a base for operations against Germany, etc.)". This new characteristic of imperialism underlined by Lenin is essential to understand because it meant that "the conquest of territories" in the course of inter-imperialist conflicts in decadence has less and less economic rationality but rather takes on an increasingly strategic dimension: "Belgium is particularly important for Germany as a base for operations against Britain; Britain needs Baghdad as a base for operations against Germany, etc."[18]

So while we can indeed see the first signs of economic difficulty on the eve of 1914, these remained very limited, comparable to previous cyclical crises and not at all on the scale of the long crisis which was to begin in 1929 or as deep as the current crises; at the same time they appeared not at the level of a fall in the rate of profit but of a saturation of the markets, which was to prove the defining characteristic of the decadence of capitalism on the economic level as Rosa Luxemburg predicted: "the more numerous are the countries who have developed their own capitalist industry, and the more the need for the extension and the capacity of extension of production increases on the one hand, the less the capacity for the realisation of production increases in relation to the former. If we compare the bounds made by British industry in the years 1860-70, when Britain still dominated the world market, with its growth in the last two decades, since which time Germany and the United States of America have made considerable gains on the world market at Britain's expense, it becomes clear that growth has been much slower than before. The fate of British industry thus depends on German industry, North American industry, and in the end the industry of the world. At each stage of its development, capitalist production irresistibly approaches the epoch in which it will only be able to develop with increasing slowness and difficulty."[19]

From this short empirical examination, it is clear that the First World War did not break out in the wake of a fall in the rate of profit, nor of an economic crisis as Mattick and the IBRP claim. It now remains to examine the complement to the thesis of the IBRP, i.e. to verify empirically whether the destruction resulting from war was the basis for a rediscovered ‘prosperity' in peacetime, thanks to a re-establishment of the rate of profit through the destruction caused by war.

The inter-war period disproves the IBRP's thesis

Very well, the IBRP would no doubt respond, but if the outbreak of the First World War cannot be explained either by a fall in the rate of profit nor by an economic crisis that forced capitalism to devalorise on a massive scale, devalorisation still took place during the course of the war as a result of massive destruction; and it is this which is at the basis of the economic growth and of the rise in the rate of profit after the war: "It was on the basis of this devaluation of capital and cheapening of labour power that rates of profit were increased and it was on this that the recovery period up to 1929 was based." (Revolutionary Perspectives n°37).

What really happened? Was there in fact a "devalorisation of capital" and a "devalorisation of labour power" during the war, allowing for a "reestablishment" until 1929, a reestablishment that supposedly allowed a recovery of the rate of profit following the destruction caused by war? It is empirically very easy to refute this idea of the economic rationality of the First World War since "during the First World War 35% of the accumulated wealth of mankind was destroyed" (Revolutionary Perspectives n°37); far from having "laid the basis for periods of renewed accumulation of capital" (Revolutionary Perspectives n°37) this resulted on the contrary in a stagnation of world trade during the whole inter-war period as well as the worst economic performances in the whole history of capitalism.[20]

If we examine in a bit more detail the growth of GNP by inhabitant during this troubled inter-war period by taking the beginning of the period of capitalist decadence as a reference point (1913), the end of the First World War (1919), the year of the outbreak of the great crisis of the 1930s (1929) as well as the situation on the eve of the Second World War (1939), we can see the following evolution.

The very feeble growth during this whole period (in the order of plus or minus 1% only per year on average) shows that the destruction of war did not constitute a stimulant to economic activity in the way that Mattick and the IBRP claim. This table also shows that the situations were very divergent and that it was by no means the countries most involved in the war who came out best in the very short period of reconstruction and recovery between 1919 and 1929. War was certainly not good business for Britain, since it only exceeded its 1913 level by 4 points, nor for Germany with hardly 13 points! For the latter country, the strong growth during the years 1929-39 was based essentially on the arms expenditure that generalised during the 1930s, since the index of its industrial production, which was 100 in 1913 was only at 102 in 1929; whereas the proportion of military expenditure in its GNP, which was still only 0.9% in the years 1929-32, rose brutally after 1933 to 3.3% and went on growing, reaching 28% in 1938![21]

In conclusion, nothing, either theoretically, historically, and still less empirically, supports this idea of Mattick's, taken up by the IBRP, that war has such regenerative effects on the economy: "War ... results in the revival and increase of economic activity" (Revolutionary Perspectives n°37). If there is any truth in what the IBRP is saying, it is a truth proclaimed by all revolutionaries since 1914 - that the war was a catastrophe which had no precedent in human history. Not only on the economic level (more than third of the world's wealth was ruined) but also on the social level (ferocious exploitation of a labour force reduced to extreme poverty), the political level (with the treason of the great organisations of the proletariat forged so painfully over a half century of struggles - the Socialist parties and the trade unions) and on the human level (20 million soldiers killed or wounded and another 20 million dead from the Spanish flu epidemic after the war). Since nothing since then has attested to the economic rationality of war, the IBRP should reflect a bit more before attacking our view that war in the decadent phase of capitalism has become irrational "Instead of seeing war as serving an economic function for the survival of the capitalist system, it has been argued by some left communist groups, notably the Internationalist Communist Current (ICC), that wars serve no function for capitalism. Instead, wars are characterised as ‘irrational', without either short or long-term function in capitalist accumulation." (Revolutionary Perspectives n°37).

Instead of rushing to call us idealists, the IBRP would do better to take off its vulgar materialist spectacles and return to an analysis which is a bit more historical and dialectical, since a detailed examination of what the IBRP calls "the economic process" "material life", "the capitalist infrastructure", "the sphere of production" teaches us that there was no open crisis nor fall in the rate of profit before the First World War and no miraculous peacetime recovery on the basis of the destruction caused by war. We therefore invite the IBRP to verify its claims more seriously before enshrining as truth what turns out to be desire rather than reality, and before accusing others of idealism when it is itself not even capable of producing a "materialist analysis" able to give a coherent account of reality.

The falling rate of profit is not adequate for explaining crises, wars and reconstructions

If the theory of Mattick and the IBRP is not at all verified with regard to the First World War, is it not attested by other periods? Is it possible to refute this theory in general? This is what we aim to examine next.

To approach this question, we will base ourselves on two curves indicating the rate of profit in the long term with regard to the USA on the one hand and France on the other. We would of course have liked to have presented this in relation to Germany, but, despite our research, we have only been able to trace its evolution in the period after 1945 and for a few dates prior to that. Unfortunately, the lack of homogeneity in the mode of calculating for these different dates makes it difficult to analyse the process of evolution. According to the data we do have, however, with a few variations, we can consider the curve for France to be characteristic of the general evolution of the old continent.[22]

Is the level and/or the evolution of the rate of profit able to explain wars?

As we have already shown, the graph of the evolution of the rate of profit in France indicates very clearly that it does not explain the outbreak of the First World War since the rate had been growing since 1896 and had been growing even more strongly after 1910! We can now see that the same thing goes for the Second World War, since on the eve of hostilities, the level of the rate of profit of the French economy was very high (double what it was during the period of prosperity between 1896 and the First World War!) and after a fall during the 1920s, it remained stable throughout the 30s.

Moreover, if the war could be explained by the level and/or tendency for the rate of profit to fall, then it becomes impossible to understand why the Third World War did not break out during the second half of the 1970s, since the rate of profit was definitely declining from 1965 on and reached levels much lower than in 1914 and 1940 - when according to the IBRP it reached thresholds that provoked the First and Second World Wars!

As for the USA, the falling rate of profit cannot explain its entry into the First World War because it was on the rise some years before it joined the conflict. The same goes for the Second World War since the US rate of profit was recovering very vigorously during the decade preceding its entry into the war: in 1940 it got back to the level before the crisis and had reached an even higher level at the moment it entered the war.

In conclusion, contrary to the theory of Mattick and the IBRP, whether we are talking about the old continent or the new, neither the level nor the evolution of the rate of profit can explain the outbreak of the two world wars. Not only do we n see that the rate of profit was not declining on the eve of the world conflicts - for the most part it had been rising for a number of years! To say the least, this must put into question the theory of the economic rationality of war professed by the IBRP, since what rationality could there be for capitalism to go to war and undertake a massive destruction of its capital at a time when the rate of profit was soaring? Understand it if you can!

Does the level and/or the evolution of the rate of profit explain the post-war prosperity?

The dynamic towards a rising rate of profit preceded World War II, so much so that in 1940, i.e. before America entered the war, the USA had recovered the average level it had reached before the great crisis of 1929, a level which would also be the same as that of the Reconstruction boom after the Second World War. At the time it entered the war the level was even higher. From that point, neither the re-establishment of the rate of profit, nor the economic prosperity of the post-war period can be explained by the destructions caused by war. It had been the same for the previous war since the dynamic towards a recovery in the rate of profit had preceded America's engagement in the conflict, and there was no significant rise in the rate after the war. Once again, neither the level, nor the tendency of the rate of profit after the First World War can be explained by America's entry into the war.

As for France, its rate of profit did not significantly improve after the First World War because, after a tiny rise of 1% between 1920 and 1923, the rate fell by 2% during the course of the 20s and then stabilised during the 30s. Only the clearly higher rate of profit after the Second World War in comparison to the pre-war situation could give any credence - in this case, and only in this case - to the IBRP's hypothesis. We will see however in the next parts of this article that the post-war prosperity owes nothing to the destruction and other economic consequences of the war.

In conclusion, it has to be said that capital's return to profitability precedes the military conflicts and the destruction caused by the war! War and its destruction thus has little to do with the revival of the rate of profit. The idea that this destruction regenerated the rate of profit, which in turn allowed a return to prosperity after the war, are just as phantasmal as the rest of the IBRP's theory.

Can the level or evolution of the rate of profit explain the crises?

Can the level and/or the rate of profit explain the 1929 crash and the crisis of the 1930s? Contrary to what the IBRP argues, it cannot be the level of the rate of profit in the USA that explains the outbreak of the crisis since in 1929 it was higher than it had been during the two previous decades of economic growth. As for the orientation of the rate of profit, it is true that it was heading downwards just before the crisis of 1929 - both in the US and in France - but this was very limited both in intensity and in duration. Thus, in France, the fall in the rate of profit between 1973 and 1980 was much more dramatic than at the time of the crisis of 1929, without this producing consequences of the same breadth (a brutal deflation leading to a very pronounced fall in production). Although unfolding over a longer period, the same can be said for the USA, since the fall in the rate of profit between the end of the 60s and the beginning of the 80s was hardly any lower than during the crisis of 1929, without this engendering the same spectacular consequences. In both cases, the difference with the present crisis can be linked to the state capitalist measures used to artificially boost solvent demand, indicating that its the latter factor which is the decisive variable in explaining crises.

The inability of the IBRP to understand the evolution and persistence of the present crisis

The evolution of the present crisis clearly shows that the theory of crisis based solely on the evolution of the rate of profit is totally unsatisfactory. The IBRP tells us that the cycle of accumulation gets blocked or stagnates when the rate of profit becomes too low and that it can only recover following the destructions of war, which permit the devalorisation and renewal of fixed capital: "The law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall means that at certain point the cycle of accumulation is arrested or stagnates. When this happens only a massive devaluation of existing capital values can start accumulation again. In the twentieth century the two world wars were the outcomes. Today we have had thirty plus years of stagnation and the system has only limped along through the massive accumulation of debt, both public and private."[23]

But then:

a) how can the IBRP explain that the crisis persists and gets worse when the rate of profit has been rising vigorously since the beginning of the 80s and has even returned to the levels it reached during the Reconstruction? (see the graph...);

b) how can the IBRP explain that, with an analagous level of profit during the 1960s, neither productivity, nor growth, nor accumulation recovered as its theory would predict;[24]

c) how can the IBRP explain that the rate of profit was able to revive fully when we are told that this can only happen through a "massive devaluation of existing capital values"? Since the Third World War has not taken place, where is the IBRP to find this "massive devaluation of existing capital" that can account for this revival in the rate of profit?

The IBRP has attempted to answer the third question: how to explain the current spectacular rise in the rate of profit without there having been a massive devaluation following destructions caused by war?

The IBRP puts forward two arguments. The first consists of taking up the arguments which we levelled at them in our polemic in International Review n°121, i.e. that the rate of profit can rise, not only following a massive devaluation of fixed capital but also with an increase in the rate of surplus value (or rate of exploitation).[25] Now, this has very clearly been the case since the drastic austerity that has hit the working class (freezing and reduction of wages, increasing rhythm and hours of labour, etc) and makes it possible to explain this revival in the rate of profit. The second argument by the IBRP consists of substituting the destruction/devaluations of a war that hasn't taken place with the twaddle of bourgeois propaganda about the so-called new technological revolution. It would seem that the latter has the same effect: diminishing the price of fixed capital following the gains in productivity brought about by this new technological revolution. This is doubly false because gains in productivity have been stagnating in all the developed countries, demonstrating that the so-called "new technological revolution" with which the IBRP constantly assaults our ears is nothing but a copy of the propaganda coming out of the bourgeois media.[26]

With the aid of these two arguments (the rise in the rate of profit thanks to austerity, and the diminution of the value of fixed capital thanks to the new technological revolution) the IBRP thinks that it has triumphantly explained the revival of the rate of profit. Very well, but the problem remains, and it has even shot itself in the foot by aggravating its own contradictions, since:

a) Now that the IBRP recognises that there has been a rise in the rate of profit,[27] how can it explain why a new cycle of accumulation has not begun, since all the conditions for it are present: "Thus, in the expression of the rate of profit, the numerator (s) is increased while the denominator (c+v) is decreased, and the rate of profit increased. It is on the basis of the increased rate of profit that a new cycle of accumulation can be started". The persistence of the crisis then becomes a mystery.

b) Following Mattick's theory, the IBRP claims that when the rate of profit rises on the basis of a reduction in the organic composition of capital and a rise in the rate of surplus value, the crisis is reabsorbed.[28]How can the IBRP explain how the crisis has continued to get worse even when the rate of profit has continued to rise since the 1980s?

c) The whole argument of the IBRP has been that "at the turn of the century a point had been reached where the destruction of capital through crisis and competition was no longer sufficient to change the total capital structure towards a greater profitability. The business cycle as an instrument of accumulation had apparently come to an end; or rather, the business cycle became a cycle of world wars". But now we have to say that with the new explanation the IBRP is offering us, capitalism has indeed been able to boost the rate of profit without resorting to a massive devalorisation of fixed capital through war. This was also the case in the USA after 1932, i.e. ten years before this country entered the war!

d) If capitalism is going through a new technological revolution enabling it to strongly reduce the cost of fixed capital without resorting to war, and if at the same time it has notably increased its rate of surplus value, what is the difference with the ascendant phase? How can the IBRP continue to argue that capitalism is senile, since it has succeeded in reviving its profit rate without resorting to the massive destruction caused by war, which according to the IBRP is the only way of re-launching the cycle of accumulation in the decadent epoch?

e) Finally, if capitalism is going through a new technological revolution and the IBRP recognises that the rate of profit has significantly increased, why does it continue to sing the same refrain, affirming that capitalism is in crisis because the rate of profit is so low? "The crisis at the start of the 1970s is a consequence of the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall: it does not mean that capitalism stops making profits but it does mean that their average profit rates are so low" ("The Turner Plan: it's time to pension off capitalism", Revolutionary Perspectives n°38, March 2006). Again, understand it if you can! It is indeed very difficult to free yourself from a dogma and put it into question when its been your trade mark from the beginning!

All these contradictions and insoluble questions simply and purely invalidate the thesis of Mattick and the IBRP who claim that only the level and/or variation in the rate of profit can explain the crisis and its evolution. For our part, all these mysteries are obviously only comprehensible if you integrate the central thesis elaborated by Marx, i.e. "society's limited power of consumption" or the saturation of solvent markets (see the first part of this article). For us, the response is extremely clear - the rate of profit could only have increased following a rise in the rate of surplus value brought about by incessant attacks on the working class and not through a change in organic composition on the basis of an imaginary "new technological revolution". It is this lack of solvent markets which explains why today, despite the re-establishment of the rate of profit, accumulation, productivity and growth have not taken off again: "The ultimate reason for all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses, in the face of the drive of capitalist production to develop the productive forces as if only the absolute consumption capacity of society set a limit to them". This response is extremely simple and clear but it is incomprehensible to the IBRP.

This inability to understand and integrate the totality of Marx's analyses and to break away from this dogma of the crisis being caused uniquely by the falling rate of profit is one of the major obstacles to their understanding. We will examine this further in the next part of this article, by going to the roots of the divergences between Marx's analysis of crises and the pale, emasculated copy set up by the IBRP.

C Mcl.

[1] Marx, Capital, Volume III This analysis elaborated by Marx obviously has nothing to do with the underconsumptionist theory of crises, which he denounced elsewhere:"it is said that the working class receives too small a share of its own product, and that this evil could be remedied by giving it a greater share of this product, and therefore higher wages. But we need only remember that crises are always preceded precisely by a period of a general increae in wages, where the working class does indeed win a greater share of the fraction of annual capital destined for consumption. From the point of view of these knights of ‘simple' (!) common sense..." (Capital). As Marx said you would have to be very naïve to believe that the economic crisis could be resolved by an increase in wages since this could only take place to the detriment of profits and thus of productive investment.

[2] Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, part II, chapter XVII, ‘Ricardo's Theory of Accumulation and a Critique of it. The Contradiction Between the Impetuous Development of the Productive Powers and the Limitations of Consumption Leads to Over-production'.

[3] Communist Manifesto, "Bourgeois and proletarians"

[4] Marx, Capital.

[5] Marx, Grundrisse, "Chapter on Capital, Circulation Process of Capital"

[6] Marx is talking here about wage labour which is at the heart of this "antagonistic conditions of distribution" in which the class struggle regulates the division between the capitalists' tendency to extort a maximum of surplus labour and the resistance to this by the workers. It is this conflict which partly explains the natural tendency for capitalism to restrict as much as it can the amount devoted to wages in favour of the amount taken in profit, or, in other words, to increase the rate of surplus value: surplus value divided by wages can also be called the rate of exploitation: "the general tendency of capitalist production is not to elevate, but to reduce the average level of wages" (Marx, Wages, Prices and Profits).

[7] Marx, Capital, Volume III, Chapter 15

[8] Marx, Capital, Volume IV, Chapter 17, "Theories of Surplus Value"

[9] Capital, Vol III Part III, Chapter 15, "Exposition of the Internal Contradictions of the Law"

[10] Cited in the preface to the English edition of Volume I of Capital (1886)

[11] The CWO (Communist Workers Organisation) is, with Battaglia Comunista, one of the two pillars of the IBRP (International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party). We will use these initials throughout this text.

[12] Paul Mattick Marx and Keynes, Merlin, 1969 p 135.

[13] Engels, letter to J Bloch, 21 September 1890: "According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Other than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody [such as the IBRP - ed.] twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure - political forms of the class struggle and its results, to wit: constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc., juridical forms, and even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas - also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form. There is an interaction of all these elements in which, amid all the endless host of accidents (that is, of things and events whose inner interconnection is so remote or so impossible of proof that we can regard it as non-existent, as negligible), the economic movement finally asserts itself as necessary. Otherwise the application of the theory to any period of history would be easier than the solution of a simple equation of the first degree....Marx and I are ourselves partly to blame for the fact that the younger people [such as the IBRP - ed.] sometimes lay more stress on the economic side than is due to it. We had to emphasise the main principle via-a-vis our adversaries, who denied it, and we had not always the time, the place or the opportunity to give their due to the other elements involved in the interaction. But when it came to presenting a section of history, that is, to making a practical application, it was a different matter and there no error was permissible. Unfortunately, however, it happens only too often that people [such as the IBRP - ed.] think they have fully understood a new theory and can apply it without more ado from the moment they have assimilated its main principles, and even those not always correctly".

[14] This analysis was clearly put forward by our organisation during its 9th Congress in 1991: "While it is clear that in the last instance imperialist war derives from the exacerbation of economic rivalries between nations, itself the result of the crisis of the capitalist mode of production, we must not make a mechanistic link between the different manifestations of the life of decadent capitalism. (...) This was already true for the First World War which did not break out as a direct result of the crisis. There was, in 1913, a certain aggravation of the economic situation but this was not especially greater than what had happened in 1900-1903 or 1907. In fact, the essential causes for the outbreak of World War I in August 1914 resided in:

a) the end of the dividing up of the world among the great capitalist powers. Here the Fashoda crisis of 1898 (where the two great colonial powers, Britain and France, found themselves face to face after conquering the bulk of Africa) was a sort of symbol of this and marked the end of the ascendant period of capitalism;

b) the completion of the military and diplomatic preparations constituting the alliances which were going to confront each other;

c) the demobilisation of the European proletariat from its class terrain faced with the threat of war (in contrast to the situation in 1912, when the Basle congress was held) and the dragooning of the class behind the flags of the bourgeoisie, made possible above all by the open treason of the majority of the leaders of social democracy, a point that was carefully verified by the main governments.

It was thus mainly political factors which, once capitalism had entered into decadence, had proved that it had reached an historic impasse, determined the actual moment for the war to break out" (pages 23 & 26)

[15] Paul Bairoch, Mythes et paradoxes de l'histoire économique, Editions la Découverte, p193.

[16] "Modern imperialism is not the prelude to the expansion of capital, as in Bauer's model; on the contrary, it is only the last chapter of its historical process of expansion; it is the period of universally sharpened world competition between the capitalist states for the last remaining non-capitalist areas on earth" (Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital - an Anti-critique ‘Imperialism'); "this live, unhampered imperialism, (Germany) coming upon the world stage at a time when the world was practically divided up, with gigantic appetites, soon became an irresponsible factor of general unrest" (Rosa Luxemburg, Junius Pamphlet, Chapter 3).

[17] "Thanks to her colonies, Great Britain has increased the length of ‘her' railways by 100,000 kilometres, four times as much as Germany. And yet, it is well known that the development of productive forces in Germany, and especially the development of the coal and iron industries, has been incomparably more rapid during this period than in Britain - not to speak of France and Russia. In 1892, Germany produced 4.9 million tons of pig-iron and Great Britain produced 6.8million tons; in 1912, Germany produced 17.6 million tons and Great Britain 9 million tons. Germany, therefore, had an overwhelming superiority over Britain in this respect. The question is: what means other than war could there be under capitalism to overcome the disparity between the development of productive forces and the accumulation of capital on the one side, and the division of colonies and spheres of influence for capitalism on the other? (...) 5) the territorial division of the whole world among the biggest powers is completed. Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which ... the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed." (Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Complete Works Vol. 22, VII ‘Imperialism, as a special stage of capitalism' p266-267, p275-276)

[18] This takes us back to the polemic that we have had with the IBRP over the numerous wars in the Middle East. The IBRP argues that these conflicts have an economic rationality from the American point of view, since the latter aims to defend its oil rents, whereas we have opposed to this Lenin's thesis by showing that the ‘conquest of Iraqi territory' was done not so much for its own sake but to weaken Europe and sap its power and influence. The obvious fact that this conflict has been a bottomless pit for the USA, in which they will never get any serious income from oil because they are totally incapable of controlling the territory and would now like to get out of it, shows how correct Lenin's analytical framework is.

[19] Introduction a l'economie politique, edition 10/18, p 298-299

[20] For world trade: 0.12% between 1913-1938, or in other words 25 time less than between 1870-1893 (3.10%) and 30 times less than between 1893-1913 (3.74%) ( W W Rostow, 1978, The World Economy, History and Prospects, University of Texas Press). The world growth of GNP per inhabitant would only be 0.91% during the period 1913-50 as against 1.30% between 1870 and 1913 - i.e. 43% more; 2.93% between 1950 and 1973 - i.e. three times more - and 1.33% between 1973 and 1998, i.e. 43% more during this long period of crisis (Maddison Angus, L'Economie Mondiale, 2001, OECD)

[21] This was also partly the case for Japan, where the percentage was only 1.6% in 1933 to reach 9.9% in 1938. On the other hand it was not the case for the USA where the percentage was only 1.3% in 1938 (all theses figures are taken from Paul Bairoch, Victoires et deboires III, Folio, p 88-89)

[22] It would be most inappropriate for the IBRP to reply that its theory only applies to Germany, the country which declared war, since, on the one hand, it is up to the IBRP to provide us with the empirical proof, and, on the other hand, this would be in total contradiction with the whole argument of the IBRP which deals with the worldwide roots of the 1914-18 war and the entry of capitalism into decadence (also, it talks indifferently about Europe or the US in its article). Its argumentation - and this is quite logical - has never been located at the national level alone. Furthermore, even supposing that the rate of profit in Germany was falling on the eve of the First World War and rose afterwards, the problem would still remain, because how can we explain the entry of capitalism into its phase of decadence at the world level when the fall in the rate of profit can only be verified in one country?

[23] www.ibrp.org/english/aurora/10/make_poverty_history_make_capitalism_history [7]

[24] cf the graph for France as well as the one published in the International Review n°121 for all the G8 countries. Both show a similar evolution, i.e. a very clear divorce between a rising rate of profit and a fall in all other economic variables

[25] "the crisis itself however serves to re-establish the correct proportion between the elements of capital and allow reproduction to restart. It does this in two principal ways, the devaluation of constant capital and increasing the rate of surplus value or the ratio s/v"

[26] We can see that increases in productivity have remained at a very weak level by looking at the graph for France as well as the graph for the countries of the G8 (the eight most important economies in the world) published in International Review n°121. In reality, only the US has seen any kind of increase in productivity but explaining this conjunctural rise would take us outside the framework of this article.

[27] This recognition is in reality very partial - the IBRP just pays it lip service, when you consider that the rate of profit has been rising vigorously and continuously since the beginning of the 1980s, and that from then on it reached heights comparable with the 1960s.

[28] "In theory, according to Marx, a sufficient increase of surplus value will change a period of capital stagnation into one of expansion", Paul Mattick, Marx and Keynes, p92, or again, "in the world at large and in each nation separately, there is overproduction only because the level of exploitation is insufficient. For this reason, overproduction is overcome by an increase in exploitation - provided, of course, that the increase is large enough to expand and extend capital and thereby increase the market demand" (ibid, p82). Unfortunately for Mattick, the configuration of capitalism since 1980 (but also between 1932 and the Second World War) delivers a striking refutation of his theories since despite a very strong increase in exploitation, there has not been a revival in the expansion of capital and of market demand.

In the previous issue of our Review [10] we began the publication of large extracts of an orientation text being discussed internally by our organisation on the subject of Marxism and Ethics. In the published extracts we wrote:

"We have always insisted that the statutes are not a set of rules defining what is and what is not allowed, but an orientation for our attitude and our conduct, comprising a coherent set of moral values (particularly concerning the relations between militants and toward the organisation). This is why we require a profound agreement with these values from whoever wants to become a member of the organisation.

"But the statutes, as an integral part of our platform, do not solely regulate who can become member of the ICC, und under which conditions. They condition the framework and the spirit of the militant life of the organisation and each of its members.

"The significance which the ICC has always attached to these principles of conduct is illustrated by the fact that it never failed to defend these principles, even at the price of risking organisational crises. In so doing, the ICC places itself consciously and unswervingly in the tradition of struggle of Marx and Engels in the First International, of Bolshevism and the Italian Fraction of the communist left. In so doing, it has been able to overcome a series of crises and to maintain fundamental class principles of comportment.

"However, the concept of a proletarian morality and ethics was upheld more implicitly than explicitly; put into practise in an emprical fashion more than theoretically generalised. In face of the massive reservations of the new generation of revolutionaries after 1968 towards any concept of morality, generally considered as being necessarily reactionary, the attitude developed by the organisation was that it was more important to find acceptance for the attitudes and mode of behaviour of the working class, than to hold this very general debate at a moment for which it was not yet ripe.

Questions of morality were not the only areas where the ICC proceeded in this manner. In the early days of the organisation there existed similar reservations towards the necessity of centralisation, the indispensability of the intervention of revolutionaries and the leading role of the organisation in the development of class consciousness, the need to struggle against democratism, or the recognition of the actuality of the combat against opportunism and centrism."

This first article of extracts treated the following themes:

• the problem of decomposition and the loss of confidence in the proletariat and humanity;
• the causes of the reserves among revolutionaries to the concept of proletarian morality after 1968;
• the nature of morality;
• ethics, that is the theory of morality, preceding marxism;
• marxism and the origins of morality;
• the struggle of the proletariat against bourgeois morality;
• proletarian morality.

In this issue we will continue the publication of extracts by recalling the struggles led by marxism against different forms and manifestations of bourgeois morality and on the necessary combat of the proletariat against the effects of the decomposition of capitalist society particularly in the perspective of reconquering the essental element of its struggle and of its historic perspective - solidarity.

The marxist struggle against ethical idealism

At the end of the 19th century, the current around Bernstein, within the Second International, put forward that Marxism's claim to be a scientific approach excluded the role of ethics in the class struggle. Considering the claims of a scientific and an ethical approach to be mutually exclusive, this current advocated renouncing the former in order to gain the latter. It proposed the "completion" of Marxism through the ethics of Kant. Behind its will to morally condemn the greed of individual capitalists, appeared the determination of bourgeois reformism to bury the fundamental irreconcilability of capitalism and communism.

Far from excluding ethics, the scientific approach of Marxism introduces for the first time a really scientific dimension to social knowledge, and therefore to morality. It unravels the puzzle of history through understanding that the essential social relationship is that between living labour power and the dead means of production. Capitalism prepared the way for this discovery, just as it prepared the way for communism, by depersonalising the exploitation mechanism.

In reality, the call for a return to the ethics of Kant represented a theoretical regression far behind bourgeois materialism, which had already understood the social origins of "good and evil". Since then, each step forward in social knowledge has confirmed and deepened this understanding. This applies to progress not only in science, as in the case of psychoanalysis, but also to art. As Rosa Luxemburg wrote: "Hamlet, through his mother's crime, finds all the bonds of humanity untied and the world out of joint, as does Dostoyevsky when he faces the fact that one human being can murder another. He finds no rest, he feels the responsibility for this dreadfulness weighing upon him, as it does on every one of us. He must elucidate the soul of the murderer, must trace his misery, his afflictions, down to the most hidden fold of his heart. He suffers all his tortures and is blinded by the terrible understanding that the murderer himself is the most unhappy victim of society....Dostoyevsky´s novels are furious attacks on bourgeois society, in whose face he shouts: The real murderer, the murderer of the human soul, is you!" 1

This was also the point of view defended by the young proletarian dictatorship in Russia. It called upon the courts to be "entirely free from the spirit of revenge. They cannot take vengeance on people simply because they have lived in bourgeois society." 2

It is not least this understanding that we are all victims of our circumstances, which make Marxist Ethics the most advanced expression of moral progress to date. This approach does not abolish morality, as the bourgeoisie claim, or sweep aside individual responsibility, as petty bourgeois individualism would have it. But it represents a giant step forward in basing morality on understanding rather than guilt - the feeling of culpability which hampers moral progress by cutting off the inner personality from fellow man. It replaces the hatred of persons - this prime source of anti-social impulses - with indignation and revolt towards social relations and attitudes.

The reformist nostalgia for Kant, was in reality the expression of the erosion of the will to struggle. The idealist interpretation of morality, by denying its role of transforming social relationships, emotionally conciliates with the existing order. Although the highest ideal of humanity has always been inner peace, and harmony with the surrounding social and natural world, this can only be approached through constant struggle. The first condition of human happiness is the knowledge of doing what is necessary, of voluntarily serving a great cause.

Kant understood much better than bourgeois utilitarian theoreticians like Bentham3 the contradictory nature of bourgeois morality. In particular he understood that unbridled individualism, even in the positive form of the pursuit of personal happiness, can lead to the dissolution of society. The fact that, within capitalism, there cannot only be winners of the competitive struggle, renders inevitable the division between duty and inclination. Kant's insistence on the pre-eminence of duty corresponds to the recognition that the highest value of bourgeois society is not the individual, but the state, and in particular the nation. In bourgeois morality, patriotism is of much greater value than the love of humanity. In fact, behind the lack of indignation within the workers movement in face of reformism, already lurked the erosion of proletarian internationalism.

For Kant, a moral act motivated by sense of duty, is of greater ethical value than one carried out with enthusiasm, passion and pleasure. Here, ethical value is tied up with renunciation, the idealisation of self sacrifice by nationalist and state ideology. The proletariat rigorously rejects this inhuman cult of sacrifice for its own sake, which the bourgeoisie has inherited from religion. Although the joy of combat necessarily includes the readiness to put up with suffering, the workers movement has never made, of such necessary evil, a moral quality in itself. Indeed, even before Marxism, the best contributions to ethics have always pointed out the pathological and immoral consequences of such an approach. As opposed to what bourgeois ethics believe, self sacrifice does not sanctify an unworthy goal.

As Franz Mehring underlined, even Schopenhauer, by basing his ethics on compassion rather than duty, represented a decisive step forward in relation to Kant.4

Bourgeois morality, incapable of even imagining the overcoming of the contradiction between individual and society, between egoism and altruism, takes the side of the one against the other, or searches for a compromise between the two. It fails to understand that the individual itself has a social nature. Against idealist morals, marxism defends moral idealism as a pleasure giving activity, and as one of the most powerful assets of a rising against a decaying class.

Another attraction of the ethics of Kant for opportunism, was that its moral rigorism, its formulation of "categorical imperatives" promises a kind of codex with which all moral conflicts can automatically be solved. For Kant, the certainty that one is right is characteristic of moral activity. (...) Here again, the will to avoid struggle is expressed.

The dialectical character of morals is denied, where virtues and vices, in concrete life, are not always easily distinguishable. As Josef Dietzgen pointed out, reason cannot determine a course of action in advance, since each individual and each situation is unique and unprecedented. Complex moral problems have to be studied, in order to be understood and creatively resolved. This can sometimes require a particular investigation and even the establishment of a specific organ, as the workers movement has long understood.5

In reality, moral conflicts are an inevitable part of life - not only within class society. For instance, different ethical principles can enter into conflict with each other (...), or the different levels of the socialisation of man (responsibilities towards the class, the family, the equilibrium of the personality etc). This requires the readiness to live with momentary uncertainty, in order to permit a real examination, avoiding the temptation to silence ones own conscience; the capacity to question ones own prejudices; above all a rigorous, collective method of clarification.

In the struggle against Neo-Kantianism, Kautsky showed how the contribution of Darwin on the origins of conscience in biological, originally animal impulses, broke down the firmest stronghold of idealist morals. This invisible force, this barely audible voice, which only operates in the inner depths of the personality, has always been the crux of ethical controversy. Idealist ethics was right to insist that conscience cannot be explained through the fear of public opinion or of sanctions by the majority. On the contrary, conscience can oblige us to oppose public opinion and repression, or to regret our actions although they meet with universal approval "Thus its mysterious nature, this voice within us, connected to no external impulse, no visible interest; this demon or God, which from Socrates und Plato to Kant those theorists of ethics have felt within themselves who have refused to deduct ethics from egoism or out of the blue. Indeed a mysterious impulse, but no more mysterious than sexual love, maternal love, the instinct of self preservation, or the essence of the organism as such...The fact that the moral law is an animal instinct, on a par with the self preservation and the reproduction instinct, explains its force, its insistence, making us obey without thinking."6

These conclusions have been confirmed by science since then, for instance by Freud, who insisted that the most advanced and socialised animals possess a similar basic psychic apparatus as man, and can suffer comparable neuroses. But Freud has not only deepened our understanding of these questions. Because the approach of psychoanalysis is not alone investigative, but interventional, therapeutic, its shares with marxism a concern for the progressive development of man's moral apparatus.

Freud distinguishes between the impulses ("id"), the "ego" which gets to know the environment and secures existence (a kind of reality principle) and the "super-ego" containing the conscience, and assuring the belonging to the community. Although Freud sometimes polemically claims that the conscience is "nothing but social fear", his whole conception of how children internalise the morals of society makes clear, that this process depends on the emotional love attachment to the parents, and their being accepted as examples for emulation.7(...)

Freud also examines the interaction between conscious and unconscious factors of the conscience itself. The super-ego develops the capacity to reflect on itself. The ego for its part can and must be able to reflect on the reflections of the super ego. It is through this "double reflection" that a course of action becomes ones own conscious act.

This corresponds to the marxist vision that the moral apparatus of man is based on social impulses; that it consists of unconscious, semi-conscious and conscious components; that with the advance of humanity the role of the conscious factor grows, until, with the revolutionary proletariat, ethics, based on a scientific method, increasingly becomes the guide of moral behaviour; that within the conscience itself, moral progress is inseparable from the enforcement of consciousness at the expense of feelings of guilt.8 Man can increasingly assume responsibility, not only towards his own conscience, but also for the contents of his own moral values and convictions.

The marxist struggle against ethical utilitarianism

Despite its weaknesses, bourgeois materialism, particularly in its utilitarian form - with the concept that morality is the expression of real, objective interests, represented an enormous step forward in ethical theory. It prepared the way for an historical understanding of moral evolution. By revealing the relative and transitory nature of all moral systems, it dealt a heavy blow against the religious and idealist vision of an eternally unchanging, presumably God given codex.

As we have seen, the working class, from an early stage, already drew its own, socialist conclusions from this approach. Although early socialist theoreticians such as Robert Owen or William Thompson went far beyond the philosophy of Jeremy Bentham - which they used as a point of departure - the influence of the utilitarian approach remained strong within the workers movement, even after the emergence of Marxism. The early socialists revolutionised Bentham's theory, by applying his basic postulates to social classes rather than individuals, thus preparing the way for the understanding of the social and class nature of moral history. And the recognition that slave owners do not have the same set of values as merchants, or desert nomads the same morals as mountain shepherds, had already been dramatically confirmed by anthropology in the wake of colonial expansion. Marxism profited from this preparatory work, just as it profited from the studies of Morgan or Maurer in throwing light on the "genealogy of morals".9 But despite the progress it represented, this utilitarianism, even in its working class form, left a number of questions unresolved.

Firstly, if morality is nothing but the codification of material interest, morality itself becomes superfluous, disappearing as a social factor on its own account. The English materialist radical, Mandeville, had already claimed, on this basis, that morality is nothing but hypocrisy, to conceal the base interests of the ruling classes. Later, Nietzsche was to draw somewhat different conclusions from the same premise: that morality is the means of the weak multitude, to prevent the rule of the elite, so that the liberation of the latter requires the recognition that for them, all is allowed. But as Mehring pointed out, the alleged abolition of morality in Nietzsche's "Beyond Good and Evil", is nothing but the establishment of a new morality - that of reactionary capitalism with its hate of the socialist proletariat - freeing itself from the fetters of petty bourgeois decency and big bourgeois respectability. 10 In particular, the identity of interest and morality implies, as Jesuitism already claimed, that the end sanctifies the means.11

Secondly, by postulating social classes as "collective individuals" merely pursuing their own interests, history appears as a meaningless squabble, the outcome of which may be important to the classes involved, but not to society as a whole. This represents a regression in relation to Hegel, who had already understood (although in a mystified form) not only the relativity of all morality, but also the progressive character of rising ethical systems in violating the established morality. (It was in this sense that Hegel declared: "One imagines oneself to be saying something great in saying: man is naturally good. But one forgets that one says something far greater in saying: man is naturally evil.")12

Thirdly, the utilitarian approach leads to a sterile rationalism which eliminates the social emotions from ethical life.

The negative consequences of these bourgeois, utilitarian leftovers, became apparent at the moment when the workers movement, with the First International, began to overcome the phase of the sect. The investigation into the plot of the Alliance against the International - in particular the commentaries of Marx and Engels on Bakunin's "revolutionary catechism" - reveal the "introduction of anarchy into morality" through a "Jesuitism" which "takes the immorality of the bourgeoisie to its conclusion.". The report commissioned by the 1872 Hague Congress underlines the following elements of Bakunin's outlook: the revolutionary has no personal interests, affairs, feelings or inclinations of his own; has broken, not only with the bourgeois order, but with the morals and customs of the entire civilised world; considers everything to be a virtue, which favours the triumph of the revolution, and everything a vice which hinders it; is always ready to sacrifice everything, including his own will and personality; suppresses all feelings of friendship, love or thankfulness; never hesitates in face of the necessity to liquidate any human being; knows no other set of values but the yardstick of utility.

Profoundly indignant at this approach, Marx and Engels declare it to be the morality of the gutter, the lumpenproletariat. As grotesque as it is infamous, more authoritarian than the most primitive communism, Bakunin makes of the revolution "a series of individual, and then mass murders" where "the only rule of conduct is exaggerated Jesuit morality."13

As we know, the workers movement as a whole did not profoundly assimilate the lessons of the struggle against Bakuninism. In his "Historical Materialism", Bukharin presents ethical norms merely as rules and regulations. Tactics replace morality. Even more confused is the attitude of Lukacs in face of the revolution. After originally presenting the proletariat as the realisation of the moral idealism of Kant and Fichte, Lukacs veers towards utilitarianism. In "What Does Revolutionary Action Mean?" (1919) he declares: "The rule of the whole over the parts signifies determined self sacrifice...Only he is a revolutionary, who is ready to do anything, in order to fulfil these interests."

But the enforcement of utilitarian morality after 1917 in the USSR was above all a reflection of the needs of the transitional state. In his "Morality and Class Norms" Preobrashensky presents the revolutionary organisation as a kind of modern monastic order. He even wants to submit sexual intercourse to the principle of eugenistic selection, in a world where the distinction between individual and society has been abolished, and where the emotions are subordinated to the findings of the natural sciences. Even Trotsky is not free of this influence, since in "Their Morality and Ours", in an unspoken defence of the crushing of Kronstadt, he basically defends the formulation that the end sanctifies the means.

It is certainly true that every social class tends to identify "good" and "virtue" with its own interests. Nonetheless, interest and morality are not identical. The influence of class on social values is extremely complex, incorporating the position of a given class in the production process and the class struggle, its traditions, its goals and expectations for the future, its share in culture, as well as how all of this manifests itself in the form of mode of life, emotions, intuitions and aspirations.

As opposed to the utilitarian confounding of interest and morality (or "duty" as he here formulates it), Dietzgen distinguishes the two. "Interest is more the concrete, present, graspable well being, whereas duty concerns the extended, general well being, projected into the future (...) Duty demands that we take into account not only the present, immediate, but also the distant, not only the bodily but also the spiritual welfare. Duty also concerns itself with the heart, with the social needs, the future, the peace of the soul, in a word with the greater whole, and demands of us that we renounce what is superfluous, in order to achieve and preserve what is necessary."14

In reaction to the idealist affirmation of the invariance of morality, social utilitarianism goes to the other extreme, insisting so one-sidedly on its transitory nature, that the existence of common values holding society together, and of ethical progress, is lost sight of. The continuity of the feeling of community is not, however, a metaphysical fiction.

This "overdone relativism" sees the individual classes and their combat, but "not the total social process, the inter-connection of the different episodes; thereby failing to distinguish the different stages of moral development as part of an inter-related process. It does not possess any general standard with which to assess different norms, not able to go beyond the immediate and temporary appearances. It does not bring together the different appearances to a unity by means of dialectical thinking."15

Concerning the relationship between end and means, the correct formulation of the problem is not that the end sanctifies the means, but that the goal influences the means, and the means influence the goal. Both sides of the contradiction mutually determine and condition each other. Moreover, both the goal and the means are but links in an historical chain, where each end is in turn a means to a further reaching goal. This is why methodological and ethical rigour must apply to a whole process, referring to the past and the future, and not only the immediate. Means which do not serve a given goal, only serve to deform it and deflect from it. The proletariat, for instance, cannot defeat the bourgeoisie by using the weapons of the latter. The morality of the proletariat orients itself both on social reality and on the social emotions. This is why it rejects both the dogmatic exclusion of violence, and the concept of the moral indifference to the means employed.

Parallel to a false understanding of the link between end and means, Preobrashensky also considers that the fate of the parts - and in particular the individual - is unimportant, and can be readily sacrificed in the interest of the whole. This however was not the attitude of Marx, who considered the Paris Commune to be premature, but still rallied in solidarity to it; or Eugen Levine and the young KPD, who entered the government of the failing Bavarian council republic - whose proclamation it had opposed - to organise its defence in order to minimise the number of proletarian victims. The one sided criteria of class utility leaves, in fact, room only for a very conditional class solidarity.

As Rosa Luxemburg pointed out in her polemic against Bernstein, the principle contradiction at the heart of the proletarian movement is that its daily struggle takes place inside capitalism, whereas its goal lies outside, and represents a fundamental break with that system. As a result, the use of violence and deception against the class enemy is necessary, and the appearance of class hatred and anti-social aggressions difficult to avoid. But the proletariat is not morally indifferent in face of such manifestations. Even while employing violence, it must never forget that - as Pannekoek said - its goal is to enlighten brains, not crush them. And as Bilan16 concluded from the Russian experience, it must avoid the use of violence wherever possible against non-exploiting layers, and exclude it altogether, on principle, within the ranks of the working class.. And even in the context of the civil war against the class enemy, it must be convinced of the need to counteract the rise of anti-social feelings such as vengeance, cruelty, destructiveness, since they lead to brutalisation, and dim the light of consciousness. Such feelings signal the intrusion of alien class influence. It was not for nothing that, after the October Revolution, Lenin considered that - second only to the extension of the world revolution - the priority should be the raising of the cultural level of the masses. We should also remember that it was the recognition of the cruelty and moral indifference of Stalin, which first enabled Lenin (in his testament) to identify the danger he represented.

The means employed by the proletariat must correspond, as much as possible, both with its goals, and with the social emotions corresponding to its class nature. It was not least in the name of these emotions that the December 14th 1918 programme of the KPD, while resolutely defending the need for class violence, rejected the use of terror.

"The proletarian revolution has no need of terror to achieve its goals, it hates and abhors the murder of human beings. It does not need these means of struggle because it fights institutions, not individuals, because it does not enter the arena with naive illusions, whose disappointment it would have to avenge."17 (Our emphasis).

As opposed to this, the elimination of the emotional side of morality by the mechanistic materialist utilitarianism approach, is typically bourgeois.. According to the latter approach, the use of lies and deception is morally superior, if it serves the achievement of a given goal. But the lies circulated by the Bolsheviks, in order to justify the repression of Kronstadt, not only eroded the confidence of the class in the party, but undermined the conviction of the Bolsheviks themselves. The vision that the end justifies the means, practically denies the ethical superiority of the proletarian revolution over the bourgeoisie. This forgets that, the more the concerns of a class correspond with the welfare of humanity, the more that class can draw on its moral strength.

The slogan, common in the world of business, that only success counts, regardless of the means employed, does not apply to the working class. The proletariat is the first revolutionary class whose final victory is prepared by a series of defeats. The invaluable lessons, but also the moral example of the great revolutionaries, and of the great workers struggles, are the preconditions of a future victory.

The struggle against the effects of capitalist decomposition

In the present historical period, the importance of ethical questions is greater than ever before. The characteristic tendency towards the dissolution of social ties and coherent thought necessarily has particularly negative effects on morality. Moreover, the ethical disorientation within society is itself a central component of the problem at the heart of the decomposition of the social tissue. The blockage which has resulted from the response of the bourgeoisie to the crisis of capitalism and the response of the proletariat, between world war and world revolution, is directly linked to the sphere of social ethics. The overcoming of the counter-revolution by a new and undefeated generation of the proletariat after 1968 expressed not least the historic discrediting of nationalism, above all in those countries where the strongest sectors of the world proletariat are to be found. But on the other hand, the massive workers struggles after 1968 have not, for the moment, been accompanied by a corresponding development of the political and theoretical dimension of the proletarian combat, in particular the explicit and conscious affirmation of the principle of proletarian internationalism. As a result, neither of the two major classes of contemporary society have been able, for the moment, to decisively advance their own specific class ideal of social community.

In general, the ruling morality of society is the morality of the ruling class. Precisely for this reason, each dominant morality, in order to serve the interests of the ruling class, must at the same time contain elements of general moral interest holding together society as a whole. One of these elements is the development of a perspective or ideal of social community. Such an ideal is an indispensable factor of the curbing of anti-social impulses.

As we have seen, nationalism is the specific ideal of bourgeois society. This corresponds to the fact that the nation state is the most developed unit which capitalism can achieve. When capitalism enters its decadent phase, the nation state definitively ceases being a vehicle of progress in history, becoming in fact the main instrument of social barbarism. But already, long before this happened, the gravedigger of capitalism, the working class - precisely because it is the bearer of a higher, internationalist ideal - was able to expose the deceitful nature of the national community. Although, in 1914, the workers initially forgot this lesson, the First World War was to reveal the reality of the main tendency, not only of bourgeois morality, but of the morality of all exploiting classes. This consists in the mobilisation of the most heroic and selfless social impulses of the exploited, labouring classes at the service of the narrowest and most sordid causes.

But notwithstanding its deceitful and increasingly barbaric character, the nation is the only ideal which the bourgeoisie can put forward in order to hold society together. This ideal alone corresponds to the contemporary reality of the state structure of bourgeois society. This is why all the other social ideals which come to the fore today - the family, the locality, the religious, cultural or ethnic community, the life style group or the gang - are really expressions of the dissolution of social life, of the putrification of class society.

But this is no less true of those moral responses which attempt to address society as a whole, but on the basis of inter-classism: humanitarianism, ecologism, "alternative globalisation". By postulating the improvement of the individual as the basis of the renewal of society, they constitute democratist expressions of the same basic individualist fragmentation of society. Needless to say, all of these ideologies admirably serve the ruling class in its struggle to block off the development of a proletarian, internationalist class alternative to capitalism.

Within the society of decomposition, we can identify certain features with direct implications at the level of social values.

Firstly, the lack of perspective tends to turn the focus of human comportment towards the present and the past. As we have seen, a central part of the rational kernel of morality is the defence of the long term interest against the weight of the immediate. The absence of a long term perspective thus favours desolidarisation between the individuals and groupings of contemporary society, but also between the generations. It results in the tendency toward the pogrom mentality: that is the destructive hatred of a scapegoat made responsible for the disappearance of an idealised better past. In the theatre of world politics, we can observe this tendency in the development of anti-semitism, anti-occidentalism or anti-islamism, in the multiplication of "ethnic cleansing", in the rise of political populism against immigrants, and of a ghetto mentality among the immigrants themselves. But this mentality tends to permeate social life as a whole, as the development of mobbing as a general phenomenon illustrates.

Secondly, the development of social fear tends to paralyse both social instincts and coherent reflection - the basic principles of human and above all class solidarity today. This fear is the result of social atomisation, giving each individual the feeling of being alone with his or her problems. This solitude colours the way the rest of society is seen, making the reaction of other human beings more unpredictable, and making them seem menacing and hostile. This fear - nourishing all the irrational currents of thought turned towards the past and the void - should thus be distinguished from that fear which results from the growing social insecurity brought forth by the economic crisis, which can become a powerful impulsion of class solidarity in reaction against it.

Thirdly, the lack of perspective and the dislocation of social links makes life appear to be devoid of meaning for numerous human beings. This atmosphere of nihilism is generally unbearable for humanity, since it contradicts the conscious and social essence of mankind. It thus gives rise to a series of closely inter-related phenomena, the most important of which are the development of a new religiousness, and of a fixation on death.

In societies mainly based on natural economy, religion is above all the expression of backwardness, of the ignorance of and fear of natural forces. Under capitalism, religion feeds mainly on social alienation - the fear of social forces which have become inexplicable and uncontrollable. In the epoch of capitalist decomposition, it is above all ambient nihilism which fuels religious longing. Whereas traditional religion, as reactionary as its role has mostly been, was still part of a communitarian world view, and whereas the modernised religion of the bourgeoisie represented the adoption of this traditional world view to the perspectives of capitalist society; the mysticism of capitalist decomposition nourishes itself from ambient nihilism. Whether in the form of the pure atomisation of esoteric soul searching, the famous "finding oneself" outside any social context, or in the form of the siege mentality of sects and of religious fundamentalism, offering the obliteration of the personality and the liquidation of individual responsibility, this tendency, while claiming to give an answer, is in reality but an extreme expression of this nihilism.

Moreover, it is this lack of perspective and dislocation of social ties which makes the biological fact of death seem to rob individual life of its meaning. The resulting morbidity (from which mysticism today to a considerable extent feeds) expresses itself both in a disproportional fear of death, and in a pathological longing for it. The former concretises itself for instance in the "hedonistic" mentality of the "fun society" (whose motto might be: "eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die"); the latter via cults such as satanism, end of the world sects, and the ever growing cult of violence, destruction and martyrdom (as in the case of suicide bombing).

Marxism, as the revolutionary, materialist outlook of the proletariat, has always been characterised by its profound attachment to the world and its passionate affirmation of the value of human life. At the same time, its dialectical standpoint has understood life and death, being and nothingness, as part of an inseparable unity. It has neither ignored death, nor has it overvalued its role within life. Mankind is part of nature. As such, blossoming growth, but also illness, decline and death, are as much a part of its existence as the setting sun or the fall of the autumn leaves. But man is a product, not only of nature, but of society. As the heir to the acquisitions of human culture, and the bearer of its future, the revolutionary proletariat attaches itself to the social sources of a real strength rooted in clarity of thought and fraternity, patience and humour, joy and affection, the real security of a well founded confidence.

Solidarity and the perspective of communism today

For the working class, ethics is not something abstract, standing outside of its own struggle. Solidarity, the foundation of its class morality, is at the same time the first precondition of its very capacity to affirm itself as a class in struggle.

Today the proletariat is faced with the task of reconquering its class identity, which suffered such a set back after 1989. This task is inseparable from the struggle to reappropriate its traditions of solidarity.

Solidarity is not only a central component of the daily struggle of the working class, but carries the germ of the future society. Both aspects, relating to the present and future, mutually influence each other. The redeployment of class solidarity within the workers struggles is an essential aspect of the present dynamic of the class struggle and opening of the road toward a new revolutionary perspective. And such a perspective when it emerges will, in turn, be a powerful factor of the reinforcement of solidarity within the immediate struggles of the proletariat.

This perspective is thus decisive in the face of the problems with which capitalist decadence and decomposition confront the working class. For instance: the question of immigration. In ascendant capitalism the position of the workers' movement, in particular of the left, was that of the defence of open frontiers and the free movement of labour. This was part of the minimum programme of the working class. Today, the choice between open and closed frontiers is a false alternative, since only the abolition of all frontiers can resolve the issue. Under the conditions of decomposition, the issue of immigration tends to erode class solidarity, threatening even to infect workers with the pogrom mentality. In face of this situation, the perspective of a world wide community based on solidarity is the most effective factor in defence of the principle of proletarian internationalism.

Under the condition that the working class, through a long period of growing struggles and political reflection, can regain its class identity, the recognition of the reality of the undermining of social emotions, links and modes of behaviour by present day capitalism can itself become a factor pushing the proletariat to develop and consciously formulate its own class values. The indignation of the working class toward the behaviour provoked by decomposing capitalism, and the consciousness that only the proletarian struggle can produce an alternative, are central for the proletariat to reaffirm its revolutionary perspective.

The revolutionary organisation has an indispensable role to play in this process, not only through the propagation of these class principles, but also and above all by itself giving a living example of their application and defence.

Besides, the defence of proletarian morality is an indispensable instrument in the struggle against opportunism, and thus in the defence of the programme of the working class. More firmly than ever, revolutionaries must place themselves in the tradition of Marxism through an intransigent combat against alien class behaviour.

"Bolshevism created the type of the authentic revolutionist, who subordinates to historic goals irreconcilable with contemporary society the conditions of his personal existence, his ideas, and his moral judgements. The necessary distance from bourgeois ideology was kept up in the party by a vigilant irreconcilability, whose inspirer was Lenin. Lenin never tired of working with his lancet, cutting off those bonds which a petty bourgeois environment creates between the party and official social opinion. At the same time Lenin taught the party to create its own social opinion, resting upon the thoughts and feelings of the rising class. Thus by a process of selection and education, and in continual struggle, the Bolshevik party created not only a political but a moral medium of its own, independent of bourgeois social opinion and implacably opposed to it. Only this permitted the Bolsheviks to overcome the waverings in their own ranks and reveal in action that courageous determination without which the October victory would have been impossible."18

1 Luxemburg: The Spirit of Russian Literature (Introduction to Korolenko) 1919.

2 Bukharin and Preobrazhansky: The ABC of Communism. Commentary of the programme of the 8th Party Congress, 1919. Chapter IX. "Proletarian Justice". § 74. "Proletarian penal methods."

3 Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) was a British philosopher, jurist and reformer. He was the friend of Adam Smith and Jean-Baptiste Say, two major economists of the bourgeoisie of the time when the latter was still a revolutionary class. He influenced "classical" philosophers of the latter like John Stuart Mill, John Austin, Herbert Spencer, Henry Sidgwick and James Mill. He gave his support to the French Revolution of 1789 and made several propositions concerning the establishment of law, the judiciary, prisons, the political organisation of the state, and colonial policy ("Emancipate your Colonies") . The young French republic made him a citizen of honour on 23rd August 1792. His influence is to be found in the civil code (also known as the "Code Napoleon" which today still governs private law in France) The thought of Bentham began from the following principle: individuals only coneive their interests in relation to pain and pleasure. They try to maximise their happiness, expressed in the surplus of pleasure over pain. Each individual had to procede according to a hedonist logic. Each action has positive and negative effects over time with different degrees of intensity; thus the individual must realise those actions that gives him most pleasure. He gave the name Utilitarianism to this doctrine in 1781.

Bentham put forward a method "the calculation of happiness and pain" intended to scientifically determine - by using precise rules - the quantity of pleasure and pain generalated by our various actions. There are seven criteria:

1. Duration: a long and lasting pleasure is more useful than a passing pleasure.
2. Intensity: an intense plesure is more useful than a pleasure of weaker intensity.
3. Certainty: a pleasure is more useful if one is sure that it will be realised.
4. Proximity: an immediate pleasure is more useful than one realised in the long term.
5. Extension: a pleasure enjoyed by serveral is more useful than a solitary pleasure.
6. Fecundity: a pleasure that leads to others is more useful than a simple pleasure.
7. Purity: a pleasure which does not lead to suffering is more useful than a pleasure that carries those risks.

Theoretically, the most moral action will be that which satisfies the greatest number of criterias.

4 Mehring: "Back to Schopenhauer!" Neue Zeit. 1908/09.

5 Thus most of the political organisations of the proletariat have had, beside organs of centralisation that deal with "current affairs" organs such as "control commissions" composed of experienced militants who have the greatest confidence of the comrades, and specifically charged with delicate questions touching on sensitive aspects of the comportment of militants within or outside the organisation.

6 Kautsky: Ethics and Historical Materialism. Chapter "The Ethics of Darwinism" (The social instincts)

7 Confirmed by the observation of Anna Freud that orphans released from concentration camps, while establishing a kind of rudimentary egalitarian solidarity among themselves, only accepted cultural and moral standards towards society as a whole, when they were re-grouped in smaller "family" units, each led by an adult respect person, towards which the children could develop affection and admiration.

8 Kautsky´s book on ethics is the first comprehensive marxist study of this question, and his main contribution to socialist theory. However, he overestimates the importance of the contribution of Darwin. As a result, he underestimates the specifically human factors of culture and consciousness, tending towards a static vision where different social formations more or less favour or hamper basically invariant social impulses.

9 See for instance Paul Lafargue: "Recherches sur l´origine de l´idee du bien et du juste." 1885, republished in the Neue Zeit 1899, 1900.

10 Mehring: On the Philosophy of Capitalism. 1891. We should add that Nietzsche is the theoretician of the behaviour of the declassed adventurer.

11 The vanguard of the counter-reformation against Protestantism, Jesuitism was characterised by the adaptation to the methods of the bourgeoisie in defence of the feudal church. It therefore, at a very early date, expressed the baseness of capitalist morality, long before the bourgeois class as a whole (which at that time still played a revolutionary role) had openly revealed the ugliest sides of its class rule. See for instance Mehring: German History from the Onset of the Middle Ages. 1910. Part 1, Chapter 6: "Jesuitism, Calvinism, Lutherism."

12 A remark in passing. Perhaps the most appropriate answer to the age old question, whether mankind is good or evil, can be given by paraphrasing what Marx and Engels in The Holy Family wrote in the chapter about Fleur de Marie from the novel of Eugene Sue "The Mysteries of Paris": humanity is neither good nor evil, it is human.

13 The Alliance of Socialist Democracy and International Workingmen's Association. 1873. Chapter VIII. "The Alliance in Russia". Marx, Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 23.

14 Dietzgen: The Nature of Human Brainwork. 1869

15 Henriete Roland Holst: Communisme en Moraal, 1925. Chapter V. "The 'meaning of life' and the task of the proletariat". Despite some important weaknesses, this book contains above all an excellent critique of utilitarian morality.

16 Review in French of the Left Fraction of the Italian Communist Party (later, the Italian Fraction of the International Communist Left).

17 "What Does the Spartacus League Want?" (A slightly different English translation of this passage can be found in Selected Political Writings of Rosa Luxemburg, Monthly Review Press 1971) Here, as in other writings of Rosa Luxemburg, we find a profound comprehension of the class psychology of the proletariat.

18 Trotsky: History of the Russian Revolution. 1930, End of the Chapter "Lenin Summons to Insurrection".

In the previous article in this series [12] we began a study of the efforts of the Italian communist left to draw the lessons of the first international wave of proletarian revolutions and of the revolution in Russia in particular, and to understand how these lessons could be applied to the revolutionary transformations of the future. We noted the characteristic methods of the Italian Fraction in this work:

• its intransigence in defending class principles, but also its openness to discussion with other internationalist currents. Both aspects were particularly relevant to the problem of the period of transition at that time, because the workers' movement was confronted with the monstrous claim that Stalin's USSR was on the verge of achieving "socialism", and because among the various internationalist groups there was a great deal of confusion about the nature of the economic developments taking place under the "Soviet" state;

• its modesty and prudence, its insistence on sticking fast to the basic analytical framework of marxism - but also its willingness to question received wisdom and to search for new answers to new problems.

In International Review no. 127 we showed how these methods were concretised in a series of articles written by Vercesi under the heading "Parti, Etat, Internationale". In this issue, we begin the publication of another major series on the same basic theme: "Problems of the period of transition" written by Mitchell, who at the time the series began was a member of the Belgian group the Ligue des Communistes Internationalistes but who subsequently helped to found the Belgian Fraction of the Communist Left, which split from the LCI on the question of the war in Spain, and with the Italian Fraction formed the International Communist Left. To our knowledge this is the first time this series has been published since the1930s and the first time it has been translated into other languages.

In the opening section of this article, Mitchell makes it clear that he is "in accordance with the whole framework and spirit of Bilan", rejecting any speculative approach to the problems of the transition period and affirming that "marxism is an experimental method and not a game of guesses and forecasts", since it bases its conclusions and its predictions on the real events of history and the authentic experience of the proletarian movement. He then goes on to outline the main axes of the series he proposes to write:

"a. the historic conditions in which the proletarian revolution arises;

b. the necessity of the proletarian state;

c. the social and economic categories which will inevitably survive in the transitional period;

d. finally, certain requirements for a proletarian management of the transitional state".

This outline was more or less followed in the ensuing articles, although the space devoted to the complex economic problems of the transitional period meant that the series eventually took up five articles in Bilan over the next few years. In particular, a lot of attention was given to the debate with the Dutch internationalist current and its approach to the economic transformation as developed in Basic Principles of Communist Production and Distribution by Jan Appel and Henk Canne-Meier, summarised in Bilan by the LCI militant A Hennaut.

In this first article, Mitchell takes up the historic conditions of the proletarian revolution. Briefly stated, he focuses on the following key questions and debates:

• communism is a historic necessity because capitalism, the last form of class society, has entered its phase of decadence and has become a definitive barrier to the development of mankind's productive forces. Bourgeois relations of production have created the possibility of a society of abundance in which the communist principle of "to each according to his needs, from each according to his means" can finally become a reality. However, a society of abundance and freedom cannot be installed overnight, but only after a more or less long period of social and economic transformation set in motion by the political victory of the proletariat;
• this transformation can only be seriously undertaken on a worldwide scale. In contrast to previous modes of production, which could exist in different regions of the globe in relative isolation from each other, capitalism is necessarily a world system, creating a complex network of interdependence which would make it entirely impossible for communist relations of production to exist in separate locations. By the same token, capitalism reaches its epoch of historical decline as a global system and not in particular countries or regions, imposing the same revolutionary tasks on the working class all over the world;
• it is on this resolutely internationalist basis that Mitchell undertakes a polemic with the most important theoretical errors of the day. First and foremost, he rejects the Stalinist doctrine of "socialism in one country" and its supposed theoretical underpinning in the "law of uneven development", an explanation given for the fact that different parts of the global capitalist system evolve at different rates and attain different levels of technological and social development. It should be remembered that Stalin made selective and abusive use of a passage from Lenin's August 1915 article "On the Slogan for a United States of Europe" to justify this argument: "Uneven economic and political development is an absolute law of capitalism. Hence, the victory of socialism is possible first in several or even in one capitalist country alone. After expropriating the capitalists and organising their own socialist production, the victorious proletariat of that country will arise against the rest of the world - the capitalist world - attracting to its cause the oppressed classes of other countries, stirring uprisings in those countries against the capitalists, and in case of need using even armed force against the exploiting classes and their states".1 Stalin took this one phrase by Lenin ("the victory of socialism is possible first in several or even in one capitalist country alone") to draw the totally unfounded conclusion that Lenin meant by this phrase not the essentially political victory of the working class as a first step towards the world revolution, but the achievement of a fully socialist mode of production behind national borders. In his text "The Third International after Lenin", a critique of the draft programme that was adopted at the 5th Comintern Congress of 1928, and which essentially constituted the suicide-note of the International by committing it to the theory of socialism in one country, Trotsky ably shows why this new theory does not at all logically follow either from Lenin's understanding of the phrase "victory of socialism" or from his conception of uneven development. Trotsky in particular insisted that capitalist development was always both "uneven" and "combined", so that all parts of the world capitalist system, though clearly at different stages of material development, functioned as a mutually-determining whole. The result of this was that an autarchic evolution towards socialism was completely impossible;
• Mitchell recognized that Trotsky and his followers had been among the first to oppose the theory of socialism in one country. At the same time, he takes them to task for themselves accepting uneven development as an "unconditional law" and for making concessions to the possibility of national steps towards socialism. In "The Third International after Lenin", Trotsky even goes so far as to argue that uneven development is a law that governs the whole of human history; in reality, it is more precise to argue that it is a particular consequence of the social relations that "govern" various modes of production: in capitalism, it is a result of the laws of accumulation, which determine that the generation of wealth at one pole is the generation of poverty at another. In terms of the disparities between different geographic regions, this is especially the case in the epoch of imperialism. It could also be argued that the Trotskyists' acceptance of a "law" of uneven development led them to make concessions to the notion of individual workers' states making significant steps towards socialism within a national framework; and much of Mitchell's series is directed against the Trotskyists' tendency to lose their critical faculties in the face of the frenetic growth of industrial production in the USSR during the 1930s;
• Mitchell also criticizes the Menshevik/Kautskyite thesis, echoed by genuine internationalists like Hennaut and the Dutch council communists, who see the failings of the Russian revolution in the backwardness of material conditions in Russia itself. Against this whole view of particular countries being "ripe" or "unripe" for socialism, Mitchell once again insists that the whole problem can only be approached in an international framework: "At the beginning of this study we underlined the fact that although capitalism has powerfully developed the productive capacity of society, it has not succeeded in developing the conditions for an immediate passage to socialism. As Marx indicated, only the material conditions for resolving this problem exist ‘or are at least in the process of formation' [...] These restrictions apply even more strongly to each national unit in the world economy. All of them are historically ripe for socialism, but none of them are ripe in the sense of possessing all the material conditions needed for the building of an integral socialism. This is true whatever level of development they may have reached".

As we publish and review the series of articles by Mitchell, we will have occasion to point out some weaknesses and inconsistencies in his contribution, some minor, some more substantial, but passages like the one just quoted confirm that when it comes to the fundamentals, we, like Mitchell, are still working "in accordance with the whole framework and spirit of Bilan".

CDW

Bilan no. 28: Problems of the period of transition

The title of this study should not lead anyone to the conclusion that we're going to start peering into the mists of the future or sketching out a solution to the many and complex tasks which will confront the proletariat when it has become the ruling class. Such a project would not be in accordance with the whole framework and spirit of Bilan. We will leave it to the "technicians" and the recipe-mongers or to the self-proclaimed "orthodox" marxists to indulge in such anticipations, to stroll down the byways of utopia, or to offer the workers formulae which have been emptied of any class content.

For us it can never be a question of inventing panaceas which are valid once and for all and which can be adapted to any historic situation. Marxism is an experimental method and not a game of guesses and forecasts. It has its roots in a historic reality, which is a moving, contradictory, process; it is nourished by past experience, tempered and corrected by the present, so that it can be enriched by further experience to come.

By synthesising the events of history, marxism has shown the true meaning of the state, laid bare of all idealist prejudices; it has developed the theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat and affirmed the necessity of the transitional proletarian state. But although it is possible to define the class content of such a state, we are as yet still limited to a mere outline of its social forms. It has still not been possible to situate the principles for running a proletarian state on a solid basis, or to clearly draw the lines of demarcation between party and state. This immaturity inevitably weighed heavily on the character and evolution of the Soviet State.

But it is precisely the task of those marxists who have survived the shipwreck of the workers' movement to forge the theoretical weapons which will make the future proletarian state an instrument of the world revolution and not a cog in the wheels of world capitalism.

This contribution to that theoretical task will examine:

a) the historic conditions in which the proletarian revolution arises;

b) the necessity of the proletarian state;

c) the social and economic categories which will inevitably survive in the transitional period;

d) finally, certain requirements for a proletarian management of the transitional state.

The historical context of the proletarian revolution

It became axiomatic to say that capitalist society, overflowing with a productive capacity which it can longer make full use of, drowning in a flood of commodities which it can't sell, has become a historic anachronism. From this it is but a short step to conclude that the disappearance of capitalism must open up the reign of abundance.

In reality, capitalist accumulation has reached the extreme limits of its progressive evolution and the capitalist mode of production is nothing but a fetter on historical progress. This doesn't mean that capitalism is like a ripe fruit which the proletariat simply has to pluck in order to find true happiness; it simply means that the material conditions exist for constructing the base (and only the base) of socialism, for preparing the ground for a communist society.

Marx said that: "The very moment civilisation begins, production begins to be founded on the antagonism of orders, estates, classes, and finally on the antagonism of accumulated labour and actual labour. No antagonism, no progress. This is the law that civilisation has followed up to our days. Till now the productive forces have been developed by virtue of this system of class antagonism".2 In his Anti-Duhring Engels asserted that the existence of a society divided into classes: "was the necessary consequence of the deficient and restricted development of production in former times" and from this he deduced that "if, upon this showing, division into classes has a certain historical justification, it has this only for a given period, only under given social conditions. It was based upon the insufficiency of production. It will be swept away by the complete development of modern productive forces". 3

It is clear that the final stage of capitalist development does not correspond to "the complete development of modern productive forces" in the sense that all human needs can now be satisfied. But what we do have today is a situation in which the persistence of class antagonism not only stands in the way of any social development, but actually leads to the regression of society.

This is what Engels was getting at when he said that the: "abolition of classes...presupposes...the development of production carried out to a degree at which appropriation of the means of pro-

duction and of the products, and, with this, of political domination, of the monopoly of culture, and of intellectual leadership by a particular class of society, has become not only superfluous, but economically, politically, intellectually a hindrance to development".4 And, when he added that capitalist society had reached this state and that we now had: "the possibility of securing for every member of society, by means of socialised production, an existence not only sufficient materially, and becoming day by day more full, but an existence guaranteeing to all the free development and exercise of their physical and mental faculties" there can be no doubt that he was envisaging the possibility of moving towards the full satisfaction of needs and not saying that we already had the material means for immediately achieving this.

As Engels said, the liberation of the productive forces: "is the one precondition for an unbroken, constantly accelerating development of the productive forces, and therewith for a practically unlimited increase of production itself".5 Consequently the period of transition (which can only unfold on a world scale and not within one state) is a political and economic phase which will inevitably be characterised by the inability of production to satisfy all individual needs, even when we take into account the prodigious levels which the productivity of labour has already achieved. The suppression of capitalist relations of production and of their antagonistic expression makes it possible to immediately begin providing for essential human needs (if we leave out the necessities of the class struggle which could temporarily reduce the level of production).

To go beyond this requires an incessant development of the productive forces. The realisation of the formula "to each according to their needs" will come at the end of a long process, which will go forwards not in a straight line but through a winding course of contradictions and conflicts, and in conjunction with the world-wide development of the class struggle.

The historic mission of the proletariat is, as Engels said, to lead humanity "from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom"; but the proletariat can only carry out this mission if it analyses the nature and limits of the historic conditions in which this act of liberation takes place, and applies this analysis to the whole of its political and economic activity. The proletariat cannot abstractly pose socialism against capitalism, as though they were two entirely independent epochs, as though socialism was not the historic prolongation of capitalism and fatally scarred by it, but something clean and new which springs form the virgin womb of the proletarian revolution.

It wasn't because of indifference or negligence that the founders of marxism didn't go into the details of the period of transition. But Marx and Engels were the antithesis, the living negation, of the utopians. They didn't try to construct abstract schema, to imagine things which could only be resolved scientifically.

And in 1918, Rosa Luxemburg, who made an immense theoretical contribution to marxism, still felt it necessary to point out that: "For from being a sum of ready made prescriptions which only have to be applied, the practical realisation of socialism as an economic, social and juridical system is something which lies completely hidden in the mists of the future...(socialism) has as its prerequisite a number of measures of force against property, etc. The negative, the tearing down, can be decreed; the building up, the positive, cannot".6

In his preface to Capital Marx had already indicated that: "When a society has discovered the natural laws which regulate it own movement (and the final purpose of my book is to reveal the economic laws of motion of modern society), it can neither overleap the natural phases of evolution, nor shuffle them out of the world by decrees. But this much, at least, it can do; it can shorten and lesson the birth pangs."

A policy of proletarian management, therefore, can only envisage the general tendencies and orientation of economic development, while historic experience (of which the Russian revolution is a gigantic though incomplete example) can provide the proletariat with an understanding of the social forms suitable for the implementation of its economic programme. This programme will only have a socialist content if it follows a way which is diametrically opposed to capitalism - if it aims at a constant and progressive elevation of the living conditions of the masses, and not at holding them down or lowering them.

***

If we want to understand the revolution not as an isolated phenomenon but as a product of an historical development, we must relate it to the fundamental laws of history - to the dialectical movement generated by the class struggle, which is the living substance of historical events.

Marxism teaches us that the causes of revolutions are not to be found in philoso-

phy, but in the economy of a given society. The gradual changes that occur in the mode of production and exchange, spurred on by the class struggle, inevitably culminate in a revolutionary "catastrophe" which tears through the envelope of the existing social and productive relations.

In this respect the 20th century is for capitalist society what the 18th and 19th centuries were for feudal society - an epoch of violent revolutionary convulsions engulfing the whole of society.

In the epoch of bourgeois decadence, then, proletarian revolutions are the product of the historical maturity of society as a whole, links in a chain of events which, as history since 1914 has shown, can easily alternate with defeats of the proletariat and wars.

The victory of one proletariat, although the immediate result of particular circumstances, is definitely part of a whole: the world revolution. For this reason there can be no question of assigning an autonomous development to this revolution because of any social or geographical peculiarities.

Here we come up against the problem underlying the theoretical controversy which led Russian centrism (and subsequently the Communist International) to put forward the theory of "socialism in one country". We are referring to the interpretation of the unequal development which has been a constant factor in historical evolution.

Marx observed that economic life was in some ways analogous to biological processes. Once life has transcended a given period of development and gone from one stage to the next, it begins to obey other laws, even though it is still dependent on the fundamental laws which regulate all manifestations of life.

It's the same for each historical period, which has its own laws, even though history as a whole is regulated by the laws of dialectical evolution. For example, Marx denied that the law of population was the same in all times and all places. Each stage of development has its own particular law of population and Marx pointed this out when refuting the theory of Malthus.

In Capital, in which he dissected the mechanisms of the capitalist system, Marx didn't dwell on the many uneven aspects of its expansion, because for him: "What we are concerned with primarily is, not the higher or lower degree of development of the social antagonisms which arise out of the natural laws of capitalist production, but these laws in themselves, the tendencies which work out with an iron necessity towards an inevitable goal. A country in which industrial development is more advanced than in other simply presents those others with a picture of their own future".7 From this passage we can see clearly that what has to be considered as the fundamental element is not the uneven development of the different countries which make up the capitalist system - as though there was some kind of law ensuring the historical necessity of uneven development - but rather the specific laws of capitalist production, which regulate the whole of society and which are themselves subordinated to the general laws of dialectical evolution.

The geographical milieu explains why the historical evolution and the specific laws of a society manifest themselves in varied and uneven forms of development, but it cannot explain the historical process itself. In other words, the geographical milieu is not the active factor in history.

Marx pointed out that while capitalist production is favoured by a moderate climate, this is merely a potential factor which can only be made use of in historical conditions which are independent of geographical conditions. "It by no means follows that the most fruitful soil is the most fitted for the growth of the capitalist mode of production. This mode is based on the dominion of man over Nature...It is not the tropics with their luxuriant vegetation, but the temperate zone, that is the mother country of capital. It is not the mere fertility of the soil but the differentiation of the soil, the variety of its natural products, the changes of the seasons, which form the physical basis for the social division of labour, and which, by changes in the natural surroundings, spur man on to the multiplication of his wants, his capacities, his means and modes of labour".8

The geographical milieu is thus not the primordial element which determines the way different countries will develop. If we locate this development in the sphere of geographical conditions, and not in the context of the general historical laws of a whole epoch, then we would have to come to the conclusion that each country has developed in an autonomous manner, independent of any historical context.

But history has only unfolded because of the intervention of men acting (with the exception of primitive communism) within a framework of antagonistic social relations, which have varied according to the historical epoch and which have imposed a particular form on the class struggle: slave against master, serf against landlord, bourgeois against feudal lord, proletariat against bourgeois.

Obviously this doesn't mean that various pre-capitalist social formations - Asiatic, slave, feudal - always succeed each other in a mechanical way and that their specific laws have a universal validity. Such a pattern of evolution was ruled out by the fact that these social formations were all based on modes of production which by nature were very progressive.

Each of these societies was unable to expand beyond a certain geographical radius (e.g. the Mediterranean basin in classical antiquity), while outside this radius other modes of production could exist, in a more or less evolved manner, and under the influence of various factors, of which the geographical factor was not the most essential.

But, with the arrival of capitalism, the whole course of history broadens out. Although capitalism inherited a historic situation characterised by considerable differences in development, it did not take it long to overcome these differences.

Dominated by the need to accumulate surplus value, capitalism appeared on the historical arena as the most powerful and progressive mode of production ever seen, the most expansive of all economic systems. But although it was characterised by a tendency to universalise its mode of production and although it partially succeeded in creating a world in its own image, it never completely destroyed all previous social formations. Rather it annexed them, sucked them dry, or pushed them aside.

We have already expressed our opinion (see "Crises and cycles") on the perspective of the advent of a pure and balanced capitalist society, which Marx is supposed to have put forward; we don't want to go back over this here, since the facts of history have eloquently refuted not Marx's pseudo-predictions, but the hypotheses of those who have used it to reinforce bourgeois ideology. We know that capitalism entered into its epoch of decomposition before being able to complete its historic mission because its internal contradictions developed faster than the system could expand. But capitalism was still the first system of production to give rise to a world economy, which is characterised not by homogeneity and balance, which would in any case be contrary to its nature, but by a strict interdependence of all its parts. It is this which, in the final analysis, subjugates the whole world to the laws of capital and to the yoke of the imperialist bourgeoisie.

The development of capitalist society, spurred on by competition, has produced this complex and remarkable worldwide division of labour which can and must be perfected and purified (this is the task of the proletariat) but which cannot be destroyed. It is not called into question at all by the phenomenon of economic nationalism, which, with the general crisis of capitalism, appears as a reactionary manifestation of the exacerbated contradiction between the universal character of the capitalist economy and this division into antagonist national states. In fact, this is further confirmed by the stifling atmosphere created by the existence of what might be called obsidian economies. Under the cover of an almost hermetically sealed protectionism, we are seeing a prolific growth of industries built up on the basis of enormous waste expenditure, the development of war economies which exact a heavy tribute from the living conditions of the masses. These are economically unviable, parasitic growths which will be eliminated in a socialist society.

A socialist society is obviously inconceivable without this global division of labour.

The interdependence and reciprocal subordination of the various spheres of production (which is today confined within the framework of bourgeois nations) is a historic necessity, and capitalism has taken this to the highest possible level, both from the economic and political point of view. The fact that, once this social structure appears on a world scale, it is shaken by a thousand contradictory forces, does not mean that it doesn't exist on this scale. It is based on a distribution of the productive forces and of natural resources which is the product of the whole historical development. It is not at all dependent on the desire of imperialist capitalism to counter-act the strict interdependence of all the regions of the world by retreating behind national frontiers. If capitalism is attempting this mad project today, it is because it is being driven by its own contradictions, but it can only do this by destroying the riches which concretise the surplus value produced by generations of workers, by precipitating a gigantic destruction of the productive forces into the holocaust of imperialist war.

The international proletariat cannot afford to ignore the laws of historical evolution. Once a section of the proletariat has made its revolution, the price of the theory of "socialism in one country" is the abandonment of the worldwide class struggle, and thus the defeat of that revolution.

***

The idea that uneven development is a historical law giving rise to the necessity of autonomous national development is a denial of the concept of society as a worldwide phenomenon.

As we have shown, uneven economic and political development, far from being an "absolute law of capitalism",9 is simply a sum of phenomena determined by the specific laws of the bourgeois system of production.

In its period of expansion, capitalism, through a tortuous and contradictory process, tended to even out inequalities of development, whereas now, in its regressive phase, the necessities of its evolution have led to a deepening of these inequalities: the advanced capitalisms suck the backward countries dry and destroy any possibility of their development.

The Communist International sees this retrograde and parasitical development, and concludes that "uneven development is augmented and accentuated even further in the imperialist epoch"; it thus puts forward its theory of "national socialism", by pointing out the impossibility of a world proletarian revolution as a simultaneous act, and confusing national socialism and a revolution which breaks out in a national framework.

In order to back up these arguments, it elaborates on certain of Lenin's writings, notably his article of 1915 "On the Slogan for the United States of Europe" (Against the Stream) where he said that "Uneven economic and political development is an unconditional law of capitalism. Hence it follows that the triumph of socialism is to begin with possible in a few, or even a single capitalist country."10

Trotsky has dealt quite adequately with these falsifications in The Third International After Lenin and we don't need to refute them again here.

But all the same, Trotsky, seeking to follow Marx and Lenin, thinks that it is possible to use the "law" of uneven development - which he also makes into an absolute law of capitalism - to explain both the inevitability of the revolution assuming a national form and also why it should first break out in the backward countries: "The uneven, sporadic development of capitalism gives the socialist revolution an uneven and sporadic character, but the advanced degree of mutual interdependence between all countries means that it is both politically and economically impossible to build socialism in one country"11 and again that: "the prediction that Russia, a historically backward country, could undergo a proletarian revolution before an advanced country like England, was based entirely on the law of uneven development."

First of all, although Marx recognised the necessity of national revolutions, he never invoked a law of uneven development, and he always made it clear that the necessity for national revolutions derived from the fact that society was divided into capitalist nations, which was simply the corollary of the fact that it was divided into classes.

The Communist Manifesto says that: "Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is, so far, national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word."12 In the Critique of the Gotha Programme Marx goes on say: "It is altogether self-evident that, to be able to fight at all, the working class must organise itself at home as a class and that its own country is the immediate arena of its struggle. In so far its class struggle is national, not in substance, but as the Communist Manifesto says ‘in form'."13

When the national struggle breaks out into a proletarian revolution, it shows that it is the product of the historical maturation of the social and economic contradictions of capitalist society as a whole. The dictatorship of the proletariat is a point of departure, not the final goal. It is an expression of the worldwide class struggle, and can only live by remaining part of that struggle. Only in the sense of this continuous revolutionary process can we talk about a "permanent" revolution.

Although Trotsky absolutely rejects the theory of "socialism in one country" and considers it to be reactionary, the fact that he bases his argument on the "law" of uneven development leads him to distort the significance of proletarian revolutions. This "law" is incorporated into his theory of permanent revolution which, according to him, consists of two basic theses: one based on a "correct" conception of the law of uneven development, the other on a precise understanding of the world economy.

If, during the imperialist epoch the various expressions of uneven development are the result not of the specific laws of capitalism (whose effects are intensified by the general crisis of decomposition) but of a historical law of uneven development which has the character of necessity, it is impossible to understand why the effects of this law should limit themselves to national revolutions which begin in the backward countries. Why shouldn't they also permit the development of autonomous economies, i.e. of "national socialism"?

By ascribing a preponderant importance to the geographical milieu (because this is what happens when you make uneven development into a law) rather than to the real historical factor - the class struggle - you are opening the door to a justification of a "socialism" based on the physical possibilities of independent development. As far as Russia is concerned, this means opening the door to centrism.

In vain Trotsky accuses Stalin of "making a fetish of the law of uneven development and declaring it as a sufficient condition for the build up of national socialism" because, beginning from the same theoretical premise, he must logically come to the same conclusions, unless he arbitrarily stops half way. Trotsky said of the Russian Revolution that: "it was the greatest of all expressions of the unevenness of historical development; the theory of the permanent revolution, which predicted the October cataclysm, was itself based on this law."

The backwardness of Russia can to a certain extent be used to explain why the revolution had to jump over the bourgeois phase, although the essential reason for this was that it took place in a period when the national bourgeoisie was incapable of carrying out its historic tasks. But the real significance of this backwardness was expressed on the political level, because the historic impotence of the Russian bourgeoisie was accompanied by an organic weakness which was aggravated by the pressures of imperialist conflict. In the chaos of the imperialist war, Russia was revealed as the weak link in the imperialist chain. The world revolution began in the place where conditions were favourable for the proletariat and the building of its class party.

***

To conclude the first part of this study, we would like to look at the theory of countries being "ripe" or "unripe" for socialism, a theory which is especially favoured by the "evolutionary socialists" but which has found some echo in the thought of the communists of the opposition when it comes to defining the character of the Russian Revolution or seeking the origins of its degeneration.

In his preface to the Critique of Political Economy Marx summed up his position on what it meant to say that a phase of social revolution had arrived at a level of maturity: "No social formation is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society. Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation."14 This means that the condition of maturity will always have its repercussions on the whole society regulated by the dominant mode of production. Moreover, the notion of maturity can only have a relative, not an absolute, meaning. A society is "ripe" to the extent that its social structure and juridical framework have become too narrow in relation to the material forces of production which it has developed.

At the beginning of this study we underlined the fact that although capitalism has powerfully developed the productive capacity of society, it has not succeeded in developing the conditions for an immediate passage to socialism. As Marx indicated, only the material conditions for resolving this problem exist "or are at least in the process of formation".

These restrictions apply even more strongly to each national unit in the world economy. All of them are historically ripe for socialism, but none of them are ripe in the sense of possessing all the material conditions needed for the building of an integral socialism. This is true whatever level of development they may have reached.

No nation on its own contains all the elements for a socialist society. The idea of national socialism is in diametrical opposition to the international nature of the imperialist economy, to the universal division of labour, and the global antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

It is a pure abstraction to see socialist society as a sum of complete socialist economies. The world-wide distribution of the productive forces (which is not an artificial product) makes it impossible both for the "advanced" countries and for the "backward" countries to complete the transition to socialism within their own borders. . The specific weight of each of the countries in the world economy is measured by the degree to which they are reciprocally dependent, not by how independent they might be. England, which is one of the most advanced sectors of capitalism, a country in which capitalism exists in an almost pure form, could not operate in isolation. Facts today show that, even when only partially cut off from the

world market, the productive forces begin to break down. This is the case with the cotton and coal industries in England. In the U.S.A, the automobile industry can only go into decline if it is limited to the home market, no matter how vast the latter is. An isolated proletarian Germany would soon see its industrial apparatus breaking down, even if it initiated a huge expansion of consumption.

It is thus an abstraction to pose the question of countries being "ripe" or "unripe" for socialism, because on these terms you would have to say that neither the advanced countries nor the backward countries were mature enough.

The problem has to be posed in the light of the historical maturation of social antagonisms, which in turn results from the sharpening conflicts between the productive forces and the relations of production. To limit the question to the material factors at hand would be to take up the position of the theoreticians of the Second International, of Kautsky and the German Socialists, who considered that because Russia was a backward economy dominated by a technically weak agrarian sector, it was not ripe for a proletarian revolution, but only for a bourgeois revolution. In this their conception was the same as that of the Russian Mensheviks. Otto Bauer declared that the proletarian state inevitably had to degenerate because of Russia's backwardness.

In the Russian Revolution, Rosa Luxemburg remarked that, according to the conception of the social democrats, the Russian revolution ought to have stopped after the fall of the Tsarism. "According to this view, if the revolution has gone beyond that point and has set as its task the dictatorship of the proletariat, this is simply a mistake of the radical wing of the Russian labour movement, the Bolsheviks. And all difficulties which the revolution has met with in its further course, and all disorders it has suffered, are pictured as purely a result of this fateful error."

The question as to whether Russia was or was not ripe for the proletarian revolution can't be answered by looking at the material conditions of its economy, but at the balance of class forces, which had been dramatically transformed by the international situation. The essential condition was the existence of a concentrated proletariat - despite the fact that it was a tiny minority in relation to the huge mass of peasant producers - whose consciousness expressed itself through a class party powerfully armed with revolutionary ideology and experience. We agree with Rosa Luxemburg that: "The Russian proletariat has to be seen as the vanguard of the world proletariat, a vanguard whose movement is the expression of the development of social antagonisms on a world scale. What is happening in St Petersburg is the result of developments in Germany, England, and France. It is these developments which will decide the outcome of the Russian revolution, which can only achieve its goal if it is the prologue to the revolution of the European proletariat." Certain comrades of the communist opposition have however, based their appreciation of the Russian revolution on the criterion of economic "immaturity".

In his study "Classes in Soviet Russia", comrade Hennaut takes up this position. In his interpretation of those statements of Engels which we looked at earlier, Hennaut sees them as having a particular significance which can be applied to a given country, rather than as referring to a whole social order that has reached the historic limitations of its development. If this were the case, Engels would obviously be contradicting what Marx said in his preface to the Critique of Political Economy. But as we shall see, this is not the case. According to Hennaut, it is the economic factor and not the political factor which is most important when we are trying to establish whether or not a proletarian revolution is possible. He says: "if we apply them to the present period of human history, these considerations (of Engels) can only mean that the seizure of power by the proletariat, the maintenance and use of this power for socialist ends, is only conceivable where capitalism has already cleared the path for socialism, i.e. where it has given rise to a numerically strong proletariat which comprises, if not the majority, then a powerful minority of the population, and where it has created a developed industry which is able to stamp its seal on the further development of the whole economy." Further on, he stresses that: "In the final analysis it was the cultural and economic capacities of the country which determined the final outcome of the Russian revolution when it became clear that the proletariat outside Russia wasn't ready to make the revolution. The backward state of Russian society had to make all its negative sides felt." But perhaps comrade Hennaut might have added that, whether we like it or not, any proletarian revolution that tries to draw its "legitimacy" from the material conditions in one country will be drawn irresistibly into the trap of "national socialism".

We repeat that the fundamental condition for the life of the proletarian revolution is its ability to link up on a world scale, and this consideration must determine the internal and external policies of the proletarian state. This is because, although the revolution has to begin on a national scale, it cannot remain indefinitely at that level, however large and wealthy that nation might be. Unless it links up with other national revolutions and becomes a world revolution it will be asphyxiated and will degenerate. This is why we consider it an error to base one's arguments on the national conditions of one country.

On the basis of these political considerations we can arrive at an understanding of the "leap" the Russian revolution made over the various intermediary phases. The October revolution showed that in the epoch of imperialist decadence the proletariat cannot stop at the bourgeois phase of development, but must go beyond it by taking the place of a bourgeoisie incapable of carrying out its historic tasks. In order to attain this objective, the Bolsheviks did not spend their time drawing up an inventory of the productive forces at their disposal, but based their activity on an evaluation of the balance of class forces.

Again, this leap was not conditioned by economic factors, but by political ones, since the only way the Russian revolution could give rise to a material development of the economy was by linking up with the world revolution. The "immaturity" of the backward countries - which makes such "leaps" necessary - as well as the "maturity" of the advanced countries, must all be incorporated into the same process of the world-wide class struggle.

Lenin gave a clear answer to those who reproached the Bolsheviks for having taken power. "It would an irreparable error to say that, because there is an obvious imbalance between our economic strength and out political strength, we shouldn't have taken power! To argue in such a way you have to be blind, you have to forget that such a balance will never exist and can't exist in any process of social revolution, and that it is only through a whole number of experiences, each one of which will be incomplete and marred by a certain imbalance, that the triumph of socialism can be realised by the revolutionary co-operation of the workers of all countries."

No matter how "poor" a proletariat might be it does not have to wait for the "richer" proletariats to make its own revolution. The fact that such a revolution might encounter many more difficulties than would confront a stronger proletariat is undeniable, but history doesn't offer other alternatives.

The historic epoch of bourgeois revolutions led by the bourgeoisie is over. The survival of capitalism has become an obstacle to progress, and thus also to the development of the bourgeois revolution, since we are now faced with a saturated world market. Moreover, the bourgeoisie can no longer win the support of the working masses like it did in 1789; even as early as 1848, 1871, and 1905 in Russia, it was unable to do this.

The October revolution was a striking example of one of these apparent historical paradoxes; it showed a proletariat completing a short-lived bourgeois revolution but then compelled to realise its own objectives in order to avoid being strangled by imperialism.

The Russian bourgeoisie had been weakened from birth by western capital's domination of the economy. The price of keeping Tsarism going was that a considerable portion of the national revenue was soaked off by foreign capital, and this was an obstacle to the economic development of the Russian bourgeoisie.

1905 was an attempted bourgeois revolution marked by the absence of the bourgeoisie. A highly concentrated proletariat already appeared on the scene as an independent revolutionary force; this forced the politically impotent liberal bourgeoisie into the arms of the feudal autocracy. But the bourgeois revolution of 1905 couldn't end in a victory for the proletariat, because although it was a product of the convulsions caused by the Russo-Japanese war, it wasn't accompanied by a maturation of social antagonisms on an international scale. Thus Tsarism was able to receive financial and material aid from the whole European bourgeoisie.

As Rosa Luxemburg said, "The Revolution of 1905-1907 roused only a faint echo in Europe. Therefore, it had to remain a mere opening chapter. Continuation and conclusion were tied up with the further development of Europe".15 The revolution of 1917 arose in a more developed historical situation. In The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky Lenin traced its successive phases: "First, with the ‘whole' of the peasantry against the monarchy, against the landlords, against medievalism (and to that extent, the revolution remains bourgeois, bourgeois democratic). Then, with the poor peasants, with the semi-proletarians, with all the exploited against capitalism, including the rural rich, the kulaks, the profiteers, and to that extent the revolution becomes a socialist one. To attempt to raise an artificial Chinese Wall between the first and the second, to separate them by anything else than the degree of preparedness of the proletariat and the degree of its unity with the poor peasants, means monstrously to distort Marxism, to vulgarise it, to substitute liberalism in its place. It means smuggling in a reactionary defence of the bourgeoisie against the socialist proletariat by means

of quasi-scientific references to the progressive character of the bourgeoisie as compared with medievalism."16

The dictatorship of the proletariat was the instrument which made it possible first to complete the bourgeois revolution, then go beyond it. This is the explanation behind the Bolshevik slogan "land to the peasants", which - mistakenly, in our opinion - was opposed by Rosa Luxemburg.

With Lenin, we say that: "...the Bolsheviks...strictly differentiated between the bourgeois-democratic revolution, and the socialist revolution: by carrying the former to its end, they opened the door for the transition to this latter. This was the only policy that was revolutionary and Marxian".17

Mitchell

(Bilan no. 28, March-April 1936)

1 Collected Works, Vol.21.

2 The Poverty of Philosophy. Collected Works, Vol. 6.

3 Collected Works, Vol.25.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid.

6 The Russian Revolution

7 Preface to the first German edition of Capital.

8 Capital vol. 1, Part V, Chapter XVI "Absolute and relative surplus value".

9 Programme of the 6th Congress of the CI.

10 Collected Works, Vol. 21.

11 The Third International after Lenin.

12 Collected Works, Vol. 6.

13 Collected Works, Vol. 24.

14 Collected Works, Vol.29.

15 The Russian Revolution.

16 Collected Works, Vol. 28.

17 The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky.