As we saw in the last article, the Communist Manifesto was written in anticipation of an imminent revolutionary outbreak. In this expectation, it was not a voice crying in the wilderness:

" ... the consciousness of impending social revolution ... was, significantly enough, not confined to revolutionaries, who expressed it with the greatest elaboration, nor to the ruling classes, whose fear of the massed poor is never far below the surface in times of social change. The poor themselves felt it. The literate strata of the people expressed it. 'All well-informed people', wrote the American consul from Amsterdam during the hunger of 1847, reporting the sentiments of the German emigrants passing through Holland, 'express the belief that the present crisis is so deeply interwoven ill the events of the present period that "it" is but the commencement of that great Revolution, which they consider sooner or later is to dissolve the present constitution of things'" (E J Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789-48).

Confident that huge social upheavals were about to take place, but aware that the nations of Europe were at various stages of historical development, the last section of the Communist Manifesto put forward certain tactical considerations for the intervention of the communist minority.

The general approach remained the same in all cases: "The communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class; but ill the movement of the present, they also represent and take care of the future of that movement ... the communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things. In all these movements they bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time."

More concretely, recognizing that the majority of countries in Europe had not yet even attained the stage of bourgeois democracy, that national independence and unification was still a central issue in countries such as Italy, Switzerland and Poland, the communists pledged to fight alongside the bourgeois democratic parties, and the parties of the radical petty bourgeoisie, against the vestiges of feudal stagnation and absolutism.

The tactic was spelled out in particular detail with regard to Germany:

"The communists turn their attention chiefly to Germany, because that country is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution that is bound to be carried out under more advanced conditions of European civilization, and with a much more developed proletariat, than that of England was in the seventeenth century, and of France in the eighteenth century, and because the bourgeois revolution in Germany will be but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution".

Thus: the tactic was support for the bourgeoisie in so far as it was carrying out the anti-feudal revolution, but always defending the autonomy of the proletariat, above all because the expectation was of "an immediately following proletarian revolution". How far did the events of 1848 vindicate these prognoses? And what lessons did Marx and his 'party' draw in the aftermath of the events?

The bourgeois revolution and the spectre of the proletariat

As we have said, Europe was at a number of different social and political levels in 1848. Only in Britain was capitalism fully developed and the working class a majority of the population. In France, the working class had acquired a considerable fund of political experience through its participation in a series of revolutionary uprisings since 1789. But this relative political maturity was almost completely restricted to the Parisian proletariat, and even in Paris large-scale industrial production was still at its early stages, which meant that the political fractions of the working class (Blanquists, Proudhonists, etc) tended to reflect the weight of obsolete artisanal prejudices and conceptions. As for the rest of Europe - Spain, Italy, Germany, the central and eastern regions - social and political conditions were still extremely backward. These areas were for the most part divided up into a mosaic of petty kingdoms and did not exist as centralized nation states. Feudal vestiges of all kinds hung heavy on society and the
structures of the state.

Thus, in the majority of countries, the completion of the bourgeois revolution was the first item on the agenda - sweeping away the old feudal remnants, establishing unified nation states, installing the political regime of bourgeois democracy. And yet many things had changed since the days of the 'classical' bourgeois revolution of 1789, introducing a series of complications and contradictions into the situation. For a start, the revolutionary upheavals of 1848 were provoked not so much by a 'feudal' crisis but by one of the great cyclical crises of youthful capitalism - the great depression of 1847, which, coming in the wake of a series of disastrous harvests, reduced the living standards of the' masses to an intolerable level. Secondly, it was above all the urban, proletarian or semi-proletarianised masses of Paris, Berlin, Vienna and other cities who led the uprisings against the old order. And as the Manifesto had pointed out, the proletariat had already become a much more distinct force than it had been in 1789; not only on the social level, but on the political level as well. The rise of the Chartist movement in Britain had confirmed this. But it was first and foremost the great rising of June 1848 in Paris which verified the reality of the proletariat as defined in the Manifesto: as an independent political force irrevocably opposed to the rule of capital.

In February 1848, the Parisian working class had been the main, social force behind the barricades in the uprising that had toppled the monarchy of Louis Philippe and installed the Republic. But within months the social antagonism between the proletariat and the 'democratic' bourgeoisie had become overt and acute, as it became apparent that the latter was able to do almost nothing to relieve the economic distress of the former. The proletariat's resistance was couched in the confused demand of the 'right to work' when the government closed the national workshops, which had given the workers a minimum of relief in the face of unemployment. Nevertheless, as Marx argued in The Class Struggles in France, written in 1850, behind this wretched slogan lay the beginnings of a movement for the suppression of private property. Certainly the bourgeoisie itself was aware of the danger; when the Parisian workers took to the barricades to defend the national workshops, the uprising was put down with the utmost ferocity. "It is well known how the workers, with unheard-of bravery and ingenuity, without leaders, without a common plan, without supplies, and for the most part lacking weapons, held in check the army, {he Mobile Guard, the Paris national Guard and the National Guard which streamed in from the provinces. It is well known how the bourgeoisie sought compensation for the mortal terror it had suffered in outrageous brutality, massacring over 3,000 prisoners" (Marx, The Class Struggles in France, 1, 'The defeat of June 1848').

This uprising in fact confirmed the worst fears of the bourgeoisie throughout Europe and its outcome was to have a profound effect on the later development of the revolutionary movement. Traumatized by the specter of the proletariat, the bourgeoisie's nerve failed and it found itself unable to carry through its own revolution against the established order. This was amplified by material factors of course: in the countries dominated by absolutism, the bourgeoisie's political nervousness was also the result of its late economic and political development. In any case, the result was that, rather than calling on the energies of the masses in its battle against the feudal power, as it had done in 1789, the bourgeoisie more and more compromised with the reaction in order to contain the threat 'from below'. This compromise took various forms. In France it produced the strange anomaly of the second Bonaparte, who stepped into the breech of power because the bourgeoisie's 'democratic' mechanisms seemed only to open the door to the cold winds of social unrest and political instability. In Germany, it was incarnated in a particularly timid and spineless bourgeoisie, whose lack of resolve in the face of absolutist reaction was lambasted time and again by Marx, especially in the article published in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung of 15 December 1848, 'The bourgeoisie and the counter revolution': "The German bourgeoisie had developed so sluggishly, so pusillanimously and so slowly, that it saw itself threateningly confronted by the proletariat, and all those sections of the population related to the proletariat in interests and ideas, at the very moment of its own threatening confrontation with feudalism and absolutism." This made it "irresolute against each of its opponents, taken individually, because it always saw the other one in front of it or to the rear,' inclined from the outset to treachery against the people and compromise with the crowned representative of the old society ... without faith in itself, without faith in the people, grumbling at those above, trembling before those below ... an accursed old man, who found himself condemned to lead and mislead the first youthful impulses of a robust people in his own senile interests - sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything - this was the nature of the Prussian bourgeoisie which found itself at the helm of the Prussian state after the March revolution. "

But though the bourgeoisie was in "mortal terror" of the proletariat, the latter was not mature enough, historically speaking, to assume political command of the revolutions. Already the powerful British working class was somewhat isolated from the events on the European mainland; and Chartism, despite the existence of a "physical force" tendency on its left wing, aimed above all at finding a place for the working class inside 'democratic', ie bourgeois, society. Above all, the British bourgeoisie was intelligent enough to find a way of gradually incorporating the demand for universal suffrage in such a way that, far from threatening the political reign of capital, as Marx himself had thought, it more and more became one of its mainstays. Besides, at the very time that continental Europe was in the midst of all its upheavals, British capitalism was already on the verge of a new phase of expansion. In France, although the working class had taken the greatest strides politically, it had been unable either to evade the traps of the bourgeoisie or, still less, put itself forward as the bearer of a new social project. The June 48 rising had to all intents and purposes been provoked by the bourgeoisie, and the communist aspirations contained within it were more implicit than explicit. As Marx put it in the Class Struggles in France ('The defeat of June 1848'): "The Paris proletariat was forced into the June insurrection by the bourgeoisie. This in itself sealed its fate. It was neither impelled by its immediate, avowed needs to fight for the overthrow of the bourgeoisie by force, nor was it equal to this task. It had to be officially informed by the Moniteur that the time was past when the republic found itself obliged to show deference to its illusions; only its defeat convinced it of the truth that the smallest improvement in its position remains a utopia within the bourgeois republic, a utopia which becomes a crime as soon as it aspires to become reality ... ".

Thus, far from rapidly going over to a proletarian revolution, as the Manifesto had hoped, the movements of 1848 hardly even resulted in the bourgeoisie completing its own revolution.

The intervention of the Communist League

The 1848 revolutions provided the Communist League with a very early ordeal by fire. Seldom has a communist organization, so soon after its birth, been granted the somewhat doubtful reward of being plunged into the deep end of a gigantic revolutionary movement. Marx and Engels, having opted for political exile away from the stultifying Junker regime, returned to Germany to play the part in events to which their convictions necessarily guided them. Given the Communist League's total lack of direct experience in events of such a scale, it would be surprising if the work that the organization carried out during that phase - including the work of its most theoretically advanced elements - were free from errors, sometimes quite serious ones. But the basic question is not whether the Communist League made mistakes, but whether its overall intervention was consistent with the fundamental tasks it had set itself in its statement of political principles and tactics, the Communist Manifesto.

One of the most striking features of the CL' s intervention in the German revolution of 1848 is its opposition to facile revolutionary extremism. In the eyes of the bourgeoisie - or at least in its propaganda organs - the communists were the nec plus ultra of fanaticism and terrorism, fell agents of destructiveness and forced social leveling. Marx himself during this period was referred to as the 'Red Terror Doctor' and was constantly being accused of hatching devious plots to assassinate the Crowned Heads of Europe. In actual practice: the activity of the 'Marx party' in this period is noteworthy for its sobriety.

In the first place, during the early, heady days of the revolution, Marx publicly opposed the revolutionary romanticism of the 'legions' set up in France by expatriate revolutionaries and aimed at taking the revolution back to Germany at the point of a bayonet. Against this, Marx pointed out that the revolution was not primarily a military question but a social and political one; he also dryly pointed out that the 'democratic' French bourgeoisie was only too pleased to see these troublesome German revolutionaries march off to fight the feudal tyrants of Germany - and that they had not neglected to give the German authorities due warning of their approach. In the same vein, Marx came out against an isolated and ill-timed uprising in Cologne in the declining phase of the revolution, since this would have once again led the masses into the waiting arms of the reaction, who had taken explicit measures to provoke the rising.

On a more general political level, Marx also had to combat those communists who believed that the workers' revolution and the advent of communism were on the short-term agenda; who scorned the struggle for bourgeois political democracy and considered that communists should talk only of the conditions of the working class and the necessity for communism. In Cologne, where Marx spent most of the revolutionary period as the editor of the radical democratic paper the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, the main proponent of this view was the good Dr Gotteschalk who considered himself a true man of the people and castigated Marx as no better than an armchair theorist, because he argued so stubbornly that Germany was not yet ripe for communism, that first the bourgeoisie would have to come to power and drag Germany out of its feudal backwardness; and that consequently the task of the communists was to support the bourgeoisie 'from the left' , participating in the popular movement to ensure that it continually pushed the bourgeoisie to go to the very limits of its opposition to the feudal order.

In practical organizational terms, this meant participating in the Democratic Unions that were set up to, as the name implies, bring together all those who were consistently and sincerely fighting against absolutism and for the establishment of bourgeois democratic political structures. But it can be said that, in reacting against the voluntarist excesses of those who wanted to skip the bourgeois democratic phase altogether, Marx went too far in the other direction and forgot some of the principles laid out in the Manifesto. In Cologne, Gotteschalk's tendency were in the majority of the League, and to counter their influence Marx at one point dissolved the League altogether. Politically: the NRZ went for a whole period without saying anything at all about the workers' conditions, and in particular about the need for the workers to guard their political autonomy in the face of all factions of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie. This was hardly compatible with the notions of proletarian independence put forward in the Manifesto, and, as we shall see, Marx made a self-critique on this particular question in the first attempts to draw up a balance sheet of the Communist League's activity in the movement. But the basic point remains: what guided Marx in this period, as throughout his whole life, was the recognition that communism had to be more than a necessity in terms of fundamental human need: it also had to be a real possibility given the objective conditions reached by social and historical development. This debate was to reemerge in the League in the aftermath of the revolution as well.

Lessons of the defeat: The necessity for proletarian autonomy

In many ways, the most important political contributions of the Communist League, apart of course from the Manifesto itself, are the documents written in the aftermath of the 1848 movements; the 'balance sheet' that the organization drew up concerning its own participation m the revolts. This is true even though the debates that these documents expressed or provoked were to lead to a fundamental split and to the actual dissolution of the organization.

In the circular of the CL's executive committee, published in March 1850, there is a critique - in fact a self-critique, since Marx himself wrote the piece - of the activities of the League within the revolutionary events. While the document affirms without hesitation that the general political prognoses of the League had been amply confirmed by events, and while its members had always been the most determined fighters in the revolutionary cause, the organizational weakening of the League - in effect, its dissolution during the early stages of the revolution in Germany - had gravely exposed the working class to the political domination of the petty bourgeois democrats: " ... the formerly strong organization of the League has been considerably weakened. A large number of members who were directly involved in the movement thought that the time for secret societies was over and that public action alone was sufficient. The individual districts and communes (the basic units of the League's organization) allowed their connections with the Central Committee to weaken and gradually become dormant. So, while the Democratic Party, the party of the petty bourgeoisie, has become more and more organized in Germany, the workers' party has lost its only firm foothold, remaining organized at best in individual localities for local purposes; within the general movement it has consequently come under the complete domination and leadership of the petty bourgeois democrats. This situation cannot be allowed to continue the independence of the workers must be restored". And there is no doubt that the most important element in this text is its clear defense of the necessity to fight for the fullest political and organizational independence of the working class, even during revolutions led by other social classes.

This was a necessity for two reasons.

First of all, if, as in Germany, the bourgeoisie proved itself incapable of accomplishing its own revolutionary tasks, the proletariat needed to act and organize independently in order to force the momentum of the revolution forward despite the reluctance and conservatism of the bourgeoisie: the model here was to some extent the first Paris Commune, the one in 1793 where the 'popular' masses had organized themselves in local assemblies or sections, centralized at the city level in the Commune, in order to push the Jacobin bourgeoisie to continue the impetus of the revolution.

At the same time, even if the most radical democratic elements came to power, they would be compelled by the logic of their position to turn on the workers and subject them to bourgeois order and discipline as soon as they became the new helmsmen of the state. This had been true in and after 1793, when the bourgeoisie began to discover more and more 'enemies on the left'; it had been demonstrated in blood by the June 1848 events in Paris; and in Marx's opinion it would happen again with the next round of the revolution in Germany. Marx predicted that following the failure of the liberal bourgeoisie, its inability to confront the absolutist power, the petty bourgeois democrats would be swept into the leadership of the next revolutionary government, but that they too would attempt forthwith to disarm and attack the working class. And for this very reason, the proletariat could only defend itself from such attacks by maintaining its class independence. This independence had three dimensions:

- The existence and action of a communist organization as the most advanced political fraction of the class:

"At the moment, while the democratic petty bourgeois are everywhere oppressed, they preach to the proletariat general unity and reconciliation; they extend the hand of friendship, and seek to found a great opposition party which will embrace all shades of democratic opinion; that is, they seek to ensnare workers in a party organization in which general social-democratic phrases prevail, while their particular interests are kept hidden behind, and in which, for the sake of preserving the peace, the specific demands of the proletariat may not be presented. Such unity would be to their advantage alone and to the complete disadvantage of the proletariat. The proletariat would lose all its hard-won independent position and be reduced once more to a mere appendage of official bourgeois democracy. This unity must therefore be resisted in the most decisive manner. Instead of lowering themselves to the level of an applauding chorus, the workers, and above all the League, must work for the creation of an independent organization of the workers' party, both secret and open, alongside the official democrats, and the League must aim to make every one of its communes a center and nucleus of workers' associations in which the position and interests of the proletariat can be discussed free from bourgeois influence":

- The maintenance of autonomous class demands, backed up by unitary organizations of the class, ie organs regrouping all workers as workers:

"During and after the struggle the workers must at every opportunity put forward their own demands against those of the bourgeois democrats. They must demand guarantees for the workers as soon as the democratic bourgeoisie sets about taking over the government. They must achieve these guarantees by force if necessary, and generally make sure that the new rulers commit themselves to all possible concessions and promises - the surest means of compromising them. They must check in every way and as far as it is possible the victory euphoria and enthusiasm for the new situation which follow every successful street battle, with a cool and cold-blooded analysis of the situation and with undisguised mistrust of the new government. Alongside the new official governments they must simultaneously establish their own revolutionary workers' government, either in the form of local executive committees and councils or through workers' clubs and committees, so that the bourgeois democratic governments not only immediately lose the support of the workers but find themselves from the very beginning supervised and threatened by authorities behind which stand the whole mass of the workers. In a word, from the very moment of victory, the workers' suspicion must be directed no longer against the defeated reactionary party but against their former ally, against the party which intends to exploit the common victory for itself".

- These organs must be armed; at no point must the proletariat be lured into surrendering its weapons to the official government:

"To be able forcefully and threateningly to oppose this party, whose betrayal of the workers will begin with the very first hour of victory, the workers must be armed and organized. The whole proletariat must be armed at once with muskets, rifles, cannon and ammunition, and the revival of the old-style citizens' militia, directed against the workers, must be opposed. Where the formation of this militia cannot be prevented, the workers must try to organize themselves independently as a proletarian guard, with elected leaders and with their own elected general staff; they must try to place themselves not under the orders of the state authority but of the revolutionary local councils set up by the workers. Where the workers are employed by the state, they must arm and organize themselves into special corps with elected leaders, or as a part of the proletarian guard. Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered, any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary".

These conclusions as to what class independence in a revolutionary situation practically entails, are important not so much as an immediate prescription for a type of revolution which was not really on the agenda any more, but as easily recognizable historical anticipations of the future - of the momentous revolutionary conflicts of 1871, 1905 and 1917, when the working class was to form its own organs of political combat and to present itself as a viable candidate for power. Here in the League's circular is the whole notion of dual power, a social situation in which the working class begins to gain such a degree of political and organizational autonomy that it poses a direct threat to the bourgeoisie's management of society; and, beyond the inherently unstable dual power situation, the notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the seizure and exercising of political power by the organized working class. In the text of the League, it is apparent that the embryonic forms of this proletarian power arise outside of, and in opposition to, the official organs of the bourgeois state. They are (Marx is specifically referring to the workers' clubs here) "a union of the whole working class against the whole bourgeois class - the formation of a workers' state against the bourgeois state" (Class Struggles in France). Consequently, these lines already contain the seeds of the position that the taking of power by the working class involves not the seizure of the existing state apparatus, but its violent destruction by the workers' own organs of power. Only the seeds, because this position had by no means been clarified by decisive historic experience: although the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte makes explicit, if passing, reference to the need to destroy the state rather than take control of it ("All political revolutions perfected this machine instead of smashing it"), during the same period Marx was still convinced that the workers could come to power in some countries (eg Britain) through universal suffrage. The matter was treated with regard to particular national conditions rather than as a general problem of principle.

This question was not finally cleared up until the real historical movement of the proletariat had intervened decisively in the discussion: it was the Paris Commune which settled it. But we can already see the continuity between the conclusions drawn about the Commune - that proletarian political power requires the appearance of a new network of class organs, a centralized revolutionary 'state' which cannot live alongside the existing state machine. Marx's 'prophetic' insight is apparent here; but these predictions are not mere speculations. They are solidly based on the reality of past experience: the experience of the first Paris Commune, of the revolutionary clubs and sections of 1789-95, and above all of the June days in France 48, when the proletariat armed itself and rose up as a distinctive social force, but was crushed in no small measure because it was insufficiently armed politically. Regardless of all the historical limitations within which these texts of the League were written, the lessons they contain about the necessity for independent working class action and organization remain as essential as ever; without it, the working class will never come to power and communism will indeed be no more than a dream.

'Permanent revolution'; permanently unrealized

Nevertheless, we cannot ignore the fact that these calls for proletarian autonomy were framed in a particular historical perspective - that of the 'permanent revolution'.  

The Manifesto had envisaged a rapid transition from the bourgeois to the proletarian revolution in Germany. As we have said, the actual experience of 1848 had convinced Marx and his tendency that the German bourgeoisie was congenitally unfit to make its own revolution; that in the next revolutionary outbreak, which the March 1850 circular still considered to be a short-term prospect, the petty bourgeois democrats, the' social democrats' as they were sometimes referred to at the time, would come to power. But this social stratum would also prove Itself incapable of carrying through a complete destruction of feudal relations, and would in any case be forced to attack and disarm the proletariat as soon as it assumed governmental office. The task of really achieving the bourgeois revolution would thus fall to the proletariat, but in doing so the latter would be compelled to forge ahead towards its own, communist revolution.

That this schema was inapplicable to the very backward conditions of Germany was, as we shall see, recognized by Marx soon afterwards, when he realized that European capitalism was still very much in its ascendant phase. This can also be recognized by leftist commentators and historians. But according to the latter, "the tactic of permanent revolution, although inapplicable in the Germany of 1850, remained as a valuable political legacy for the workers' movement. It was proposed by Trotsky for Russia in 1905, though Lenin still considered it premature to attempt to convert the bourgeois democratic revolution into a proletarian one. In 1917, however, in the context of the all-European crisis brought about by the World War, Lenin and the Bolshevik party were able to apply successfully the tactic of permanent revolution, leading the Russian revolution of that year forward from the overthrow of Tsarism to the overthrow of capital itself" (David Fernbach, introduction to The Revolutions of 1848, Penguin Marx Library, 1973).

In reality, the whole notion of permanent revolution was based on an insoluble conundrum: the idea that while the proletarian revolution was possible in some countries, other parts of the world still had (or have) unfinished bourgeois tasks or stages ahead of them. This was a genuine problem for Marx, but it was transcended by historical evolution itself, which demonstrated that capitalism could only pose the conditions for proletarian revolution on a world-wide scale. It was as a single, international system that capitalism entered its decadent phase, its "epoch of wars and revolutions" with the outbreak of the First World War. The task facing the Russian proletariat in 1917 was not the completion of any bourgeois stage but the seizure of political power as a first step towards the world proletarian revolution. Contrary to appearance, February 1917 was not a 'bourgeois revolution', or the accession to power of some intermediate social stratum. February 1917 was a proletarian revolt which all the forces of the bourgeoisie did everything they could to derail and destroy; what it proved, very rapidly, was that all factions of the bourgeoisie, far from being 'revolutionary', were totally wedded to imperialist war and counter-revolution, and that the petty bourgeoisie and other intermediate strata had no autonomous social or political program of their own, but were doomed to fall in behind one or other of the two historic classes in society.

When Lenin wrote the April Theses in 1917, he liquidated all the outmoded notions of some half way stage between the bourgeois and the proletarian revolution, all the vestiges of purely national conceptions of revolutionary change. The Theses effectively dispensed with the ambiguous concept of the permanent revolution and affirmed that the revolution of the working class is communist and international, or it is nothing.

Clarifying the communist perspective: the concept of capitalist decadence

The most important clarifications about the perspective of communism came through the debate that broke out in the League not long after the publication of this first post-revolutionary circular. It soon became clear to Marx and those close to him politically that the counter-revolution had triumphed all over Europe and that there was in fact no prospect of an imminent revolutionary struggle. What convinced him of this more than anything was not simply the political and military victories of the reaction but his recognition, based on painstaking economic research in his new conditions of exile in Britain, that capitalism was entering a new period of growth. As he wrote in the Class Struggles in France:

"In view of this general prosperity, in which the productive forces of bourgeois society are flourishing as exuberantly as they possibly can under bourgeois conditions, there can be no talk of a real revolution. Such a revolution is only possible at periods when the two factors, modern forces of production and bourgeois forms of production, come into conflict. The incessant squabbles in which the representatives of the continental Party of Order are now indulging and compromising one another are remote from providing any opportunity for a new revolution. On the contrary, they are only possible because conditions for the time being are so secure and - what the reaction does not know - so bourgeois. All attempts of the reaction to put a stop to bourgeois development will recoil upon themselves as certainly as all the moral indignation and enthusiastic proclamations of the democrats. A new revolution is only possible as the result of a new crisis. But it will come, just as surely as the crisis itself" (IV, 'The abolition of universal suffrage in 1850').

Consequently, the task facing the Communist League was not the immediate preparation for revolution, but above all to grasp theoretically the objective historic situation, the real destiny of capital and thus the real bases for a communist revolution.

This perspective met with fierce opposition from the more immediatist elements in the party, the Willich-Schapper tendency who, in the fateful meeting of the CL's Central Committee in September 1850, claimed that the argument was between those "who organize in the proletariat" (ie, themselves, the real worker-communists) and "those whose influences derive from their pens" (ie Marx and his armchair theorists). The real issue was posed by Marx in his reply:

"During our last debate in particular, on the question of 'The position of the German proletariat in the next revolution', views were expressed by members of the minority of the Central Committee which directly contradict our second-to-last circular, and even the Manifesto. A national German approach has replaced the universal conception of the Manifesto, flattering the national sentiments of the German artisans. The will, rather than the actual conditions, was stressed as the chief factor in the revolution. We tell the workers: if you want to change conditions and make yourselves capable of government, you will have to undergo fifteen, twenty or fifty years of civil war. Now they are told: we must come to power immediately or we might as well go to sleep" (Minutes of the CC meeting, published in The Revolutions of 1848).

This debate resulted in the effective dissolution of the League. Marx proposed that its HQ be moved to Cologne and that the two tendencies work in separate local sections. The organization continued to exist until after the notorious Cologne Communist trial of 1852, but it was more and more a purely formal existence. The followers of Willich-Schapper got themselves increasingly involved in crack-brained plots and conspiracies aimed at unleashing the proletarian storm. Marx, Engels and a few others withdrew more and more from the activities of the organization (except when they came to the defense of their imprisoned comrades in Cologne) and devoted themselves to the main task of the hour - elaborating a more profound understanding of the workings and weaknesses of the capitalist mode of production.

This was the first clear demonstration of the fact that a proletarian party could not exist as such in a period of reaction and defeat; that in such periods revolutionaries can only work as a fraction. But the non-existence of an organized fraction around Marx and Engels in the ensuing period was not a strength; it expressed the immaturity of the proletariat's political movement, of the concept of the party itself (see the series 'The Fraction-Party relationship in the marxist tradition', IRs nos. 59, 61, 64, 65, in particular 'From Marx to the Second International', IR 64).

Nonetheless, the debate with the Willich-Schapper tendency has left us with an enduring legacy: the clear affirmation by the 'Marx tendency' that revolution could only come about when the "modern forces of production" had entered into conflict with "the bourgeois forms of production"; when capitalism had become a fetter on the development of the productive forces, a decadent social system. This was the essential reply to all those who, divorcing it from its objective historical conditions, reduced the communist revolution to a simple question of will. And it is a reply that has had to be repeated over and over again in the workers' movement - against the Bakuninists in the First International, who showed the same lack of interest in the question of material conditions, and made the revolution dependent on the flair and enthusiasm of the masses (and of their self-proclaimed secret vanguard); or against Bakunin's latter-day descendants in today's proletarian political milieu - groups like the Groupe Communiste Internationaliste and Wildcat, who, starting by rejecting the marxist conception of the decadence of capitalism, end up rejecting all notions of historical progress and claim that communism has been possible since capitalism began, or even since the very dawn of class society.

It is true that the debate in 1850 did not finally clarify this question of decadence; there is room in Marx's words about the "next revolution coming out of the next crisis" for concluding that Marx saw the revolutionary possibility emerging not so much out of a period in which-bourgeois relations have become a permanent fetter on the productive forces, but out of one of the cyclical and temporary crises which punctuated capitalism's life throughout the 19th century. Some currents within the proletarian movement - in particular the Bordigists - have tried to remain consistent with Marx's critique of voluntarism while rejecting the notion of a permanent crisis of the capitalist mode of production, the notion of decadence. But although the concept of decadence could not be fully clarified until capitalism really entered its decadent phase, it is our contention that those who defend this notion are the real heirs of Marx's method. This will be one of the elements we will examine in the next article in this series, when we consider Marx's theoretical work in the period following the dissolution of the League from the angle most relevant to this series: as a key to understanding the necessity and possibility of communism.

CDW

'Communism is dead! Capitalism has won because it is the only system that works! It is useless and even dangerous to dream of another society!' The bourgeoisie has unleashed an unprecedented campaign with the collapse of the eastern bloc and the so-called Communist regimes. At the same time, to drive in the nail, bourgeois propaganda is trying to demoralize the working class by persuading it that it's no longer a force in society, that it no longer counts, even that it no longer exists. The bourgeoisie has completely exaggerated the significance of the fall in class combativity that has resulted from the upheavals of the last few years. The recovery of class struggle, which has already begun, will expose these lies, but even during big workers' struggles the bourgeoisie will continue to hammer home the idea that these struggles cannot in any way lead to the overthrow of capitalism and the foundation of a society devoid of the scourges that this system imposes on humanity. Thus, against all the bourgeois lies, but also against the skepticism of certain would-be revolutionaries, the affirmation of the revolutionary character of the proletariat remains a responsibility of communists. This is the objective of the following article.

In the campaigns that we have suffered these past years, one of the major themes is the 'refutation' of marxism. The latter, according to the ideologues appointed by the bourgeoisie, is bankrupt. Its practical results and its collapse in the countries of the east illustrate this bankruptcy. In our Review we have shown that Stalinism has nothing to do with the communism that Marx and the whole of the workers' movement envisaged[1]. Concerning the revolutionary capacity of the working class, the task of communists is to reaffirm the marxist position on this question. In the first place this means recalling what marxisrn understands by a revolutionary class.

What is a revolutionary class for marxism?

"The history of all previous societies is the history of class struggles"[2]. This is the opening line of one of the most important texts of marxism and of the workers' movement: the Communist Manifesto. This thesis is not unique to marxism[3], but one of the fundamental bases of communist theory is that the class struggle in capitalist society has the ultimate perspective of the overthrow of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat and the installation of the power of the latter over the whole of society. This thesis has always been rejected, obviously, by the defenders of the capitalist system. However, while the bourgeoisie in the ascendant period of its system could discover (in an incomplete and mystified way of course) a certain number of social laws[4], it cannot do so today: the bourgeoisie of capitalist decadence has become totally incapable of giving rise to such thinkers. For the ideologues of the dominant class, the fundamental priority of all their theoretical efforts is to show that marxisrn is wrong (even if some defend this or that contribution of Marx). And the foundation stone of their 'theories' is that the working class has no historical role. That's when these experts are not denying the very existence of the class struggle, or worse, the existence of social classes themselves.

It's not only the avowed defenders of bourgeois society who make such assertions. Certain 'radical thinkers', who have made a career of contesting the established order, have echoed them for several decades. The guru of the group Socialisme ou Barbarie (and inspirer of the group Solidarity in Great Britain), Cornelius Castoriadis, at the same time that he envisaged the replacement of capitalism by a 'third system', the 'bureaucratic society', has been claiming for nearly 40 years that the antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat, between exploiters and exploited, was destined to give way to a struggle between 'order-givers and order-takers'[5]. More recently, other 'thinkers' who have known their hour of glory, such as Professor Marcuse, affirmed that the working class had been 'integrated' into capitalist society and that the only challenge to the system would come from marginalized social categories such as blacks in the USA, students or even the peasants of the under-developed countries. Thus the theories about the 'end of the working class', which are flowering again today, do not even have novelty value: one of the characteristics of the 'thought' of the decadent bourgeoisie, and one which well expresses the senility of this class, is the incapacity to produce any new idea. The only thing that it can do is to ferret out old clichés from the rubbish bins of history and dress them up as the discovery of the century.

One of the favorite means used today by the bourgeoisie to evade the reality of class antagonisms, and even the reality of social classes, are sociological studies. With great supplies of statistics, it is demonstrated that real social cleavages have nothing to do with class differences but with criteria such as education, housing, age-group, ethnic origin, or religious persuasion[6]. According to this type of thinking the vote of a 'citizen' in favor of the right or of the left depends less on his economic situation than on other criteria. In the USA, in New England, the blacks and the Jews traditionally vote Democrat, in France, practicing Catholics, the people of Alsace or Lyon traditionally vote right. This forgets however that the majority of American workers never vote and that in strikes French workers who go to church are not necessarily less combative. In a more general way, sociological 'science' always forgets to give an historic dimension to its claims. Thus, there is a refusal to remember that the same Russian workers who launched the first proletarian revolution of the 20th Century, that of 1905, began it the 9th January (Red Sunday) with a demonstration led by a priest, and appealed to the kindness of the Czar to ease their poverty[7].

When the sociological 'experts' refer to history, it's only to say that things are radically different to the last century. At this time, according to them, marxism and the theory of the class struggle could mean something because the working and living conditions of the wage laborers of industry really were appalling. But since then the workers have been 'embourgeoisified' and integrated into the 'consumer society' to the extent of losing their identity. Moreover the bourgeois with a top hat and gold chain has given way to salaried 'managers'. All these considerations try to hide the fact that the fundamental structures of society have not basically changed. In reality the conditions which gave the working class its revolutionary nature in the last century are still present. The fact that the standard of living of the workers today may be better than that of their class brothers of past generations does not change in any way their place in the relations of production which dominate capitalist society. The social classes continue to exist and the struggles between them still constitute the fundamental motor of historical development.

It is a real irony of history that the official ideologies of the bourgeoisie pretend, on the one hand, that classes don't play any specific role (and thus don't exist), but recognize on the other hand that the world economic situation is the essential question which this same bourgeoisie is faced with.

In reality, the fundamental importance of classes in society is a necessary result of the preponderant place that the economic activity of men has within it. One of the basic affirmations of historical materialism is that, in the last analysis, the economy determines the other spheres of society: juridical relations, forms of government, ways of thinking. This materialist vision of history obviously demolishes the philosophies which see in historical events either pure chance, the expression of divine will, or the simple result of the passions or thoughts of men. But as Marx already said in his time "the crisis forces the dialectic into the heads of the bourgeoisie". The now obvious preponderance of the economy in the life of society is at the root of the importance of social classes, because the latter are precisely defined, contrary to other sociological categories, by the place they occupy vis-a-vis economic relationships. That has always been true since class society existed, but in capitalism this reality expresses itself more clearly.

In feudal society, for example, social differentiation was enshrined in laws. A fundamental juridical difference existed between the exploiters and the exploited: nobles were, by law, granted an official status of privileges (freedom from taxes, beneficiary of tributes from their serfs, for example) while the exploited peasants were attached to their land and obliged to give part of their revenue to the lord (or work for nothing on the land of the latter). In such a society, exploitation, if it was easily measurable (for example in the form of a tribute paid by the serf) seemed to derive from law. By contrast, in capitalist society, the abolition of privileges, the introduction of universal suffrage, the equality and liberty proclaimed by its constitutions, no longer allowed exploitation and class differentiation to hide behind differences in legal regulations. It is the possession or non-possession of the means of production[8], as well as their method of employment, which essentially determines the place in society occupied by its members and their access to its wealth; that is, their membership of a social class and the existence of common interests with the other members of the same class. In large measure, the fact of possessing the means of production and of putting them to work individually determines the membership of the petit-bourgeoisie (artisans, fanners, liberal professions, etc)[9]. The fact of being deprived of the means of production and of being constrained, in order to live, to sell its labor power to those who own them and who profit from this exchange to extract surplus value, determines the membership of the working class. Finally, the bourgeoisie are those who possess (in the strictly juridical sense or in global sense of their individual or collective control) the means of production which puts wage labor to work and who live from the exploitation of the latter through the appropriation of the surplus value that the workers produce. In essence, this differentiation into classes is as valid as it was last century. Moreover the interests of each of these different classes, and the conflicts between their interests, remains. That's why the antagonisms between the principal components of society, determined by the skeleton of the latter, the economy, continues to be at the center of social life.

That said, even if the antagonism between exploiters and exploited is one of the principal motors of the history of societies, it is not expressed identically in each society. In feudal society, the struggles, often ferocious and wide ranging, between serfs and lords, never led to a radical overthrow of the latter. The class antagonism which led to the overthrow of the ancien regime, the abolition of the privileges of the nobility, was not the one between the aristocracy and the class that it exploited, the serfs, but the conflict between this same nobility and another exploiting class, the bourgeoisie (English Revolution of the middle of the 17th century, French Revolution from the end of the 18th). Moreover, the slave society of Roman antiquity had not been abolished by the class of slaves (despite the sometimes formidable combats led by the latter, like the Spartacus revolt in 73 BC) but by the nobility
which was to dominate the Christian west for more than a millennium.

In reality, in the societies of the past, revolutionary classes have never been exploited classes, but were new exploiting classes. This was no accident. Marxism distinguishes revolutionary classes (also referred to as 'historic' classes) from other classes of society by reason of their capacity, contrary to the latter, to take on the leadership of society. In so far as the development of the productive forces was insufficient to assure an abundance of goods to the whole of society, it was inevitable that economic inequalities and thus relations of exploitation would remain. In these conditions, only an exploiting class was able to impose itself at the head of the social body. Its historic role was to facilitate the emergence and development of the new relations of production which it carried within itself; to supplant the old, obsolete relations of production, resolving contradictions made insurmountable as long as the old relations prevailed.

Thus, the decadence of Roman slave society came about because, on the one hand, the 'supplies' of slaves from the conquest of new territories came up against Rome's difficulty in controlling the increasingly far-flung frontiers of its empire, and on the other hand because of the system's inability to get the slaves to take the care required for the application of new agricultural techniques. In such a situation, feudal relations, in which the exploited no longer had a status equal to that of cattle[10], and in which they were closely interested in developing the productivity of the soil they worked on because they lived from it as well, were the most suitable for taking society out of the mess it was in. This is why the new relations were developed in particular by the increasing emancipation of the slaves (this was accelerated in certain places by the arrival of the 'barbarians', some of whom already lived in a form of feudal society).

Similarly, marxism (beginning with the Communist Manifesto) insists on the eminently revolutionary role played by the bourgeoisie at a certain stage of its history. This class, which appeared and developed within feudal society, saw its power grow vis-a-vis a nobility and a monarchy which was becoming more and more dependent on it, both for the supply of all kinds of goods (materials, furniture, spices, weapons) and for financing their expenses. As the possibilities of clearing and extending cultivated lands diminished, so one of the main sources of the dynamic of feudal relations dried up; and as great kingdoms were established, the role of protector of the populations, which had originally been the main vocation of the nobility, lost its raison d'etre. As a result the nobility's control over society became a barrier to social development. And this was amplified by the fact that this development, the real progress at the level of the productive forces, was more and more connected to the growth of trade, of the banks and of craftsmanship in the towns.

Thus, by putting itself at the head of the social body, at first in the economic sphere, then in the political sphere, the bourgeoisie freed society from the fetters that had plunged it into crisis; it created the conditions for the most formidable growth of wealth that human history had ever known. In doing so, it replaced one form of exploitation, serfdom, with another form of exploitation, wage labor. In order to achieve this, it was led, in the period that Marx called primitive accumulation, to take measures on a par with the way the slaves were treated, in order to compel the peasants to come and sell their labor power in the towns (on this subject, see the admirable pages in Book One of Capital). And this barbarism was only a foretaste of the way that capital would exploit the proletariat (child labor, night work for women and children, 18 hour days, the 'workhouse', etc) before the latter's struggles compelled the capitalists to attenuate the brutality of their methods.

As soon as it appeared, the working class waged revolts against exploitation. And these revolts were from the start accompanied by projects aimed at overturning society, abolishing inequalities, and holding social wealth in common. Here it was not fundamentally different from previous exploited classes, notably the serfs, who also, in certain of their revolts, rallied to the idea of a great social transformation. This was notably the case with the Peasants' War of the 16th century, in Germany, where the mouthpiece of the exploited was the monk Thomas Munzer, who advocated a form of communism[11]. However, contrary to the projects for social transformation put forward by other exploited classes, the one advanced by the proletariat is not an unrealisable utopia. The dream of an egalitarian society, without masters and exploitation, which was raised by the slaves and the serfs, could only be a mirage because the level of economic development reached by their societies did not permit the abolition of exploitation. By contrast, the communist project of the proletariat is perfectly realistic, not only because capitalism has created the premises of such a society, but also because it's the only project that can take humanity out of the swamp that it's now in.

Why the proletariat is the, revolutionary class of our time

As soon as the proletariat began to put its own project forward, the bourgeoisie could only express its disdain for what it saw as the ramblings of prophets crying in the wilderness. When it bothered to go beyond mere disdain, the only thing that it could imagine was that the workers could do no more than what the exploited of previous epochs had done: dream about impossible utopias. At first sight, history seems to have proved the bourgeoisie right. Its philosophy could be summed up in these terms: "there have always been rich and poor, and there always will be. The poor gain nothing by rebelling; the only thing that can work is that the rich don't abuse their wealth and concern themselves with relieving the suffering of the worst-off". Priests and charitable ladies have been the mouthpieces and practitioners of this 'philosophy'. What the bourgeoisie refuses to see is that its economic and social system, any more than the ones that preceded it, is not eternal; and that, like slavery and feudalism, it is destined to give way to another kind of society. And just as the characteristics of capitalism made it possible to resolve the contradictions that brought down feudal society (and as the latter had already done vis-a-vis slave society), the characteristics of the society that will resolve the mortal contradictions of capitalism flow from the same kind of necessity. Thus, by beginning with these contradictions, we can define the characteristics of the future society.

Obviously we can't go into these contradictions in any great depth in the context of this article. For more than a century, marxism has been doing this in a systematic manner, and our own organization has devoted a number of texts to the question[12]. However, we can give a resume of the general outlines of these contradictions. They reside in the essential characteristics of the capitalist system. This is a mode of production that has generalized commodity exchange to all the goods it produces, whereas, in the past, only a part of these goods, often a very small one at that, was transformed into commodities. This colonization of the economy by the commodity has even taken over the labor power that men set in motion in their productive activity. Divorced from the means of production, the producer, if he is to survive, has no choice but to sell his labor power to those who control the means of production - the capitalist class. This is in contrast to feudal society for example, where, while a commodity economy already existed to some degree, what the artisan or peasant sold was the fruit of his labor. It's this generalization of commodity relations which is at the basis of the contradictions of capitalism: the crisis of overproduction has its origins in the fact that the aim of this system is not to produce use values, but exchange values which have to find buyers. And it's the incapacity of society to buy all the commodities produced (even though actual needs are far from being satisfied) which gives rise to this apparently absurd calamity: capitalism collapses not because it produces too little, but because it produces too much[13].

The first characteristic of communism will therefore be the abolition of commodity production, the development of the production of use values, not exchange values.

Furthermore, marxism, and Rosa Luxemburg in particular, has shown that at the origin of this overproduction is the necessity for capital, considered as a totality; to realize, by selling outside its own sphere, that part of the surplus value extracted from the workers which is earmarked for accumulation. As this extra-capitalist sphere gets smaller, the convulsions of the economy can only get more and more catastrophic.

Thus, the only way to overcome the contradictions of capitalism is to abolish all form of commodity exchange, in particular the commodity character of labor power, in other words, wage labor.

The abolition of commodity exchange presupposes the abolition of what lies beneath it: private property. It's only when the wealth of society is appropriated in a collective manner that the buying and selling of this wealth can disappear (this already existed, in an embryonic form, in the primitive community). Society's collective appropriation of the wealth that it produces, and in the first place, of the means of production themselves, means that it's no longer possible for a part of society, a social class (including in the form of a state bureaucracy) to dispose of the means of production in order to exploit another part. Thus, the abolition of wage labor cannot be accomplished by introducing another form of exploitation, but only by abolishing exploitation in all its forms. And, in contrast to the past, not only must the transformation that alone can save society not lead to new relations of exploitation - capitalism really has created the material premises for an abundance that will make it possible to go beyond exploitation. These conditions of abundance can also be glimpsed in the very existence of the crises of overproduction (as the Communist Manifesto pointed out).

The question posed is therefore: what force in society is capable of carrying out this transformation, of abolishing private property and all forms of exploitation?

The first characteristic of this class is that it has to be exploited, because only such a class can have an interest in the abolition of exploitation. While in the revolutions of the past, the revolutionary class could not be an exploited class, given that the new relations of production were necessarily relations of exploitation, exactly the opposite is true today. In their day, the utopian socialists (such as Fourier, Saint-Simon, Owen)[14] harbored the illusion that the revolution could be taken in charge by elements of the bourgeoisie itself. They hoped that it would be possible to find, within the ranks of the ruling class, enlightened philanthropists who would understand the superiority of communism over capitalism, and would finance the building of ideal communities whose example would then catch on like wildfire. Since history is not made by individuals but by classes, these hopes were dashed within a few decades. Even if a few rare members of the bourgeoisie did adhere to the generous ideas of the utopians[15], the ruling class as such obviously turned its back on such efforts, or fought them openly, since they were aimed at making it disappear as a class.

Having said this, the fact of being an exploited class, as we have seen, is not enough to make that class revolutionary. For example, in the world today, and particularly in the underdeveloped countries, there exists a multitude of poor peasants suffering from exploitation through the appropriation of their fruit of their labor, enriching part of the ruling class either directly, or through taxes, or through the interest they pay to the banks and moneylenders to whom they are indebted, All the third-worldist, Maoist, Guevarist and similar mystifications are based on the fact that these strata are subjected to an often unbearable misery. When these peasants are led to take up arms it's only as the foot soldiers of this or that bourgeois clique, who, once in power, only strengthen exploitation all the more, often in particularly atrocious forms (as in the case of the Khmer Rouges in Cambodia in the second half of the 70s). The wearing out of these mystifications, which were put about both by the Stalinists and the Trotskyists, as well as certain 'radical thinkers' like Marcuse, simply demonstrates the patent failure of the 'revolutionary perspective' that supposedly lay with the poor peasants. In reality, the peasants, although they are exploited in all sorts of ways, and can sometimes wage very violent struggles to limit their exploitation, can never direct these struggles towards the abolition of private property because they themselves are small owners, or, living alongside the latter, aspire to become like them[16].

And, even when the peasants do set up collective structures to increase their income through an improvement in productivity or the sale of their products, it usually takes the form of cooperatives, which don't call into question private property or commodity exchange[17]. To sum up, the classes and strata which appear as vestiges of the past (peasants, artisans, liberal professions, etc)[18], and who only survive because capitalism, even if it totally dominates the world economy, is incapable of transforming all the producers into wage laborers - these classes cannot be the bearers of a revolutionary project. On the contrary, the only perspective they can dream about is the return to a mythical 'golden age' of the past: the dynamic of their specific struggles can only be reactionary.

The truth is that, since the abolition of exploitation is essentially bound up with the abolition of wage labor, only the class which is subjected to this specific form of exploitation, ie the proletariat, is capable of carrying out a revolutionary project. Only the class exploited within the bounds of capitalist relations of production, which is the product of these relations, is able to develop the perspective of going beyond them.

A product of the development of big industry, of a socialization of the productive process unprecedented in history, the modem proletariat cannot dream of a return to the past[19]. For example, while the demand for the redistribution or dividing up of the land might be a 'realistic' demand for the poor peasants, it would be absurd for the workers, who produce in an associated manner goods which incorporate parts, raw materials and technology which comes from all over the world, to start dividing up their enterprises into small pieces. Even illusions about self-management, ie the common ownership of an enterprise by those who work in it (which is a modem version ofthe workers ' cooperative) have really had their day. After numerous experiences, like the LIP factory in France at the beginning of the 70s, which often ended in conflicts between the workers as a whole and those they picked to be the managers, the majority of the workers are quite aware that, faced with the need to maintain the competitive position of the enterprise on the capitalist market, self-management means self-exploitation. When the proletariat develops its historic struggle, it can only look forwards: not towards the splitting up of capitalist property and production, but towards completing the process of socialization which capitalism has advanced considerably, but which it is incapable by its very nature of taking to its conclusion, even when the whole of the productive apparatus is concentrated in the hands of a nation state (as was the case in the Stalinist regimes).

In order to accomplish this task, the potential strength of the proletariat is enormous.

To begin with, in developed capitalist society, the essential wealth of society is produced by the labor of the working class even if it is still a minority of the world population. In the industrialized countries, the part of the national product that can be attributed to independent laborers (peasants, artisans, etc) is negligible. This is even the case in the backward countries, where the majority of the population lives (or just survives) from working the land.

Secondly, by necessity, capital has concentrated the working class in gigantic units of production, much bigger than anything that existed in Marx's day. Furthermore, these units of production are in general concentrated in the heart of, or close to, towns that are increasingly heavily populated. This regroupment of the working class, both where it lives and where it works, is an unrivalled source of strength when it knows how to make use of it, in particular through the development of solidarity and collective struggle.

Finally, one of the essential strengths of the proletariat is its capacity to develop its consciousness. All classes, and especially revolutionary classes, develop a form of consciousness. But hitherto, these forms could only be mystified, either because the project put forward could not be realized (as in the case of the Peasants' War in Germany, for example), or because the revolutionary class was obliged to lie" to hide reality from those it wanted to draw into its actions but which it was to continue to exploit (the case of the bourgeois revolution with its slogans 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity'). But since it is an exploited class whose revolutionary project is to abolish all exploitation, the proletariat does not have to mask, either from other classes, or from itself, the ultimate goals of its action. This is why, in the course of its historic struggle, the proletariat can develop a consciousness free from all mystifications. Because of this, its consciousness can go well beyond anything attained by its class enemy, the bourgeoisie. And it's precisely this capacity to become conscious which, along with its organization as a class, constitutes the decisive strength of the proletariat.

******

In the second part of this article, we will see how the proletariat today retains, despite all the campaigns which talk about its 'integration' or its 'disappearance', all the characteristics which make it the revolutionary class of our time. FM

[1] See in particular the article 'The Russian experience: private property and collective property' in International Review 61, as well as our series of articles' Communism isn't a nice idea, but a material necessity'.

[2] Marx and Engels later made the precision that this assertion only applied to the historical epochs that followed the dissolution of the primitive community, whose existence was confirmed by the ethnological works of the second half of the 19th century, such as those of Morgan on the American Indians.

[3] Certain bourgeois thinkers (such as the 19th century French politician Guizot, who was the head of government under the reign of Louis-Philippe) also reached this conclusion.

[4] This was also the case with the 'classical' economists such as Smith and Ricardo, whose work was particularly useful for the development of marxist theory.

[5] It's time to render unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and to Cornelius what belongs to him: all the latter's predictions have been invalidated by the facts. Did he not 'predict' that capitalism had overcome its economic crises (see in particular his articles on 'The dynamic of capitalism' in Socialisme ou Barbarie at the beginning of the 60s)? Did he not announce to the world in 1981 (see his book Devant la guerre, the second part of which, due to come out in the autumn of 81, we're still waiting for) that the USSR had definitively won the cold war ("a massive disequilibrium in favor of Russia"; "a situation practically impossible for the Americans to redress"? Such formulations were really welcome at a time when Reagan and the CIA were telling us all about the Evil Empire). This hasn't prevented the media from asking his 'expert' advice on all the big events of our time: despite all the gaffes he's made, the bourgeoisie will always be grateful to him for his tireless work against marxism - a work which is actually the root cause of all his chronic failures.

[6] It's true that, in many countries, these characteristics partially coincide with class membership. Thus, in many third world countries, the ruling class recruits most of its members from this or that ethnic group. This doesn't mean, however, that all members of that ethnic group are exploiters - far from it. Similarly, in the USA, the WASPS (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) are proportionally the highest represented in the bourgeoisie. This doesn't mean that there's no black bourgeoisie (Colin Powell, the armed forces chief, is black), or that there isn't a huge mass of 'poor whites'.

[7] "Sovereign ... we have come to you to ask for justice and protection ... Ensure that our needs are satisfied, and you will inscribe your name in our hearts, in the hearts of our children and grandchildren, forever." Such were the terms used by the workers' petition addressed to the Czar of all the Russians. But we should also point out that the petition added: "The limits of patience have been reached; for us, the terrible moment has arrived when death would be better than the prolongation of unbearable torments ... If you refuse to listen to our supplication, we will die here, on this square, in front of your palace."

[8] This possession does not necessarily take the form, as we have seen with the development of state capitalism, notably its Stalinist version, of an individual, personal ownership (one that can for example be passed on through inheritance). More and more it's in a collective manner that the capitalist class 'possesses' (in the sense of disposing of, controlling, benefitting from) the means of production, including when the latter have been statified.

[9] The petty bourgeoisie is not a homogeneous class. There are numerous variants of it which don't possess material means of production. Thus, cinema actors, writers, lawyers, for example, belong to this social category without disposing of specific tools. Their 'means of production' consist of a knowledge or a 'talent' which they put to use in their work.  

[10] The serf was not a mere 'thing' belonging to the lord. Tied to the land, he was sold along with it (which was a trait he shared with the slave). However, there was initially a 'contract' between the serf and the lord: the latter, who possessed arms, offered him protection in return for the serf working on the lord's land (the corvee) or for a part of the serf's harvest.

[11] See 'Communism isn't a nice idea ...' I, 'From primitive communism to utopian socialism', IR 68.

[12] See in particular our pamphlet The Decadence of Capitalism, soon to be reissued in English.

[13] On this point, see 'Communism isn't a nice idea ...', V, IR 72, for the way that the crisis of overproduction expresses the bankruptcy of capitalism

[14] See on this point 'Communism isn't a nice idea', I. IR 68.

[15] Owen was himself initially a big textile factory owner who made several attempts, both in Britain and America, to create ideal communities that ended up being broken on the laws of capital. Nevertheless he contributed to the development of the Trade Unions. The French utopians had less success in their enterprises. For years, Fourier waited in vain in his office for the benefactor who would finance his ideal city; and the attempts of his disciples to build 'phalansteries' (notably in the USA) ended in economic disaster. As for the doctrines of Saint-Simon, if they had some success, it was as the credo of a whole series of bourgeois, such as the Pereire brothers, founders of a bank, or Ferdinand de Lesseps, builder of the Suez Canal.  

[16] There is an agricultural proletariat whose only means of existence is to sell its labor power to the owners of the land. This part of the peasantry belongs to the working class, and during the revolution constitutes its bridgehead into the countryside. However, since it undergoes its exploitation as the result of its 'bad luck' in being deprived of inheriting any land, or because it has been left too small a portion of land, the agricultural worker, who often works on a seasonal basis or is involved in a family farm, very often dreams of acquiring his own property and of a fairer division of the land. Only the advanced struggle of the urban proletariat will be able to turn him away from such chimaeras by offering the perspective of the socialization of the land along with the rest of the means of production.

[17] This doesn't mean that, during the period of transition from capitalism to communism, the regroupment of small landholders in cooperatives might not constitute a step towards the socialization of the land, in particular because it' would allow them to overcome the individualism that derives from the context of their labor.

[18] What is true for the peasants is even more true for the artisans whose place in society has been even more radically reduced than that of the former. As for the liberal professions (private doctors, lawyers, etc), their social status and their income (which is often the envy of the bourgeoisie) doesn't incite them to question the existing order in any way. As for the students, whose very definition indicates that they have no place in the economy, their destiny is to split up into the different classes they are heading towards on account of their qualifications or their family origins.

[19] At the dawn of the development of the working class, certain sectors, thrown into unemployment because of the introduction of new machinery, directed their revolt against the machines themselves, and went about destroying them. This attempt to return to the past was only an embryonic form of the workers' struggle and it was quickly superseded with the economic and political development of the proletariat.

"The new world disorder": this is what the English-speaking press is now calling the ‘new world order' that ex-president Bush bequeathed to his successor. The panorama is terrifying and catastrophic. The list of misfortunes hitting humanity is very long. The bourgeois press and television make this clear enough. They might like to hide the facts, but if they tried it would discredit them totally. But since they must still serve the ideology of the bourgeoisie, they separate the numerous tragic events taking place, they refuse to see the link between them, the common root: the historic impasse that capitalism has reached, the putrefaction of this social system, which explains the multiplication of imperialist wars and the brutal aggravation of the world economic crisis with all the ravages that it brings. To recognise the unity between all these characteristics of capitalism today, to recognise that they are all getting worse together and that they mutually influence each other, would be to expose the fact that capitalism is leading us into endless barbarism, that it is dragging the whole of humanity into a bottomless pit.

Recognising the link, the unity, the common cause behind all these elements of capitalism also serves to accelerate the development of consciousness about the historic alternative facing humanity today. For there is indeed a single alternative to this irreversible catastrophe: to destroy this society and build a radically different one. And there is one social force capable of taking on this task: the working class, which is both an exploited class and a revolutionary class. It alone can do away with capitalism, put an end to all these catastrophes and give birth to communism, a society in which men will no longer be led to kill each other but will be able to live in harmony.

No words are strong enough to denounce the barbarism and scale of the murderous local conflicts that are bloodying the whole planet. No continent is spared. These conflicts are not the inevitable result of ancestral hatreds; they are not the result of some natural law which determines that men are always evil, always looking for confrontation and war. This barbarous slide into imperialist war is not a natural fatality. It is the product of the historic impasse that capitalism has reached. The decomposition which is hitting capitalist society, the lack of any hope or perspective except individual survival, or membership of armed gangs in a war of each against all, is responsible for the explosion of local wars between populations who, for the most part, lived together harmoniously, or at least lived side by side, for decades or even centuries.

The putrefaction of capitalism is responsible for the thousands of deaths, killings, rapes and tortures, the famine and the deprivation decimating whole populations, men, women, and children. It is responsible for the millions of terrified refugees, forced to flee their houses, their villages, their regions, no doubt for good. It is responsible for the splitting up of families, for forcing parents to send their children away in the hope that they will escape the horrors, the massacres, the death, or the forced conscription, usually without any hope of seeing them again. It is responsible for the gulf of blood and revenge which is going to separate populations, ethnic groups, regions, villages, neighbours, parents. It is responsible for the daily nightmare in which millions of human beings are forced to live.

The decomposition of capitalism is also responsible for throwing out of capitalist production, or any productive activity at all, hundreds of millions of men and women, crammed together into the huge slums that now surround the mega-cities of the ‘third world'. The luckiest of them may from time to time find a super-exploited job which hardly manages to feed them. The others, under the whip of hunger, are compelled to beg, steal, to engage in all kinds of petty trafficking in order to get a pittance; they are pushed inexorably into the twilight of alcohol and drugs; they are forced to sell their own small children as virtual slaves to work in mines, in innumerable small workshops, or as prostitutes. Perhaps the worst of all this is the increasing number of abductions of street children, who are then killed because their livers or their eyes can be sold on the market. With all this material and moral degradation, which affects millions of humans beings, is it so astonishing that there are so many adults, adolescents, and even children of ten or less who are ready for any kind of horror or infamy, who are ‘free' of any morality, any values, any respect, for whom the lives of others are nothing because their own lives have been worth nothing since they were small children; that they are ready to become mercenaries in any guerilla group or street gang, led by any chief, general, colonel, sergeant, mafia boss; that they should stoop to torture, murder, systematic rape in the service of ‘ethnic cleansing' and other horrors?

There is a cause for this growing madness. There is something responsible for it: the historic impasse of capitalism.

Capitalism's decomposition aggravates local wars and conflicts

The decomposition of capitalism is responsible for the frightful wars that are spreading throughout the territory of the ex-USSR, in Tadjikstan, Armenia, Georgia...it is responsible for the endless confrontations between militias that used to be allies in Afghanistan, and who now take turns flinging their missiles and shells across the streets of Kabul. It is responsible for the continuation of the war in Cambodia, for subjecting the country to blood and fire. It is responsible for the dramatic proliferation of wars and ethnic conflicts throughout the African continent. It is responsible for the renewal of ‘small' wars, if we can use the term, between armies, guerillas and mafias in Peru, Colombia, in Central America. While the populations of these areas have nothing, these armed gangs, whether formally part of the state or not, have considerable stocks of weapons, as often as not the fruits of the drugs trade, which is expanding all over the world, a trade that they control and practice themselves.

The decomposition of capitalism is responsible for the break-up of Yugoslavia and for the chaos that has come out of it. Workers who used to work together in the same factories, who struggled and went on strike shoulder to shoulder against the Yugoslav capitalist state, peasants who cultivated land next to each other, children who went to the same school, the numerous families which are the fruit of ‘mixed' marriages, are now separated by an abyss of blood, of killings, of torture, of rape and plunder.

"The fighting between Serbs and Croats left some 10,000 dead. The fighting in Bosnia-Herzegovina several tens of thousands (the Bosnian president has spoken of 200,000), 8,000 of them in Sarajevo...It is estimated that in the territory of ex-Yugoslavia there are two million refugees and victims of ‘ethnic cleansing'" (Le Monde des Débats, February 93).

Millions of men and women, of families, are seeing their hopes ruined, with no possible compensation, with no perspective ahead of them except despair, or even worse, blind revenge.

Imperialist antagonisms exacerbate local conflicts

It is necessary to denounce with the utmost rigour the bourgeois lie that this period of chaos is purely temporary, that it is the price that has to be paid for the death of Stalinism in the eastern countries. We communists say that chaos and wars are going to develop and multiply. The phase of capitalist decomposition can offer neither peace nor prosperity. On the contrary, even more than in the past, it can only exacerbate the imperialist appetites of all capitalist states whether powerful or feeble. All of them are caught up in the war of each against all. There is not one conflict in which imperialist interests are absent. It is said that nature abhors a vacuum. It is the same with imperialism. Each one, no matter how strong or weak, is unable to leave a single region or country alone, for fear that a rival might grab it. The infernal logic of capitalism inevitably compels the various imperialisms to intervene.

No state, whether large or small, weak or powerful, can escape the implacable logic of imperialist rivalries and confrontations. It is just that the weakest powers, in order to defend their particular interests as best they can, have to line up according to the evolution of global imperialist antagonisms. They all participate in the rampaging development of local wars.

This period of chaos is not temporary. The evolution of global imperialist alignments around the main world imperialist powers, the USA of course, but also Germany, Japan, and, to a lesser degree, France, Britain, and Russia [1], China, throws oil on the fires of local wars. In fact, it is the old western imperialist powers at the very heart of world capitalism which are doing most to fan the flames of local wars and conflicts. This is the case in Afghanistan, in the Asiatic republics of the ex-USSR, in the Middle East, in Africa (Angola, Rwanda, Somalia) and of course in ex-Yugoslavia.

In Yugoslavia, the growing difficulties of the US in imposing its leadership over the other powers

Ex-Yugoslavia has become the focal point in global imperialist rivalries, the place where, through the terrible war that has been going on, the imperialist stakes of the present period are being played for. If the historic impasse of decadent capitalism, its phase of decomposition, is responsible for the break-up of Yugoslavia (as it was for the break-up of the USSR), and for the aggravation of tensions between the peoples who used to be part of it, it is the imperialist interests of the great powers which are responsible for the outbreak and dramatic intensification of the war. Germany's recognition of Slovenia and Croatia provoked the war, as the Anglo-Saxon press repeats often enough in hindsight. The USA, of course, but also Britain and France, consciously pushed Serbia - which was only waiting for the chance - to dole out military punishment to Croatia. And from there on, the divergent interests of the imperialist powers we have mentioned determined the whole slide into military barbarism.

The atrocities committed on all sides, and especially the disgusting policy of ‘ethnic cleansing' undertaken by the Serbian militias in Bosnia, have been cynically used by the media propaganda of the western powers to justify their political, diplomatic and military interventions, and to hide their divergent imperialist interests. In fact, behind the humanitarian speeches, the great powers are confronting each other and have kept the fire going while pretending to be firemen.

Since the end of the cold war and the disappearance of the imperialist blocs that went with it, the allegiance owed to the USA by powers like Germany, France and Japan, to mention only the most important, has also disappeared. Inevitably, a country like Germany is destined to pose as an alternative pole of imperialist attraction to the US pole. Since the end of the Gulf war, these powers have more and more defended their own interests, putting the USA's leadership into question.

The break-up of Yugoslavia and the growing influence of Germany in the region, particularly in Croatia, and thus in the Mediterranean, represents a reverse for the American bourgeoisie in strategic terms [2], and it is also a bad example of its capacities for political, diplomatic and military intervention. It goes in the opposite direction to the lesson that it delivered via the Gulf war.

"We failed" said Eageleburger, Bush's Secretary of State. "From beginning to end, to right now, I am telling you I don't know any way to stop it (the war) except with the use of military force" (International Herald Tribune, 9.2.93). How is it that American imperialism, which was so prompt to use an incredible armada against Iraq two years ago, has not up till now resorted to massive military force?

Since last summer, each time the Americans were on the point of intervening militarily in Yugoslavia, when they wanted to bomb Serbian positions and airports, the rival European powers threw a spanner in the works. Last June, Mitterand's trip to Sarajevo, in the name of ‘humanitarian intervention', allowed the Serbs to lift the siege of the airport while at the same time saving face in front of the USA's threats to intervene; the sending of French and British soldiers within the UN force, then the reinforcement of the latter, then the Vance-Owen negotiations with all sides of the conflict - all this removed the justifications and, above all, considerably weakened the guarantee that a US military intervention would be successful. On the other hand, they aggravated the fighting and the massacres. as we have seen with the Vance-Owen Plan, which has been used by the Croats to reopen the war against Serbia in Krajina.

The hesitations of the new Clinton administration about supporting the Vance-Owen Plan, which has been devised in the name of the EC and the UN, reveal the USA's difficulties. Lee Hamilton, the Democrat president of the House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs, summarised succinctly the problem facing US imperialist policy:

"The underlying fact here is that no leader is prepared to intervene massively in the former Yugoslavia with the kind of resources we used in the Gulf to throw back aggression, and if you are not prepared to intervene in that fashion then you have to deal with less forceful means and work within them" (International Herald Tribune, 5.2.93).

Following Hamilton's realistic advice, Clinton has seen reason and finally decided to support the Vance-Owen Plan. Like any good poker player, he has also decided to play the card of humanitarian intervention and to air-drop food supplies to the famished populations of Bosnia [3]. At the time of writing, the food containers dropped in the countryside still have not been found! Apparently, the ‘humanitarian' air-drops are as accurate as the ‘smart bombs' used against Iraq. Their actual result has been to intensify the war around the besieged cities. The number of victims has increased dramatically, with thousands of men, women and children fleeing desperately in the snow and the cold, under fire from artillery and snipers. But for the American bourgeoisie, the important thing is to begin imposing its military presence in the area. Moreover, its rivals are not fooled. "faced with the renewal of the fighting, and for humanitarian reasons", of course, the German and Russian bourgeoisies are openly talking about intervening themselves, about participating in the air-drops and even sending ground troops. The population's purgatory has a long way to go.

Imperialism leads to military confrontations

All the proposals of the American leaders confirm it: the US is more and more going to be compelled to use military force - and thus to exacerbate conflicts and wars. Humanitarian campaigns were the justifications for the displays of force that it carried out recently in Somalia and Iraq. These ‘humanitarian' displays were aimed at reasserting US military power in the eyes of the world, and, as a consequence, the impotence of the European powers in Yugoslavia. They also had the aim of preparing a military intervention in Yugoslavia viv-a-vis other rival imperialisms (as well as in front of the American population). As we have just seen, up till now the results have not measured up to their hopes. On the other hand, famine and military confrontations between rival factions continue in Somalia. Regional imperialist tensions in the Middle East are getting sharper, and the Kurds and the Shiites are still subjected to the terror of the various states in the region.

US imperialism's growing resort to the military card has the consequence of pushing its rivals to develop their own military strength. This is the case with Japan and Germany, who both want to change the Constitutions they inherited from the defeat of 1945, which restrict their capacities for armed intervention. It also has the consequence of stoking up the rivalries between the USA and Europe on the military level. The formation of the Franco-German army corps was a manifestation of this. In Yugoslavia, there is a real political battle going on to decide whether ‘humanitarian intervention' will be carried out under the command of the UN or NATO. In a more general sense, "a critical situation is shaping up between the Bonn government and NATO" (Die Welt, 8.2.93). This is confirmed by the former French president Giscard d'Estaing, who says that "defence is the sticking point in Euro-American relations" (Le Monde, 13.2.93).

The repulsive hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie has no limits. All the American military interventions, or those done under the cover of the UN - Somalia, Iraq, Cambodia, Yugoslavia - have been carried out in the name of humanitarian aid. All of them have served to rekindle and aggravate horror, war, massacres, the flight of refugees from fighting, misery and famine. They express and raise to a new level imperialist rivalries between small, medium, and above all the great powers. All of them are being pushed to increase their expenditure on arms, to reorganise their military forces in order to deal with new antagonisms. This is the real meaning of the ‘duty of humanitarian intervention' which the bourgeoisie goes on about. These are the results of the campaigns on humanitarian aid and the defence of human rights.

Decomposition and the sharpening of imperialist rivalries are the product of capitalism's economic impasse

At the origin of the historic impasse of capitalism, which is provoking this horrifying spread of imperialist slaughters, is the system's inability to overcome and resolve the contradictions of its economy. The bourgeoisie is completely unable to solve the economic crisis. A bourgeois economist presents this contradiction while expressing his worries about the future of the inhabitants of Bangladesh (and the future of capitalism as well):

"Even if by some miracle of science enough food could be produced to feed them, how could they find the gainful employment needed to buy it?" (M F. Perutz from the University of Cambridge, cited in the International Herald Tribune, 20.2.93).

First of all - what an asshole! To claim today that it is impossible, except by some miracle, to feed the population of Bangladesh (and, we would say, of the whole world) is scandalous. Capital itself proves this, by paying farmers in the industrialised countries to limit their production and not to cultivate growing tracts of land. There is no underproduction, but an overproduction of goods. Not an overproduction of goods, of food, in relation to human needs, but, as underlined by our eminent university professor (who is both impotent, because he cannot resolve the contradiction, and hypocritical, because he argues as though there were not immense productive capacities around today), it is an overproduction resulting from the fact that the greater part of the world population can't buy the goods. From the fact that the markets are saturated.

Today, world capitalism means millions of human beings dying because they can't afford any food, and hundreds of millions not getting enough to eat when the main industrial powers, the same ones that are spending billions of dollars on their imperialist military interventions, compel their farmers to reduce their production. Not only is capitalism barbaric and murderous, it is also totally irrational and absurd. On the one hand, overproduction leads to the closure of factories, to throwing millions of workers out of work, and the abandonment of cultivatable lands; on the other hand there are hundreds of millions of individuals with no resources and tortured by hunger.

Capitalism can no longer resolve this contradiction as it did last century by conquering new markets. There are none left on the planet. Neither, for the moment, can it get on with realising the only ‘perspective' it can offer society, a third world war, as it has been able to do on two occasions since 1914, in the two world wars that left tens of millions dead. On the one hand, since the disappearance of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact, the imperialist blocs necessary for such a holocaust are not there; on the other hand, the population, and especially the proletariat, of the main western imperialist powers, is not ready to make such a sacrifice. Since capitalism is stuck in this situation, it is literally rotting on its feet.

In this situation of a historic impasse, economic rivalries sharpen as much as imperialist rivalries. The trade war is aggravating as are imperialist wars. And the disintegration of the USSR, which marked a very important step in the dramatic development of generalised chaos at the imperialist level, also marked an important step in the acceleration of competition between all capitalist nations, and especially between the great powers. "With the collapse of the Soviet threat, the economic disparities and disputes among the rich countries are getting harder to handle" (Washington Post, cited in the International Herald Tribune, 15.2.93). Hence the impossibility of so far closing the GATT talks, or the disputes and threats of protectionism between the USA, Europe and Japan.

Capitalism is bankrupt and the trade war has been unleashed. The recession is ravaging even the strongest economies, the USA, Germany, Japan, all the European states. No country is spared. It forces each one ruthlessly to defend its own interests. It is an added factor in the tensions between the big powers.

The economic crisis is pushing the proletariat to struggle

The economic bankruptcy of capitalism also has terrible consequences for the world proletariat. Here again, words or figures can't really convey the brutality of the attacks being mounted on the workers. The closure of enterprises, massive redundancies, are taking place all over the world. And especially in the main economic and imperialist powers, the USA, western Europe, even Japan; and in central sectors such as the automobile, aerospace construction, steel, and computer industries, as well as banks and insurance; in the public sector, etc. Just to give a slight indication of the redundancies being envisaged officially: 30,000 at Volkswagen; 28,000 at Boeing; 40,000 in the German steel industry; 25,000 at IBM, where there were already 42,900 in 1992...These massive cuts in the workers' ranks are being accompanied by wage reductions, drastic cuts in the ‘social wage' - social security, pensions, benefits of all kinds. For those ‘lucky' enough to keep their jobs, working conditions are getting worse and worse. Unemployment benefits are being considerably reduced, where they exist at all. The number of homeless, of families reduced to eating in soup kitchens, of beggars, has exploded in all the industrialised countries. The workers of North America and western Europe are experiencing absolute pauperisation, like their class brothers in the so-called ‘third world' and in eastern Europe did before them.

Just as imperialist conflicts are breaking out on all continents at the same time, with an incredible savagery, the attacks on the workers are falling harder than could have been thought possible not long ago, in all sectors, in all countries, and at the same time.

But unlike the wars and conflicts produced by the decomposition of capitalism, the economic catastrophe of capitalism and its consequences for the working class can give rise to a revival of hope, to the prospect of the communist alternative to this world of atrocity and misery.

Since the autumn of 1992, and the massive workers' reaction in Italy, the proletariat has started to fight again. Despite their weaknesses, the miners' demonstrations in then UK, the signs of anger in France, and the street demonstrations of steel workers in Germany, express the return of class combativity. Inevitably, the international proletariat is going to have to respond to the attacks against it. Inevitably, it will return to the path of the class struggle. But there is still a long way to go before it can present to suffering humanity the perspective of the proletarian revolution and of communism. Not only will it have to struggle of course, but it will also have to learn how to struggle. In the defence of its living conditions, in its economic struggles, in the search for an ever-widening unity, it is going to have to confront the manoeuvres and obstacles set up by the unions; it is going to have to uncover the divisive and corporatist traps laid by the ‘rank and file' unionists, and reject the phony radicalism of the leftists. It is going to have to develop its capacities for organisation, to regroup, to hold general assemblies open to all, workers and unemployed, to set up struggle committees, to demonstrate in the street and call for active solidarity. In short, it is going to have to wage a difficult and bitter political fight to develop its struggles and to affirm the revolutionary perspective. For the workers there is no choice but the political struggle. It comes directly from their conditions of life. It comes from their future, and the future of all humanity.

With the decomposition of capitalism, the chaos that goes with it, and particularly since the explosion of the USSR, imperialist wars have become more savage, more barbaric and at the same time more numerous. No continent has been spared. Similarly, the economic crisis is today taking on a deeper, more irreversible , more dramatic character than ever before, and it is hitting all the countries of the world. Combined together, they are dramatically aggravating the generalised catastrophe that the very survival of capitalism represents. Every day that passes is a another tragedy for hundreds of millions of human beings. Every day that passes is also another step towards capitalism's irreversible slide towards the destruction of humanity. The stakes are frightful: a definitive collapse into barbarism , with no hope of return, or the proletarian revolution and the creation of a world in which men can live in a harmonious community. Workers of all countries, take up the struggle against capitalism! RL, 4.3.93

[1] After the end of the USSR, will we now see the break-up of the Russian Federation? In any case, the situation there is deteriorating rapidly both economically and politically. Chaos is growing, violence and the rule of the mafia everywhere, corruption, brutal recession, poverty and despair. Yeltsin doesn't seem able to govern very much and his authority is more and more being called into question. The aggravation of the situation in Russia can only have grave consequences on the international level.

[2] Directly economic interests, the gaining of particular markets, is more and more secondary in the development of imperialist rivalries. For example, the control of the Middle East, and thus of its oil, by the USA, corresponds more to its strategic interests vis-a-vis the other great powers, Germany and Japan in particular, who are dependent on the oil supplies from this region, than to any financial benefits the USA might be able to draw from it.

[3] At the time of writing, it's still not clear who planted the bomb at the World Trade Center in New York. It is very probable that it is linked to the exacerbation of imperialist rivalries. Either it was carried out by a state which wanted to put pressure on the US bourgeoisie (as was the case with the terrorist attacks of September 86 in Paris), or it was a provocation of some kind. In any case, the crime has been used by the American bourgeoisie to create a sentiment of fear in the population, with the aim of making it rally round the state, and of justifying the military interventions to come.

The text below is an extract from a report on the situation in Germany written by Weltrevolution, the ICC's section in that country. Although the article deals with the situation in a single country, it actually reflects the general crisis of capitalism in all countries. Once feted in the bourgeoisie's propaganda as a virtuous example of capitalism's good health, the German economy has now become a symbol of the gravity of the system's downfall.

Now that it is sinking into the worst crisis it's been through since the 1930s, this central pole of world capitalism, which once seemed to be the most solid of all, is tottering. This situation is not only a significant pointer to the seriousness of the current world economic crisis; it is the harbinger of future storms that menace the entire edifice of global capitalism.

The bourgeoisie no longer has any ‘healthy' models to back up the illusion that, in order to get over the crisis, all that's needed is rigorous management. The situation in Germany shows that even the country that distinguished itself by having the most virtuous management of all, a country whose workers were always being praised for their sense of discipline, cannot escape the crisis This also shows the inanity of the bourgeoisie's constant appeals for more rigor. No bourgeois policy can offer a solution to the generalised bankruptcy of the capitalist system. The sacrifices that are everywhere being imposed on the proletariat will not bring a better tomorrow, but only growing misery with no improvement in sight, including in the most industrialised countries.

The brutal acceleration of the crisis

The recession in the USA at the end of the 80s, although eclipsed at the time by the collapse of the eastern bloc and the media celebration of the "victory of the market economy", was not merely of conjunctural but of historic importance. After the final and definitive collapse of the third world and of the eastern bloc, it meant the breakdown of one of the three main motors of the world economy, paralysed by a mountain of debts. 1992, at this level, was another truly historic year, marked by the public and spectacular humbling of the two remaining giants, Japan and Germany. The indebtedness of Germany in the aftermath of unification, while temporarily delivering a specific German boom, has not made it possible to avoid the recession. This means that, like for the US, for Germany this recession is of historic importance. Due to its soaring public debts, Germany no longer has the means to pay its way out of the present slump. Not only has Germany officially entered into recession, but it has failed as a powerhouse for the world economy and in its previous role as a relative pillar of economic stability in Europe. The German bourgeoisie is the latest and most spectacular victim of the explosion of economic chaos and the uncontrollability of the crisis.

The recession in Germany

In relation to the boom of the past three years, the conjuncture literally collapsed in the third quarter of 92. GNP growth, which at the end of 1990 reached a peak of almost 5%, dropped suddenly to around 1%, and is expected to actually fall below minus for the first six months of 1993, despite a predicted 7% growth in the ex-GDR. The orders for investment goods fell by 8% in the last six months. The production of the vital machine tools sectors dropped by 20% in 91 and 25% in 92. Total industrial production fell by 1% last year and is expected to be minus 2% this year. Textile production fell by 12%. The export sector, the traditional motor of the German economy, usually able to lead the way out of each slump, no longer delivers the goods in the face of world wide recession and increased imports. The balance of payments, still plus 57.4 billion dollars in 1989, has for 1992 reached a new record deficit of over 25 billion dollars. The devaluation of the currencies of Britain, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Sweden and Norway in the autumn made German goods there around 15% more expensive overnight. The number of companies going bankrupt increased last year by almost 30%. The car industry is already planning production cuts of at least 7% for this year. The other industrial pillars such as steel, chemicals, electronics and engineering are planning similar reductions. One of the biggest steel and machine producers, Klöckner, is on the verge of bankruptcy. The result is an explosion of redundancies. Volkswagen, expecting a sales reduction of 20% this year, plans to sack every tenth employee: 12,500. Daimler-Benz (Mercedes, AEG, DASA Aerospace) will sack 11,800 this year and cut 40,000 jobs by 1996. Other major job killers: Post-Telecom: 13.500; Veba: 7000; MAN: 4500; Lufthansa: 6000; Siemens: 4000.Thus, the official unemployment figures at the end of 92 read: 3,126,000. That means 6.6% in the west and 13.5% (1.1 million) in the east. On short time work: in the west 649,000; in the east 233,000. In the east FOUR MILLION jobs have been eliminated in the past three years and almost half a million workers are in state employment schemes. And this is just the beginning. Even the official predictions expect 3.5 million unemployed by the end of this year for Germany as a whole. In the ex-GDR, production and services would have to increase by over 100% to even maintain employment at the present rate. Officially, three million homes are lacking just in the big cities, whereas 4.2 million people live from the lowest social benefits (460% more than in 1970). Even semi-official organisations admit that the real number of unemployed will reach 5.5 million this year. And this does not include the 1.7 million in the new eastern provinces in educational, labour creation, short time work and early retirement - an operation which has alone cost 50 billion DM.

The explosion of debt

When Kohl became chancellor in 82, the public debt of 615 billion DM amounted to 39% of GNP, or 10,000 DM per citizen. In the meantime this has reached 21,000 DM per head, over 42% of GNP. And soon it is expected to exceed 50% of GNP, so that each German would have to work six months without wages to pay it back. The state debt has reached 1700 billion, and is expected to exceed 2500 billion by the turn of the century. It took 40 years up until 1990 for the German state to reach the first thousand billion DM of debt. The second thousand billion is expected to be achieved by 1994 or at the latest 1995. Every minute of the year the state takes in 1.4 million DM in taxes and makes 217,000 DM in new debts. And over 100 billion DM have been loaned out by state controlled banks and funds (Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau, Deutsche Ausgleichsbank, Berliner Industriebank) to East German companies alone between 89 and 91. Most of this money will never be seen again. 41 billion have gone to the ex-USSR in the same period and are expected to meet the same fate. Thus, overnight, vast financial resources accumulated over decades, and which made Germany not only the most solvent major power but also a principal and valuable money lender on the world markets, have melted away. Major instruments for manipulating the economy have been wasted definitively. And the recession makes all of this all the worse. Every missing growth % costs Bonn 10 billion DM, and the provinces and communes 20 billion DM in income losses through missing tax revenues. At the same time, taxes and social payments have reached record levels. Every second DM earned goes to the state or the social funds. And new taxes are planned: a drastic increase for mineral oil; or a special levy to finance a building boom for the east. And the share of interest payments in the federal budget, which rose from 18% in 1970 to 42% in 1990, is predicted to reach over 50% by 1995.The collapse of the German conjuncture, the shrinking of its markets, its demise as international financier, is a real catastrophe not only for the German but for the world and especially the European economy.

Economic chaos, state capitalism, and economic policy

We could hardly find better examples of the growing uncontrollability of the world economic crisis than the way in which the economically most powerful bourgeoisie in Europe is more and more obliged to act in a way which only worsens the crisis or which is in contradiction to its own dearest principles. One example is the inflationist policy of public debt, not least to finance unproductive consumption, coupled with a constant increase of money in circulation - a policy which took on spectacular forms with the economic and monetary union with the GDR and which has been going on ever since. The yearly price index increase, traditionally one of the lowest of all the main industrial countries, is presently tending to be one of the highest. Hovering between 4 and 5%, the ceiling on this has only been maintained to date by the ruthless anti-inflationist interest rates policy of the Bundesbank. The headlong plunge into ever greater debts is itself a grave break with the previous policy of at least keeping debts within certain boundaries. The classical German anti-inflationist policies of the last forty years (both the goal of price stability and the relative autonomy of the Bundesbank are written into the constitution) reflect not only immediate economic interests but an entire political "philosophy", born not only of the experiences of the great inflation of 1923 and the economic disaster of 1929, but of the traditional leanings of the German "national character" towards order, stability and security. Whereas in Anglo-Saxon countries high interest rates are usually considered the main barrier to economic expansion, the "German school" declares that enterprises with good chances of profits will never be put off by interests rates, but rather by inflation. Equally, the fanatical pursuit of a policy of a "hard Deutsche Mark" is theoretically underlined by the idea that the advantages of devaluation (for exports) are always wiped out by the resulting inflation (through more expensive imports). It's thus far more significant of the loss of control when Germany of all countries today pursues such inflationary policies.The same goes for the eruptions in the EMS, which is a true catastrophe for German interests. Stable currency relations are crucial for German industry, since not only the big but even most of the smaller companies not only export mainly to other EC countries but conduct at least part of their production there. Without this stability, any price calculation becomes impossible, and life even more of a lottery than usual. At this level the EMS was really a success, not least in making Germany to quite a large extent independent of the fluctuations and manipulations of the Dollar. But even the Bundesbank with its still gigantic currency reserves was helpless in face of the speculative movement of 500 to 1000 billion dollars per day on the currency markets.As a world wide operating economic power, Germany has most to lose from the financial, monetary and commodity markets becoming ever-more fragile. And yet it finds itself obliged to conduct a national economic policy which daily hacks away at the foundations of these markets.

Unification and the role of the state

Whether in the US with Clinton, in Japan, or with the proposals of Delors in the EC, the policies of a more open and brutal state intervention through the financing of public works and infrastructure programmes, to some extent ignoring real market demands, is coming to the foreground in all industrial countries. This is coupled with an ideological shift away from the laissez-faire mystifications of the 80s, which were particularly developed in the Anglo-Saxon countries under Reagan and Thatcher. These policies are not a solution or even a medium-term palliative; they are merely a sign that the bourgeoisie is not planning to commit suicide and is prepared to postpone a greater catastrophe even if it means that when it comes it will be even worse. The level both of debts and of overproduction prohibit any real stimulation of the capitalist economy. Where these policies lead to is perfectly illustrated by the country which for political reasons was obliged to first initiate such schemes: Germany, with its reconstruction programmes for the east, transferring several hundred billion DM to its eastern provinces per year. The result today is: debt explosion, tendency to inflation, squandering of reserves, balance of payments deficit, and finally recession.But while Germany was the forerunner in all this, the goals and motivations of this policy is not identical to that in the US or Japan, where perhaps the main consideration is to stop the dive in economic activity. We should not lose sight of the fact that the main goal of this policy has been political (unification, stabilisation, the enlarging of the power of the German state etc). This gives such an economic policy a different dynamic from, say, that of the US under Clinton. On the one hand it implies that some investments can prove politically "profitable" even if giving immediate economic losses. But on the other hand it also means that the German bourgeoisie cannot simply stop and reverse policies if this operation proves too expensive, which is precisely the case. This is an operation where there is no turning back any more, even in face of the danger of bankruptcy. At the economic level the bourgeoisie badly miscalculated the costs of unification. It underestimated both the general costs and the degree of dilapidation of East German industry. And it didn't expect such a rapid collapse of the eastern export markets of the ex-GDR. Since then the strategy has changed. The territory of the ex-GDR must be made into a platform for conquering western markets. This of course is only possible if it acquires real competitive advantages over its rivals, in particular in the EC. The three pillars of this strategy are the following:

- A STATE INFRASTRUCTURE PROGRAMME: in an epoch in which production methods and technologies are becoming increasingly uniform, infrastructure (transport, communications etc) constitute a potentially decisive competitive advantage. There can be no doubt about the determination of the German bourgeoisie to equip its eastern provinces with the most modern infrastructure in Europe, that this programme is advancing in giant steps, and that it will be completed by the end of the century if German capital does not go bust beforehand;

- LOW WAGES: according to the wage agreements signed, eastern wages will soon reach western levels. However the unions have now reached an unofficial agreement according to which wages under the norm can be paid in enterprises struggling for survival (the case for 80% of them!)

- POLITICAL INVESTMENTS: the previous economic policy towards the east has been: the state creates the infrastructure and conditions, the employers make the investments. However the employers have not done so, for reasons to do with what is pleased to call itself "the market economy". The result: nobody wanted to buy the GDR's industry, which for the most part has completely disappeared in what has been the fastest and most spectacular deindustrialisation in history. In the end the state will have to pay directly for long term investments which private investors are shying away from.

The attacks against the working class

The conditions of the workers in the East

Is the bourgeoisie capable of giving so much as the shadow of a solution to the problem of the world's division into nations, which has caused millions of deaths in the worldwide and local wars which have besmirched the planet since the turn of the century? This is at least the claim of several pro-European political tendencies.

Today's reality demonstrates that a united Europe incorporating the various EEC countries, and even others, was nothing but a utopia. We can see the proof in the disputes that divide them, and their inability to settle such tragic international events as those in Yugoslavia, despite their unfolding at the very gates of industrialised Europe. Nonetheless, it is not impossible that the bourgeoisie might, in different circumstances, and in particular to serve new imperialist alliances, be led to revamp the idea of European unity as "flavour of the month" once again. Once again, the bourgeoisie would be led to use campaigns on the European question to try to polarise the workers' attention on a problem which has nothing to do with their interests, and even more, to divide the class by making it take sides in a false debate.

This is why it is necessary to show that the whole project of building European unity is in fact just an element in the creation of alliances in a merciless economic war which is being waged between all the countries in the world, or in the formation of imperialist alliances with a view to open warfare to which the insoluble economic crisis is leading.

The different attempts at European unity are sometimes presented as so many steps towards the creation of a "new European nation", with a considerable economic and political standing in the world. Each step forward, and especially the latest, are, according to the euro-enthusiasts, factors of peace and justice in the world.

Such an idea has had all the more impact in that whole sectors of the bourgeoisie have fallen for it, and become its earnest advocates. They like to talk of the "United States of Europe", on the same lines as the United States of America.

New nations are not viable under decadent capitalism

In fact, such a proposal is a utopia, because it is lacking two essential factors.

The first is the fact that the formation of a new nation, in the full sense of the word, is a process that can only occur under certain historic circumstances. And the present period, unlike some in the past, is wholly unfavorable to such a formation.

The second is that, contrary to the claims of bourgeois propaganda "the political will of governments" and "popular aspirations" cannot act as substitutes for violence. Since the existence of the bourgeoisie is indissolubly linked to that of private property, whether individual or state-controlled, the unification of nations inevitably means the expropriation or violent subjection of some national fractions of the bourgeoisie by others.

This is illustrated by the history of the formation of new nations ever since the Middle Ages.

During the Middle Ages, the social, economic, and political situation can be summed up in these words of Rosa Luxemburg: "In the Middle Ages, when feudalism was dominant, the ties between different parts or regions of the same nation were in fact extremely loose. Every important city produced, with the surrounding countryside, the majority of products required to satisfy its day-to-day needs; it would also have its own administration, its own government, and its own army; in the West, the largest and most prosperous cities sometimes waged war and signed treaties with foreign powers. Similarly, the largest communities led their own isolated lives, and each part of a feudal lord's domain, or even each of his knights' manors, constituted in itself a quasi-independent state" [1].

Although at a slower pace and on a smaller scale than was to be the case under capitalist domination, the process of social transformation was already at work: "The revolution in production and commercial relations at the end of the Middle Ages, the increase in the means of production and the development of a money based economy with the development of international trade, and at the same time as the revolution in military techniques the decline of the nobility and the development of standing armies were all factors which in political terms encouraged the development of royal power and the rise of absolutism. Absolutism's main tendency was to create a centralised state apparatus. The 16th and 17th centuries were a period of constant struggle between the centralising tendency of absolutism and the remains of feudal separatism" [2].

Obviously, it was the bourgeoisie which gave the decisive impetus to this process of the formation of modern states, and brought it to a conclusion: "The abolition of tolls, and of the independence of both municipalities and the minor nobility in the matter of taxation and the administration of justice, were the first acts of the modern bourgeoisie. This went along with a large state machine which brought together all these functions: administration in the hands of central government, legislation by a parliament, the various armed forces gathered together in a centralised army under the command of the central government, customs duties levied uniformly on imports and exports, the imposition of a single currency throughout the state, etc. In the same way, the modern state has unified the cultural domain as far as possible, through a uniform régime in education, and with a church organised along the same lines as the state as a whole. In a word, capitalism's dominant tendency is towards the greatest possible centralisation" [3].

War has always played a vital role in the formation of modern nations, both internally in eliminating the resistance of reactionary sectors of society, and externally in asserting the nation's frontiers, and its right to exist, by force of arms. This is why the only viable states to have emerged from the Middle Ages are those which have a sufficient economic development to guarantee their own independence.

The example of Germany illustrates the role of violence in the formation of a strong state: after beating Austria, and subjecting the German princes, Prussia was able to impose a stable German unity thanks to the victory over France in 1871.

Similarly, the formation of the United States of America in 1776, although its foundations were not laid in the soil of feudal society since it had gained its independence in the war against Great Britain, also illustrates the same point: "The first nucleus of the Union between the various English colonies of North America, which until then had been independent of each other and which differed widely both socially and politically and indeed on many levels had widely diverging interests, was created by the revolution" [4]. But the formation of the cohesive modern USA of today was only assured by the North's victory over the South in the Civil War of 1861: "The Northern States acted as advocates of centralisation, thus representing the development of large-scale modern capital, machine industry, individual freedom and equality before the law, in other words the real corollary of wage labour, democracy, and bourgeois progress" [5].

The 19th century was characterised by the formation of new nations (Germany, Italy), or by the bitter struggle to do so (Poland, Hungary). This "is no accident, but corresponds to the impetus given by an expanding capitalist economy which finds the nation state the most appropriate framework for its development" [6].

Capitalism's entry into its decadent phase at the turn of the century prevented the emergence of any new nations capable of competing on an equal footing with the existing industrialised nations [7]. The six greatest industrialised nations of the 1980's (USA, Japan, Russia, Germany, France, Britain) were the same, though in a different order, as those of World War I. The saturation of solvent markets, which is at the root of capitalism's decadence, provokes a commercial war between nations and the development of imperialism, which is nothing other than the attempt to find a military solution to the insoluble problem of the economy. In this context, those nations which arrived late on the industrial scene have not been able to close the gap separating them from the most developed: on the contrary the gap tends to widen. Last century already, Marx underlined the permanent antagonism between the bourgeoisie's different national fractions: "The bourgeoisie finds itself engaged in a constant battle. At first with the aristocracy; later on, with those portions of the bourgeoisie itself whose interests have become antagonistic to the progress of industry; at all times, with the bourgeoisie of foreign countries" [8]. While the contradiction between capitalism and feudalism has been superseded, by contrast the antagonism between nations has only been exacerbated by decadence. This underlines how utopian, or hypocritical and deceitful, is the idea of a peaceful union of different states, European though they may be.

All the nations born in the present period were the result (like Yugoslavia on 28th October 1918) of the imposition of new frontiers or the dismemberment of vanquished nations or their empires in the world wars. In such conditions, they were necessarily deprived of the attributes of a major nation.

The present, and final, phase of decadence, that of social decomposition, not only discourages the emergence of new nations: it exerts an active pressure on the less cohesive existing ones. The breakup of the USSR is partly a result of this phenomenon, and in its turn it has been a destabilising factor both in the republics which it created and in the European sub-continent as a whole. Yugoslavia, amongst others, has not stood up to it.

Since the conditions for European unity as a nation did not exist before the beginning of the century, in a period which was much more favorable for new nations to emerge, it has been impossible ever since. However, given the region's importance - the greatest industrial concentration in the world - and its consequent status as a prime target for imperialist appetites, it was inevitable that Europe should become the theatre where the determining imperialist alliances in the international balance of power would be made and broken. From the end of World War II until the collapse of the Eastern bloc, it has been the bastion of the Western bloc, with a political and military cohesion to match that of the enemy bloc. Likewise, since the collapse of the Eastern bloc and the consequent dissolution of the Western bloc, it has been the theatre for the struggle for influence between the USA and Germany, which will be at the head of the two future imperialist blocs, should these ever come into being.

The economic agreements between European countries to face up to international competition have been superimposed on these imperialist rivalries and alliances, though not always in tune with them.

Europe: an instrument of American imperialism

At the end of World War II, a Europe destabilised by economic crisis and social disorganisation looked an easy prey for Russian imperialism. The leader of the opposing bloc was thus obliged to do everything possible to reestablish a social and economic organisation which would make it less vulnerable to Russian ambitions: "Western Europe, although it had not suffered the appalling damage inflicted on the Eastern part of the continent, was still suffering, two years after the end of the war, from an economic exhaustion which it seemed unable to escape... overall, at the beginning of 1947 it seemed on the edge of an abyss... all these elements seemed likely to provoke, in the short term, a general economic collapse, while social tensions gathered on the horizon threatening to tip Western Europe into the rapidly forming camp of the USSR" [9].

The Marshall Plan was voted in 1948: $17 billion worth of aid was to be made available between 1948 and 1952. It was entirely at the service of this imperialist objective of the USA [10]. It was part of the dynamic of the strengthening of the two blocs and the increasing tensions between them. Other important events were part of the same pattern. On the Western side came, in the same year: Yugoslavia's break with Moscow, preventing the formation of a Balkan Federation including Bulgaria and Albania under Soviet influence; the creation of the Brussels Mutual Assistance pact (a military alliance between the Benelux countries, France and Great Britain), followed the year after by the Atlantic Pact which was to lead to the creation of NATO in 1950. This being said, the Eastern bloc did not remain passive: it initiated the "Cold War", marked in particular by the Berlin blockade and the pro-Russian coup d'état in Czechoslovakia in 1948. In 1949, Comecon (Council for Economic Cooperation) was set up between the countries of the bloc. Moreover, the antagonism between the two blocs was not limited to Europe, but already was polarising imperialist tensions throughout the world. The years 1946-1954 saw the first phase of the war in Indochina, which was to end with the surrender of French troops at Dien Bien Phu.

The establishment of the Marshall Plan was a powerful factor drawing together the countries which benefited from it, and the body in charge of it, the "European Organisation for Economic Cooperation", was the precursor of all those "agreements" which were to follow. However, the motive force behind these agreements remained the demands of imperialism. This was especially true of the "European Coal and Steel Community". "The European Party led by Robert Schumann gained strength in 1949-50, when a Russian offensive was most feared, and it was desired to consolidate Europe's economic resistance while the political arena saw the reinforcement of the Council of Europe and NATO. And so the desire to give up particularities in favour of a pooling of the great European resources, in other words the foundations of economic power which at the time were coal and steel" [11]. 1952 thus saw the formation of the ECSC, a common market for coal and steel embracing France, Germany, Italy and the Benelux countries. Although formally more autonomous of the USA than was the EOEC, this new community still served US interests through an economic and therefore a political strengthening of the Western bloc's frontier with the USSR. Great Britain did not enter the ECSC for reasons of its own, linked to its desire to preserve its "independence" from the other European countries, and to maintain the integrity of the "sterling zone", since the pound at the time was the world's second currency. However, this exception was perfectly acceptable for the Western bloc, given Britain's geographical position and the strength of its ties to the USA.

The EEC's creation in 1957, with the aim of "gradually doing away with customs duties, harmonising economic, monetary, financial and social policies, and establishing the free circulation of labour and free competition" [12] was a further stage in the reinforcement of European cohesion, and so of the Western bloc's cohesion likewise. Although the EEC was a potential economic rival for the United States, it began on the contrary as a factor in US development: "The geographical area most favored by direct US investments since 1950 is Europe: they have increased fifteen-fold. This tendency remained fairly modest until 1957, but accelerated afterwards.

The unification of the continental European market led the Americans to rethink their strategy in the light of several imperatives: the creation of a common economic tariff was likely to exclude them, if they were not already present on the spot. Existing investments were called into question, since within a unified market there could be advantages to be gained in terms of labour costs, taxation, or government subsidies, by relocating, for example, to Italy or Belgium. Moreover, there was no longer any reason to duplicate investment in more than one country. Finally, and above all, the new European market could compare in population, in industrial capacity, and in the medium term in living conditions, with the USA: its potential was therefore not to be neglected" [13].

In fact, Europe's development was such - during the 60s it became the world's greatest economic power - that its products began to compete directly with those from America. However, despite this economic success it was unable to overcome its own divisions, based on opposing economic interests and different political orientations within the Western club. An example of the opposition between different economic interests is the divergence between Germany on the one hand, which sought to encourage its exports by widening the EEC and developing closer relations with the USA, and France which on the contrary wanted a more closed EEC in order to protect its own industry from international competition. This political opposition between France and other countries came to a head over Britain's repeated applications to join the EEC. De Gaulle's government, which sought to reduce American domination, alleged that membership of the Community was incompatible with the "special relationship" between Britain and the USA.

Thus, "the EEC was only a very partial success, and was unable to impose a common policy. The failure of Euratom in 1969-70, the mitigated success of the Concorde aircraft, are illustrations of this"(13). This is hardly surprising, since a common and autonomous European strategy on the political, and thence on the economic level inevitably came up against the limits imposed by the discipline of the bloc dominated by the USA.

This bloc discipline disappeared with the collapse of the Eastern bloc, and the dissolution of the Western bloc as a result, since as we have seen European unity was cemented essentially by imperialist considerations.

The only cohesive factor in Europe, as it appears today with the dissolution of the Western bloc, is at the economic level, in agreements designed to confront in the least unfavorable conditions possible the competition from Japan and America. By itself, this factor is very weak compared to the growing imperialist tensions which are pulling Europe apart.

The battleground in the struggle for influence of the great imperialist powers

The agreements which, on the economic level, define the present European Community are largely to do with freedom of trade in most commodities between member countries, with various safeguards allowing the temporary protection of national production in some countries, with the agreement of the other members. These agreements go hand in hand with other open or concealed protectionist measures against other countries which do not belong to the Community. Although these agreements obviously do not eliminate competition between the member countries (this is not their purpose anyway), they nonetheless have a certain effectiveness against competition from the US and Japan. One example is the hypocritical barriers imposed on imports of Japanese cars, to protect the European auto industry. Another, though in the opposite direction this time, is the USA's huge effort during the GATT negotiations to drive a wedge into European unity, and to have succeeded amongst other things over the question of agricultural produce. At the economic level, these measures are topped off by the adoption of various standards such as those concerning tax laws, designed to facilitate trade and economic cooperation amongst the countries involved.

Apart from the strictly economic measures, others have been adopted or proposed whose clear aim is to tighten the links between the various countries.

Thus, the Schengen agreement has been signed by France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Luxemburg, and the Netherlands (to be joined later by Spain and Portugal), with the aim of "providing protection against massive immigration", and at the same time "against internal destabilising factors".

Despite their vagueness, the Maastricht agreement is also an attempt to go further in tightening these links.

The implications of such agreements are wider than the mere common defense of certain economic interests, since the growing interdependence between the member countries opens the way to a greater political autonomy from the USA. The full importance of such a perspective can be seen when we consider that the most powerful European country involved is Germany, which is precisely the country most likely to take the lead of a future imperialist bloc opposed to the USA. This is the reason for the clear attempts on the part of Holland and Great Britain, which have remained the USA's faithful allies, to sabotage the construction of a more "political" Europe.

The imperialist question appears still more clearly if we look at the military agreements involving the "hard core" of the attempt to assert a clear autonomy against US hegemony. Germany and France have formed a common army corps, while a less important, but still significant agreement has been concluded between France, Spain, and Italy for the formation of a common air-sea force [14].

Britain's disapproval of the Franco-German force, and the Dutch reaction to it ("Europe must not be subjected to the Franco-German consensus") are clear indicators of the antagonism between the respective camps.

Similarly, the USA, despite some discreet and purely diplomatic noises in favour of Maastricht, are singularly unenthusiastic about the treaty, even though they can always rely on their British and Dutch allies to paralyse the European institution [15].

Obviously, the tendency will be for Germany and France to make more and more use of the EEC institutions to make Europe more autonomous relative to the USA. Conversely, Holland and Britain will be obliged to respond by paralysing European initiatives.

Nonetheless, such action by Britain or Holland would tend to "marginalise" them from the EEC structures if pushed beyond certain limits.

Such a perspective, which would mean the beginning of the breakup of the EEC, is obviously not without disadvantages at the economic level for all the countries involved. In Europe itself, it would accelerate the formation of a new bloc opposed to the US.

Fertile ground for anti-working class ideological campaigns

Since the "European project" is a pure myth, and moreover is preparing the integration of an imperialist bloc, the working class obviously has no sides to take in the quarrels going on between different bourgeois factions as to which imperialist camp to join. The workers must reject both the chauvinists who present themselves as the "guardians of national identity", or even the "defenders of the workers' interests against the bosses' Europe", and the no less nationalist partisans of "building Europe". The class has everything to lose on this terrain, which would do nothing but sow division and the worst illusions amongst it. And amongst the lies the bourgeoisie uses to deceive the workers, there are a few "classics" which they must be able to unmask.

"The union of the majority of European countries is a factor for peace in the world, or at least in Europe". This kind of idea relies on the assumption that if France and Germany are allied in such a structure, we will avoid a repetition of the last two world wars. It is true that this might avoid a conflict between the two countries - always assuming that France does not change sides at the last minute to join the US camp. But it provides no solution at all to the crucial problem of war. If the political ties between certain European countries were to develop further than they are today, this would inevitably be part of a dynamic towards the formation of a new imperialist bloc around Germany, and opposed to the USA [16]. And if the working class leaves the bourgeoisie's hands free, the end result of such a dynamic can only be imperialist war.

"This kind of union would allow its inhabitants to avoid such disasters as poverty, ethnic wars, or famines which are presently ravaging most other parts of the world". This idea is the complement to the one above. Apart from the lie which makes believe that a part of the planet could escape from the system's worldwide crisis, this idea is part of the propaganda whose aim is to persuade the working class in Europe to leave the fundamental problem of its own to survival in the hands of "its own" bourgeoisie, without regard to, and (though this is not admitted openly) to the detriment of the working class in the rest of the world. It therefore aims to harness the working class to the defense of bourgeois national interests. It is merely the equivalent, on the scale of the imperialist bloc in formation, of all the nationalist and chauvinistic campaigns that the bourgeoisie uses in every country. In this sense, it can be compared to the campaigns that the Western bloc used to employ against its Russian adversary, designated for the occasion as the "evil empire".

"The working class can, in fact, be identified with the most nationalist fractions of the bourgeoisie, since like them it is largely against European unity". It is true that under the barrage of bourgeois propaganda, large numbers of workers have in some cases (eg during the French referendum on the ratification of Maastricht in 1992) been led to take part in the "European debate". This is due to a weakness in the working class. It is also true that, in this context, some workers have been influenced by those arguments which seek at different levels to mix up the defense of class interests with nationalism, chauvinism, and xenophobia. Such a situation is a product of the fact that, overall, the working class is still subjected to the weight of the dominant ideology, of which nationalism in all its forms is a component. But the bourgeoisie also uses this situation to render the working class guilty of engendering within itself such "monstrosities", in order to divide the class into so-called "progressive" and "reactionary" fractions.

Faced with the lies of "overcoming national frontiers by building Europe", or of the "social Europe", as with the calls to nationalism in order to "protect themselves from the social evils of European Union", the workers have no choice to make. The only way forward for them is the intransigent struggle against all the fractions of the bourgeoisie, for the defense of their living conditions and the development of a revolutionary perspective, through the development of their international class solidarity and unity. Their only safeguard will be to put into practice the old but always up-to-date slogan of the workers' movement: "The workers have no fatherland. Workers of all countries, unite!".

M, 20th February, 1993

[1] Rosa Luxemburg, The Nation State and the Proletariat [19]

[2] idem.

[3] idem.

[4] idem.

[5] idem.

[6] "The proletarian struggle in the decadence of capitalism. The development of new capitalist units", International Review no.23

[7] See the article: "Still-born nations" in International Review no.69

[8] The Communist Manifesto.

[9] Pierre Léon, Histoire Economique et Sociale du Monde.

[10] Clearly, it is no accident that the plan was set up by Marshall, head of the US army's general staff during the war.

[11] idem.

[12] idem.

[13] idem.

[14] idem.

[15] Such an initiative is also significant of the need felt not only by France, but also by Spain and Italy, to avoid being completely defenseless against their powerful German neighbour and ally.

[16] The USA is also doing whatever it can, not just to block the French and German efforts, but also to create their own "common market", to prepare for an increasingly difficult world situation. The North American Free Trade Association formed with Mexico and Canada is not just an economic effort, but an attempt to reinforce the cohesion and stability of their immediate zone of influence, both against internal decomposition, and against the influence of other major powers from Europe or Japan.