In this text we aim to show:

-- that the proletariat must distinguish the various strata of the rural population and seek the support of the farm workers and poor peasants;

-- that the agrarian problem has got worse with the decadence of capitalism, which will leave a very difficult legacy to the proletariat;

-- that all the attempts at ‘agrarian reform' are bourgeois mystifications; and that the world­wide proletarian revolution is the only real solution to the growing misery of the countryside in the third world.

What is the peasantry?

Unlike the sociologists, who talk indiscriminately of the peasantry as a unified social class, Marxists have always demonstrated its heterogeneity. They have shown that in the countryside there exist different and often antagonistic social classes, and within these, strata created by the juridical system of landed property or by the possession of the means of production. It is the study of class divisions in the countryside, and in different geographical regions that allows Marxism to grasp the explosive social contradic­tions that hold sway there, as well as their connection with the struggle of the industrial proletariat.

It is all the more necessary to define the agrar­ian social classes in that the bourgeoisie consciously obscures their existence. For the bour­geoisie, the agricultural workers, the unemployed, the landless peasants crammed in the villages, are all one and the same. A capitalist farmer is identical to a farmer in the third world; a capitalist plantation owner is defined as a ‘farmer' in the same way as a small peasant with his little plot.

Secondly, we must be careful to distinguish the rural population (all the social classes living in the countryside) from the agricultural popula­tion (all the classes that gain their living from agriculture). It is obvious that a worker who lives and works in the countryside is not a peasant; and conversely a peasant living and work­ing in a town or a large village is not a small businessman or a worker. There is a qualitative difference between the industrialized countryside of the highly-developed nations, and the non-industrialized countryside of many third world countries.

Thirdly, we should point out that the agricultural population does not cover the active population. While in Germany or Japan, fifty per cent of the population is in work, in the under-developed countries this figure often falls to less than thirty per cent. In the latter, it should be emphasized that under- and un- employment affect between 20-40% of the agricultural population.

It is all the more necessary to make these points in that the bourgeoisie uses all the means at its disposal (both ideological and statistical) to hide the existence of classes, and so of class antagonisms, in the countryside under the all-embracing category of the ‘peasantry'.

The peasantry as such does not exist; there is rather, on the one hand a rural proletariat, and on the other hand, various social types of ‘farmer', from the great landed proprietor to the jobless.

The agricultural workers

Agricultural workers are not part of the peasantry, even if they may often share its prejudices and ideology; they are a detachment of the proletar­iat in the countryside and their class interests are indistinguishable from those of the prole­tariat as a whole. Their extremely low wages and the instability of their living conditions -- unemployment, repression by the landlords' private armies as in Latin America - make them without doubt the most exploited category of the working class. Their dramatic isolation from the rest of the proletariat is emphasized by their gene­rally weak concentration and their minority posi­tion in the countryside, outside the developed nations and regions of plantation farming. In the future, one of the urban proletariat's tasks will be precisely to bring the class struggle to the countryside, with the firm support of the rural proletarians. This will nonetheless be a difficult job given their dispersal and their numerical weakness: it is estimated that they make up no more than 10-20% of the world's agricultural population.

However, the main difficulty facing this union of the urban and rural proletariat lies in the inter­penetration of the different layers of rural society; agricultural workers often own a parcel of land which keeps them alive; often, again, we find peasant-workers doing a double day's work. In the third world, vast masses of the work-less only sell their labor power for a part of the year. We will see later how the agrarian reforms, carried out in the eastern bloc and the third world, by giving plots of land to agricultural workers, have blurred the distinction between them and the peasantry, and temporarily diminished the gaps within society.

In third world countries, the existence of enor­mous under- or un- cultivated properties may in a revolutionary period prompt the agricultural workers to occupy them. As the example of Russia 1917-18 shows, they then cease to be workers. By dividing up the land, they become small farmers, with all the prejudices that implies. The ‘divi­sionist' ideology (dividing the land amongst everyone) is an obstacle to those workers' class consciousness. It leaves them vulnerable to all the maneuvers of the left wing of the bourgeoisie, which puts itself forward as the spokesman of small property owners.

The position of agricultural workers in the developed countries is quite different. The progressive disappearance of day-work and the concen­tration of workers into vast food factories (or co-operatives) and in mechanized units, has greatly simplified the situation. For these workers, the associated and truly industrial nature of their labor makes the dividing up of the land the agricultural factories quite meaningless. Unaffected by any backward ‘divisionist' ideology, they will be smoothly integrated into the revolutionary struggle that will shake the developed countries.

By contrast, the weight of the past and the arch­aic structures of rural society make for a great heterogeneity amongst the peasantry existing alongside the agricultural workers.

The different categories of peasants

These are distinguished by three criteria:

-- the juridical structures; ownership or not of the land; freehold or leasehold property; agricultural co-operatives;

-- the size of the farms: large, medium or small;

-- the level of capitalization and mechaniza­tion.

These criteria allow us to distinguish the class divisions in the countryside. It is obvious that capitalism's domination of the countryside has, for this purpose, given the economic crit­eria a primary importance at the expense of the juridical ones. For capital, juridical property matters less than ownership of the means of production and of the capital that allows the exploitation of the land and of labor power. In the industrial nations moreover, the amount of land cultivated has lost much of its importance: extensive agriculture has given way to intensive agriculture - land-hunger to thirst for capital.

In order to define the rural classes, we must take two essential criteria into account:

-- the ‘peasant's' income;

-- his place in the relations of production: whether or not he is an exploiter of labor-power; his dependence or otherwise on the capitalist or landlord.

Finally, we must consider the geographical diff­erences. The small farmer of the Middle West has nothing in common with the small farmer of the Camerouns.

However, taking all these factors into account, we can distinguish three main classes that confront each other within the peasantry.

The rural bourgeoisie

One of the great mystifications developed by the bourgeoisie is the description of large landed proprietors or capitalist farmers as ... ‘peasants'. No less pernicious is the idea that ‘latifundar­ies' in Asia or Latin America, the Islamic ‘aghas' or the Indian ‘zamindars' are ... feudal lords, just as in the Middle Ages. To this we can reply:

1. Even if in the feudal epoch, the legendary ‘rich laborers' might be considered as an upper stratum of the peasantry, since the beginning of capitalism's expansion the bourgeoisie's hold over the land and its domination of this stratum have definitively created, even in the most back­ward countries, an agrarian bourgeoisie organi­cally linked to the rest of that class by the political and economic triumph of the new rela­tions of production. This class is bourgeois, not because of a juridical formalism, nor thanks to its income -- even though these do express a difference between it and the peasantry in the strict sense -- but through its possession of the means of production (land, technical capital), the capitalist exploitation of labor power (wages in kind or money), and finally by its participa­tion in the capitalist market (production for sale).

2. Today, it is not titles of nobility nor the size and feudal origins of the great plantations (‘latifundia'), nor even the almost feudal domi­nation of landlords over peasants still reduced to forced labor and servile status (in the Middle East or the most backward countries of Latin America), which defines the relations of production in the most backward regions -- but the world market. The penetration of capitalism, the capitalist nature of the state under the laws of capital, all tend to transform the one-time feudal lords into bourgeois. Whether they are planters, money-lenders, or tribal chiefs, capita­lism has, by integrating them into the market and above all the state, tied them to the rest of the dominant capitalist class. Whether they ride on horses or in cars, whether they wear grass skirts or city suits, they have irreversibly become an integral part of the bourgeoisie. Along with the rest of the bourgeoisie they participate in the appropriation of ground rent, and the profit from agricultural goods sold on the capitalist market.

From our worldwide standpoint, it thus follows that in no way can there exist in the most back­ward countries, a ‘reactionary feudal class' on one side and a ‘progressive bourgeois class' on the other; in decadent capitalism, these are one and the same reactionary class - the class that dominates the exploited!

3. Clearly, this is not to deny the survival of remnants of previous modes of production. In the twentieth century, we can see, side by side, the most modern plantations and tribes tilling the land with tools from the Stone Age.

This reality, which is indeed the product of the capitalist system's continued senility, does not contradict the worldwide domination of capital. It is essentially in the sphere of circulation (exchange of goods) that capitalism has imposed itself everywhere. Even Asia's great ‘feudal lords' have to sell their products on the world market.

4. The theory which, basing itself on the real existence of remnants of pre-capitalist modes of production, goes on to talk of the continuing possibility of ‘anti-feudal bourgeois revolutions' is strangely reminiscent of that old corruption of ‘uneven development' so dear to the late Josef Stalin, with his idea of the ‘Revolution by Stages'. This kind of theory is not neutral: its starting point is a national and therefore nationalist, vision of the dominant relations of production. It is the ‘revolutionary' fig-leaf for all the bourgeois, third worldist, Trotsky­ist movements which insist that the enemy of the rural proletariat and poor peasants in the under­developed countries is ... the ‘feudal lord'.

The petty bourgeoisie

This category includes the small peasants, small independent proprietors (exploiters of labor power or otherwise), the small farmers and tenant farmers in the developed countries. The hetero­geneity of this social layer is the historical product of the interpenetration of pre-capitalist relationships with modern capitalism. Its origin lies in the most diverse juridical, economic and geographical structures. It could even be said that this complex situation creates inevitable ‘sub-classes' within the petty bourgeoisie. All are dependent on the market, but vary in their dependence on capital. Here we can distinguish two main strata:

-- independent farmers, who are in fact arti­sans, since they possess their own means of production (land, tractors, buildings). Within this category there is a dividing line between those who buy labor power and those whose workforce is drawn from their own family;

-- tenant farmers, who do not own the land they farm. These are divided into two opposing strata: sharecroppers and farmers proper. The latter necessarily own their instruments of labor, while the evolution of capitalism has gradually transformed them into small capitalists, differen­tiated themselves by the size of their capital. As for the sharecroppers -- a pre-capitalist remnant rapidly disappearing in the developed countries -- they are directly subjected to the arbitrary power of the landlord, and the hazards of the harvest, since their farming techniques are prim­itive and they are obliged to pay in kind for the rent of their land and tools.

This indicates the whole complexity of the prob­lem and the difficulty the proletariat will have in intervening towards these strata.

In fact, it is the proletariat's unshakable unity that will be able to create splits within the agricultural petty bourgeoisie. In the under-developed countries, a determined proleta­riat can draw in its wake the layers of the petty bourgeoisie thrown into total pauperization by the crisis. In the developed countries, the proletariat will confront the liveliest hostility from those strata which identify with private property. At best, if the world revolution spreads rapidly, the proletariat will be able to count on the resigned ‘neutrality' of these particularly backward layers.

Poor peasants and landless peasants

In the third world, these constitute a layer of starvation, living in inhuman conditions. All, whether they are sharecroppers in the Islamic countries, small landowners vegetating on a tiny plot of land (microfundia) or landless peasants at the mercy of the moneylender, whether they are vagabonds or are crammed into slum-villages, all live in the same situation of total misery, with­out any hope of integration into the capitalist society on whose margin they live. Often they are at the same time small landowners and agri­cultural laborers, sharecroppers and farmers when part of their land is mortgaged. Often their situation is like that of the jobless, since a majority (between 20-40% of the third world agricultural population) only work eighty days in the year. At the mercy of famines and the brutality of the great landlords, they live in a state of profound apathy, interspersed by brutal, hopeless revolts that are ferociously crushed.

This layer -- which constitutes the majority in the most backward rural regions - has absolutely nothing to lose and a world to win from the proletarian revolution.

Nonetheless, their loyalty to the proletarian revolution will depend on the proletariat's own decisiveness. Their vagabond, even lumpen-­proletarian position, has made them in the past, and may make them in the present, the tools of the great landlords or of state capitalist (‘natio­nal liberation') movements, to be used as mercen­aries against the workers.

The revolutionary flame will only touch this hybrid layer whose only unity is its absolute misery, if the proletariat struggles mercilessly for the annihilation of the rural bourgeoisie.

The weight of decadence

1. Marxism and the Peasant Question in the Nineteenth Century

While the peasantry on the eve of the industrial revolution still represented more than ninety per cent of the world's population, the develop­ment of capitalism took the form of a brutal, wide-scale proletarianization of peasants thrown into the new industrial jails. Right from its beginnings, the whole history of capitalism is the history of the violent expropriation of the peasant proprietors by agricultural capitalism, of landless peasants reduced to vagabondage and subsequently transformed into proletarians. The process of primitive accumulation in Britain, studied by Marx in Capital, is the cruelest example of this.

The mechanization of agriculture in the nineteenth century, a sign of increasing capitalization of the land, simply hastened this phenomenon by leaving the poor peasants the choice between a slow death by drowning in the competition of capitalist agriculture (this was the case with the Irish peasantry who left a million dead in the great famine of 1847), and becoming industrial proletarians. What capitalism had obtained in its beginnings through physical violence, it got henceforth through the violence of its economic laws; a cheap and abundant workforce, to be merci­lessly sucked dry in the new industrial centers.

For capitalism, this expropriation had a second and no less important advantage. By concentrating landholdings, capital was able to produce cheap food in response to a gigantic population explo­sion, and to put pressure on wage levels by redu­cing the production costs of the goods necessary for the reproduction of labor power.

On the theoretical level, Marx in his demonstra­tion of the laws governing capitalism, divided society into three main economic classes: the bourgeoisie, the proletariat and the great agricultural landlords raking in land-rent. Politi­cally, he distinguished fundamental historic classes: the previous revolutionary class, the bourgeois, and its gravedigger, the proletariat.

However, at the turn of the century, capitalism, although it had achieved worldwide domination, was still a long way from integrating the peasan­try into the production process on a world, or even a European scale. Kautsky, in a study limi­ted to European and American agriculture, thought that the general tendency of capitalist develop­ment would lead to the disappearance of small­holding property, in favor of large-scale property, and so of industrialized agriculture. He empha­sized the proletarianization of the German peasan­try, transformed into agricultural workers (see Fabre, Paysans Pauvres et Sans Terre).

This optimistic vision of a fusion of industry and agriculture, of a ‘peaceful' capitalist solution to the peasant and agrarian problem, was founded on a belief in the impossibility of capi­talism's decadence and on the reactionary hope (not yet admitted by Kautsky) of an infinite and harmonious growth of the system.

Capitalism's decadence has simply pushed the pea­sant and agrarian problem to its limit. From the worldwide viewpoint, it is not the development, but the under-development of modern agriculture that has been the result. The peasantry today constitutes a majority of the world population, as it did a century ago.

2. Development and Under-Development in the Third World

These countries represent 69% of the world popu­lation, but only 15.4% of the world GNP (see Cazes-Domingo, Les Criteres Du Sous-Developpement, 1976, ed. Breal). They account for only 7% of world industrial production, and their illiteracy rate is around 75%. Their share of world trade has diminished continuously, from 31.2% in 1948 to 17% in 1972 (see Lacoste, Geographie du Sous­Developpement, ed. PUF).

The world agricultural population has not dimini­shed but has increased since World War II. It rose from 700 million in 1950 to 750 million in 1960 and has reached -- by statistical deduction -- about 950 million active members today. When we consider that the active population taken as a whole amounts to 1,700,000,000 we get an idea of the crushing weight of the agricultural popu­lation. As for the active part of this popula­tion, it has slightly diminished: 60% of the active population in 1950; 57% in 1960; perhaps 55% in 1980 (all these figures consider only the world as a whole).

Evidently, these figures are not entirely trust­worthy given the lack of serious statistics not manipulated by bourgeois economists.

In reality, 66% of the world's population would seem to live in the countryside. Outside the industrialized countries, the vast majority are poor peasants, landless or otherwise.

Not only is capitalism unable to integrate the peasants into industry, it grinds them into the most total misery. Of the 60 million deaths in one year, largely in the third world, 20 million are due to hunger or to what the economists coyly call ‘malnutrition'. The immense majority of the population lives to no more than 40, and half the children die in their first year. Officially, 900 million peasants are considered as living on the threshold of absolute poverty, perhaps even more since the unemployed are not counted, and third world peasants often supplement their income with agricultural wage labor (see R. Fabre, Paysans Sans Terre).

This absolute misery, the looming famines as in the Sahel or in Asia, are all the more a condemna­tion of capitalism in that it is today amply possible to feed the entire world population:

-- only a third of the world's potential agri­cultural surface is cultivated;

-- the developed countries' agricultural over­production in relation to the solvent market brings about a vast under-production in relation to real needs: the USA prefers to transform its surplus into alcohol or even reduce the cultivated surface, rather than see prices fall;

-- the constant development of war production, by developing ever greater strategic stocks in preparation for a third world war, brings about a constant reduction in the consumption of food­stuffs.

The threat of hunger is as real today as it was in previous economies; agricultural production per head is below its 1940 level (see R. Fabre, Paysans Sans Terre). A sign of the total anarchy of the capitalist economy: since World War II most of the one-time productive agricultural countries of the third world have become importers. Iran, for example, imports forty per cent of the foodstuffs it consumes. Contrary to the claims of capital's apologists, who still talk straight-­faced about ‘developing countries', the cause is not these countries backwardness, but the world­wide penetration of capitalism.

3. Capitalist Penetration

Apart from the primitive tribes of Amazonia or Central Africa -- an anthropologist's delight -- no region of the world today is autarkic and self-sufficient. Through violence and the state's growing stranglehold, capital penetrated every corner of the countryside, subjecting the peasantry to taxation and the exchange economy. Since then, even the most backward peasant pro­ducer has sold an ever-growing part of his pro­duction on the market.

However, while agricultural products circulate like any other commodity, capitalism has not and will not be able to socialize agriculture, nor to fuse town and countryside.

This is why the vast majority of the rural popu­lation still works the land in mediaeval conditions:

-- without tractors, even without ploughs and other tools;

-- without pesticides or fertilizers;

-- cultivating the land according to the rhythm of the seasons, and so below its capacity;

-- using available labor below capacity;

-- subjected to a physical exhaustion and a death-rate that reduces productivity still further.

Through its laws, both economic and juridical, capitalism has gained a formal domination over the countryside, but it has not really been able to integrate it into the capitalist economy.

It might be objected that there has been a real proletarianization of the peasantry during the reconstruction period after World War II, especi­ally in Europe and America. It is true that the active agricultural population in the US and Great Britain is now no more than 3% of the total active population; in France the country of small peasants, no more than 10%; in West Germany 7%; in East Germany 10%; in Czechoslovakia 14%, etc. It is also true that the agricultural production of those countries has been to a great extent modernized thanks to the use of machines and fertilizers. But in no way can we generalize from Europe to the rest of the world. More than two-thirds of the peasantry worldwide still lives in mediaeval conditions and has not profited in the least from the ‘manna' of reconstruction.

The ‘danse macabre' of agricultural over- and under- production

Capitalism's world domination has been accompanied by a real reduction in agriculture's productive forces. They have only developed in the indust­rialized sectors whose production is destined for the world market. This is why the capitalist crisis is expressed in the food industry by:

-- the impossibility of selling off agricultural stocks on a world market whose saturation is in correlation with the fall in industrial production;

-- the impossibility of developing agricultural production due to a lack of capital in the under­developed countries and a surplus in the industrialized countries.

Even were we to imagine, as a hypothesis, an important development of third world agricultural production, this would clash with the laws of capitalism. It would bring with it a collapse in world farm prices, of capitalist profit and in the end, of world food production.

On the other hand, the low productivity of the millions crammed together in these backward countrysides, without any modern techniques, inevitably makes their cultivation less profitable. To give an example: in Asia, more than 100 working days is needed to cultivate a hectare of rice, while a hectare of corn in the US needs only one day for the same output (see J. Klatsmann, Nourrir 10 Milliard d'Hommes?, ed. PUF,1975).

Finally, state capitalism, by creaming off an ever-growing share of farm produce, reduces the share that comes back to the peasant producer. Whence the absurd situation, common to almost all third world agricultural countries, which forces them to import more and more basic foodstuffs to stave off famine. The resulting debt only serves to disintegrate still further this back­ward agriculture. By the laws of capitalism, it is better for the state to buy a ton of grain produced cheaply in Europe or Australia, than to buy from the landed proprietor or small peasant whose output is at least 100 times less.

All these factors show the course that world capitalism is set on: the dislocation of agriculture, the collapse of food production, the deepening of social antagonisms in the country­side as well as in the towns, which cram together ever-growing numbers of jobless, chased from the land by hunger and misery. But, according to some, the ‘positive results' of the ‘agrarian reforms' carried out in various third world coun­tries is supposed to counter-balance this nameless misery.

The mystification of agrarian reform

When the bourgeois revolution broke out in France in 1789, it dispossessed the feudal lords and dismantled the communal property of the villages. It liberated the peasant from forced labor and feudal exactions, transforming him into a ‘citizen' (ie a small landowner able to sell his produce ‘freely' and exchange it with the town), so breaking juridically the autarkic framework of the stagnating village community. In this way the bourgeoisie gained the possibility of buying land ‘freely', with, as a bonus, a solid social base for its revolution.

However, the development of small landholdings and the subdivision of agricultural exploitation could not be capitalism's natural tendency. The most classic examples of England and the USA show that its aim is fundamentally the concentra­tion and not the dispersal, of the land and agricultural means of production. In response to the needs of nascent industry, it must not only expropriate the peasant and subject him to wage labor, but also increase productivity by the concentration of land and machines. The aim of all capitalist agriculture is, in fact, produc­tion for the world market, and not for the natio­nal market which remains too restricted, in spite of its large concentrations of population.

All this brings in its wake the consolidation, not the division, of the land, a rural exodus rather than the settlement of a mass of surplus agricultural labor. Directly oriented towards the market, capitalist agriculture inevitably undergoes the crises of overproduction determined by the degree of solvability of the world market as a whole. The crisis, by diminishing solvable demand, has only exacerbated this tendency. Today, the countries of large-scale capitalist agriculture must encourage their farmers to diminish production and the amount of land culti­vated, in order to avoid a collapse in the prices of basic agricultural products. Overproduction is followed by underproduction relative to the productive capacities of large-scale mechanized agriculture which according to the bourgeois spec­ialists themselves would be able alone to feed the whole of humanity.

And yet half of humanity lives on the edge of starvation. 100 million Chinese are threatened with death by hunger. In the third world coun­tries, despite the fact that the population has more than doubled in thirty years, food produc­tion per head regularly falls. Capitalism stands convicted of pushing humanity to its doom!

Faced with this situation, already present in the nineteenth century but exacerbated by the deca­dence of capitalism, bourgeois ideologists, agron­omists, third worldists and leftists have not missed an occasion to push for ‘collectivization', ‘agrarian reform', ‘green' or ‘white' revolutions according to taste. They have sung the praises of the Chinese ‘people's communes', of Cuba's ‘collectivized agriculture', of the ‘bourgeois revolution' in Algeria where the settlers' land was seized and divided up. There is hardly a country in the third world that has not claimed to have carried out its agrarian ‘reform' or ‘revolution', and that has not found a whole crowd of leftist and ‘progressive' supporters to shout hallelujah.

The causes of ‘agrarian reform' in the third world and in Russian bloc

As we have seen, the key to capitalism's insolu­ble contradictions lies in the world market and in the competition between the factions of world capital to conquer it and divide it up.

The colonization of what is now the third world by the great industrial countries had a twofold aim: firstly, to find outlets not only for their industrial goods but also for the agricultural surplus that their home market was too limited to absorb; secondly, to prevent, through their economic, political and military control, the development of a national economy capable of com­peting with metropolitan industry and agriculture. This is why capital in the industrialized count­ries left the agricultural economy of the colonies to its lethargy, with the sole exception of the great plantations whose production was oriented towards the world market and the metropoles, providing crops that could not be cultivated in Europe for climatic reasons. The perfecting of the international division of labor that divides agricultural from industrial countries completed the colonized countries' physiognomy of back­wardness: Ceylon for tea; Malaysia for rubber; Colombia for coffee; Senegal for groundnuts, etc.

This international division was necessarily accom­panied by monoculture at the expense of subsis­tence polyculture. Little by little destroying the natural economy, it progressively integrated a growing fraction of small peasants into the market, forcing them to cultivate obligatory crops, even subjecting them to real forced labor on the colonial plantations. With the concentra­tion and seizure of the land, which forced the small peasant to abandon his lands to the money­lender or the great landlord through open violence or violently imposed taxation, self-subsistent agriculture rapidly collapsed, leaving millions dead of starvation as in China, India, Africa ...

The countless peasant revolts which have broken out from India (Sepoy's Revolt) to China (Tai­ping) to Zapata's revolt in Mexico demonstrated the explosiveness of the situation that world capitalism created in the backward pre-capitalist zones. For the peasants they have demonstrated both the hopelessness of counting on the ‘progres­sive or anti-feudal' national bourgeoisie, who always turn out to be allied to the great landed proprietors, as well as the impossibility of improving their condition within a capitalist framework, however ‘liberal' or ‘democratic'. This was shown by the Mexican peasant revolts at the turn of this century, where the peasantry served as the plaything of the different pro-British or pro-American factions of the bourgeoisie.

Faced with this permanent revolt that threatened to shatter social cohesion (though not in a revolutionary sense, as long as the proletarian revolution wasn't on the cards), the bourgeoisie understood that, if it could not suppress the cause, it could at least diminish the effect by concessions. At the risk of reducing agricultu­ral productivity, it made official the division of the land in Mexico, hoping in this way to win the allegiance of the poor and landless peasants who gained a plot of land or enlarged their fields.

But it was above all after World War II that the question was posed in the newly ‘independent' ex-colonies or semi-colonies. Inter-imperialist tensions, the advance of the Russian bloc by means of ‘national liberation struggles' obliged the American bloc to adopt a more ‘realistic' attitude, especially in Latin America, where its policies in Guatemala and above all in Cuba turned out to be disastrous. The sole aim of Kennedy's program worked out in 1961 at Punta del Este and pompously named the ‘Alliance for Progress' was to force the local bourgeoisies of the US bloc to adopt ‘agrarian reform' measures in order to avoid another Cuba. In Peru, 600,000 hectares were redistributed from 1964-69; in Chile, 1,050,000 hectares were seized for redis­tribution between 1964 and 1967; 8,000,000 between 1967 and 1972 (see Le Goz, Reformes Agraires, ed. PUF). Similar measures were taken in other countries.

In the Maghreb (North Africa), the seizure of settlers' lands by the state made it possible to allot land to the poor and landless peasants, who were forcibly organized into ‘self-managed' co­operatives. These examples could be multiplied throughout the third world.

In the Russian bloc and again for political rea­sons, the USSR after the war also pushed for the splitting up of the large estates, and redistri­buted the land formerly owned by German nationals and the great landed proprietors.

All these measures aimed to limit the tension in the countryside and to gain the support of a fraction of the poor, and especially of the middle peasantry, even at the cost of sacrificing the rural bourgeoisie.

Most important, however, was each national capi­tal's economic need to halt the dizzying fall in agricultural production on the vast majority of smallholdings, which existed side by side with vast but scarcely cultivated latifundias. In these conditions agricultural productivity and competitiveness is practically zero. When we add that the world population has risen from 3 billion in 1965 to 4.2 billion in 1980, we get some idea of the appalling situation of the mass of poor peasants, surviving on a few hectares, or even less, alongside 100,000 hectare latifundias for the most part lying fallow. In this situation, the small plots parceled out for farming are more productive, sometimes providing the major part of national agricultural production. This is true despite the lack of fertilizers and machines, since they are more intensively cultivated and use an abundant labor force.

In this way, the various backward capitalist coun­tries that have divided up a part of the great estates, and created peasant ‘co-operatives' dreamed of increasing agricultural production, as much for social as for economic reasons. Each under-industrialized third world country tried to extract an agricultural surplus for export on the world market. And in exchange for this ‘gift' of land, taxes and obligatory crops subjected the small peasant or farmer more than ever to the laws of the market and its fluctuations.

Another method was to buy back the lands seized from the estate owners in order to capitalize them; they were thus farmed in a capitalist manner by the state or by industrial capital and the peasants were transformed into proletarians. Of these, the majority were left with no choice but to flee to the city, piling into monstrous slums containing, as in Mexico for example, as much as a third of the country's population.

The result

From the capitalist point of view, the only posi­tive result of all these ‘agrarian reforms' has been, in a few countries and notably in India, to develop a class of ‘kulaks', middle peasants who have grown rich and form a social buffer in the countryside between the great landlords and the smallholders. Attached in this way to the bour­geoisie, they nonetheless form a very thin stra­tum, given the backward and rotten nature of the economy.

In reality, the ‘rich' have got richer and the ‘poor' poorer; the contrasts between the classes are sharper. The partition by inheritance of landholdings has continued, despite the few extra hectares handed out; productivity continues to fall. The decline has even accelerated on the now-partitioned great ex-colonial estates, through lack of machines and fertilizers; the Algerian countryside now has a 40 per cent unemployment rate. Where the land has been industrialized and cultivated mechanically, the mass of jobless has swollen extravagantly. Where private property has been transferred to the state, as in the Russian bloc, unemployment has officially disapp­eared in the countryside, but at the same time productivity has collapsed: an American farm worker produces thirteen times more wheat than a Russian farm worker.

The bourgeoisie, knowing that it could do little from the economic point of view, claimed, through the intermediary of its agronomists, that the ‘green revolution' would, if not raise producti­vity, at least feed humanity by means of more productive and nutritious plants. In the sixties and seventies, much noise was made about hybrid strains of corn and wheat. The famines in Africa and Asia speak volumes about the result of such promises. In the third world only the rural bourgeoisie, which disposed of capital, machines and fertilizers, was able to profit from them.

In this way, the decadence of capitalism has rendered the peasant question still more diffi­cult. Capitalism's terrible legacy to the proletariat is the destruction of the productive forces in the countryside, and the wretchedness of billions of human beings.

It would be wrong, though, to consider only the negative effects of this misery. It is full of revolutionary potential.

The proletariat will be able to use this potential, if it is capable of acting autnomously, decisively and without abandoning its own program.

This is not a time for ‘bourgeois revolutions'. In the towns, as in the countryside, the only hope for billions of wretched, pauperized human beings lies in the triumph of the worldwide, proletarian revolution.

Chardin

In a world growing sombre with the threat of famine and war, the mass strikes of the Polish workers are a lightning flash of hope.

Compared to the ebullient period of the late sixties and early seventies, when the idea of revolution was rescued from the dustbin by the international reawakening of the class struggle, the rest of the seventies seemed grim and dis­quieting. The class struggle -- at least in the major capitalist countries -- entered into a pha­se of retreat; and as the world economy visibly disintegrated, the realisation grew among all classes that the only light at the end of capi­talism's tunnel was the sinister glare of ther­monuclear bombs.

Amongst the young generations of the working class and other oppressed strata, the banners of total revolt, which they had raised in those early years, gave way to apathy and cynicism. Many discontented young workers drifted into nihilistic violence, while considerable numbers of yesterday's student rebels opted for the quieter pastures of organic living and whole meal bread-baking. The revolutionary communist movement, which had been born out of this first wave of social struggles, reached a certain point of development and maturity, but it has remained strikingly small and has little direct impact on the class struggle. In response to this ob­jective situation, some revolutionary currents wandered off into individualism and theories about the integration of the proletariat into the bourgeois order. Others sought to compen­sate for their lack of confidence in the class, for their political isolation, by indulging in dreams about the all-knowing party which, like Jesus descending from the clouds in glory, will save the proletariat from its innate sinfulness.

But, looking beneath the surface -- which has always been the hallmark of the Marxist method -- it was possible to discern another process unfolding in this period. True, the proletarian struggle was going through a reflux, but a re-flux is not the same as a crushing defeat. Behind the apparent apathy, millions of proleta­rians have been thinking soberly and seriously, asking themselves questions like: Why aren't we winning anything anymore when we go on strike? Why do the unions act in the way they do? Is there anything that can be done about the threat of war? For most, such questions have been posed in an incoherent, unorganized manner, and the initial conclusion many workers came to was that it might be better not to rock the boat, that it might be wiser to wait and see whether this crisis showed any signs of letting up. But a minority of workers did begin to pose such ques­tions in a more organized way, and came to much more radical conclusions. Thus, the appearance of workers' discussion circles in countries like Italy, where the economic and social crisis is extremely well advanced, was an expression of something far broader and deeper, of a subterranean process of reflection that was going on in the whole class. Above all, as the entire population was increasingly feeling the blows of unemployment and inflation, the discontent that was accumulating in the entrails of society necessarily bore with it the potential for immen­se and unforeseen explosions of the class strug­gle -- especially as it became clearer that the bourgeoisie was incapable of doing anything about the crisis of its system. The years 1978-­79 thus saw both a marked deepening of the cri­sis and the first signals of a reaction against it by the proletariat of the advanced countries: the US miners' strike, the steelworkers' strike in West Germany, the British ‘winter of discon­tent' which precipitated the fall of the Labor Government. That a new phase in the class strug­gle had opened up was made clearer by the violent battles in Longwy and Denain, the self-organization of the Italian hospital workers and Dutch dockers, the protracted and militant strike of the British steelworkers. But the recent mass strikes in Poland -- because of their huge scale, their level of self-organization, their interna­tional repercussions, their obviously political character -- have confirmed beyond any doubt that, despite all the bourgeoisies saber-rattling, despite the real dangers of world war, the wor­king class can still act in time to prevent the capitalist system from dragging us all into the abyss.

The aim of this article is not to draw out all the lessons of this immensely rich experience, nor to describe the present situation in Poland, which continues to be marked by extreme ferment and instability, even if the workers' aspira­tions are to some extent being channeled into the false solutions of democracy and ‘indepen­dent' trade unionism. For broader and more up‑to-date accounts, we refer the reader to the leading article in IR 23, the editorial in this IR, and to the territorial publications of our Current. Our intention here is to examine how the Polish events clarify a question, which is nearly always the main bone of contention within today's revolutionary movement, just as it has been in the past: The nature and function of the organization of revolutionaries.

It is true that the groups in today's revolutio­nary movement haven't all come to the same con­clusions about other aspects of the Polish events -- far from it. It has been particularly diffi­cult for a number of revolutionary groups to avoid the temptation of seeing the ‘independent' trade unions as some sort of proletarian expres­sion, especially because they appear to be in continuity with genuine organs of working class struggle -- the strike committees. This difficul­ty has above all been encountered by the groups furthest from the solid roots of the left commu­nist tradition. Thus the ex-Maoists of Le Bol­chevik in France go around shouting ‘Long live the free trade unions of the Polish workers', while the American Marxist Workers Committee (also ex-Maoist) sees them as a positive gain of the struggle, even if their lack of revolu­tionary leadership exposes them to the danger of corruption. The libertarians of the British group Solidarity have been so enthused by these apparently ‘autonomous', ‘self-managed' insti­tutions (who cares whether they're called unions?) that they've been (critically) applauding the Trotskyists of the British SWP for their support for the free trade unions. Even worse: Soli­darity organized a meeting in London to express their agreement with the ideal of independent trade unions for the Polish workers, and felt little embarrassment about sharing a platform with a Labor Party councilor and Polish social democrats. In their most recent magazine (n.14) Solidarity try to squirm out of this by saying they weren't really sharing a platform; they merely gave this impression because of the ‘traditional' seating arrangements at the meeting (ie a table of speakers facing the audience on rows of chairs instead of the more libertarian practice of sitting round in circle). In any case, Solidarity whine, they weren't trying to set up a united front with these other groups, but only to organize an ‘open forum' where every­one could put forward their own views. Thus libertarianism shows itself to be an extension of the liberal-bourgeois mystification that all viewpoints are equally interesting, equally open to discussion. Class lines disappear, and only forms remain.

The groups of the communist left didn't allow themselves to be taken in quite so easily, although both the PCI (Programma) and the Groupe Communiste Internationaliste showed how dangerous it is not to have a clear understanding that we are living in the decadent epoch of capitalism, and thus that trade unionism is dead. The PCI seems to reject the present free trade unions, but wants to leave the door open to the idea that there could be real free trade unions if they were led by a revolutionary party. As for the GCI, like the official Bordigists, it's committed to the idea of a timeless ‘workers associationism' which is the ‘immediate' form of organization created by the workers in strug­gle, and whose name and form are irrelevant, no matter what period of history we're talking about. Trade union, workers' group, soviet, it doesn't matter: Only formalists (like the ICC, for example) care about forms. The impor­tant thing is that all these expressions of workers' associationism are "episodes in the history of the party, whether in time or in space" (Rupture avec le CCI, p.9). Thus, true to their anti-formalism, the GCI was keen to hold out the possibility that the free trade unions being demanded in Poland could be "real workers' organisms, broad, open to all proletarians in struggle, the co-ordination and centralization of strike committees", but could "equal­ly" be transformed into state organs under the pressure of the authorities and the dissidents (Le Communiste, n.7, p.4). But these hesita­tions took place more in the realm of specula­tion than in the material world as it is today: The latest edition of Le Communiste (n.8) is very clear in its denunciation of the new unions. On the whole, the groups of the communist left were able to appreciate the importance of the Polish events and to defend the basic class po­sitions with regard to them: Opposition to ca­pitalism east and west, support for the self-organization and unity of the Polish workers' struggle, rejection of the mystifications of democracy and the free trade unions. But, were you to ask the ICC, the CWO, the PCI, Battaglia Comunista, the GCI, Pour une Intervention Com­muniste (PIC) or others about what the Polish events teach us about the role of the revolutio­nary organization, you would be certain to get a wide variety of answers. In fact, it has been the inability of the communist groups to agree about this basic question which has undermined the possibility that the international revolu­tionary movement might be able to make some kind of joint intervention in response to the Polish strikes: Not long before they broke out, the international conferences of communist groups fell apart because of an inability to agree even about how the debate on the role of the revo­lutionary party should be posed (see IR 22).

Given that mankind is still living in the pre­historic phase when the unconscious tends to dominate the conscious, it's not surprising that the revolutionary vanguard should also be afflicted with that general distortion of vision, which makes it easier for men to be critically aware of what's happening in the world ‘out­side' than to understand their own subjective nature. But, as we never tired of pointing out at the international conferences, the theo­retical debates between revolutionaries, inclu­ding the debate about their own nature and func­tion, aren't resolved simply through self-ana­lysis or through discussion behind closed doors. They're only settled by the interaction of revo­lutionary thought with the practical experience of the class struggle. The working class has not yet accumulated sufficient historical experience for us to say that all the questions about the positive role of the revolutionary organization have been resolved once and for all -- even though we can be fairly clear about what the organization cannot do. This is beyond any doubt, a debate that will continue -- both amongst revolutionaries and the class as a who­le -- well after other issues, such as the nature of the trade unions, have ceased to be contro­versial. In fact, only the revolution itself will make the main points of the ‘party question' crystal-clear for the entire revolutiona­ry movement. But if the debate today is to leave the realm of grandiose abstraction and vague assertion, it must be conducted in close connection to the actual development of the class struggle.

Since it was first constituted the ICC has fought an unrelenting battle against the two main dis­tortions of the Marxist understanding of the role of the revolutionary organization: On the one hand, against councilism, spontaneism, li­bertarianism... all those conceptions which minimise or deny the importance of the revolutio­nary organization, and in particular its most advanced expression, the world communist party; on the other hand, against party-fetishism, sub­stitutionism... all those conceptions which overestimate and exaggerate the role of the party. We think that the recent events in Po­land have vindicated our struggle on these two fronts, and we shall now try to show why and how.

The bankruptcy of spontaneism

The revolutionary currents which emerged in the late sixties and early seventies were strongly marked by spontaneist ideologies of various kinds. In part this was an inevitable reaction against the aberrations of Stalinism and Trot­skyism. For decades, these counter-revolutio­nary tendencies had paraded themselves as the only viable expressions of Marxism, and for many people the very idea of the revolutionary party was irredeemably associated with the loath­some caricatures offered by the Communist Parties and their Trotskyist or Maoist acolytes. More­over, after May ‘68 and other outbreaks of mass proletarian revolt, revolutionaries were under­standably enthusiastic about the fact that the workers were now showing their ability to strug­gle and organize themselves without the ‘leader­ship' of the official left wing parties. But, given their purely visceral reactions to Stalinism and Trotskyism, a number of revolutionaries were led to the facile conclusion that a revo­lutionary party, and in some cases any revolu­tionary organization at all, could only be a barrier to the spontaneous movement of the class.

Another reason for the predominance of sponta­neist ideas in this initial phase of the revolutionary movement was that the social revolts which had given rise to many of these currents were not always clearly working class and were not transparently aimed at an economy in deep crisis. May ‘68 was the classic example of this, with its interaction between student revolts and workers' strikes, and the impression it gave that it was a movement against the excesses of the ‘consumer society' rather than a response to the first manifestations of the world econo­mic crisis. The majority of the revolutionary groups born in that period were made up of ele­ments who had either come directly from the student movement or from the margins of the proletariat. The attitudes they brought with them from these layers of society took different ‘theoretical' forms, but they were often linked by the common feeling that the communist revolution was a playful happening rather than a deadly serious struggle. It's true that revo­lutions are ‘festivals of the oppressed' and that they will always have their humorous and playful aspects; but these can only be the light relief of the revolutionary drama as long as the working class still has to wage a violent and bitter civil war against a ruthless class enemy. But the situationists and related cur­rents often talked as if the revolution would bring an immediate translation of all desires into reality. Revolution had to be made for fun, or it was not worth making; and one only became a revolutionary for one's own needs -- everything else was just ‘sacrifice' and ‘mili­tantism'.

Attitudes like this were based on a fundamental inability to understand that revolutionaries, whether they know it or not, are produced by the needs of the class movement as a whole. For the proletariat, the associated class par excel­lence, there can be no separation between the needs of the collective and the needs of the in­dividual. The proletariat is constantly giving birth to revolutionary fractions because it is compelled to become conscious of its overall goals, because its struggle can only develop by breaking out of the prison of immediacy. What's more, the only factor that can compel the pro­letariat to struggle on a massive scale is the crisis of the capitalist system. Major class movements don't come about because workers are bored and want to protest against the banality of everyday life under capitalism. Feelings like that certainly exist in the working class, but they can only give rise to sporadic outbursts of discontent. The working class will only move on a massive scale when it is forced to defend its basic conditions of existence, as the Polish workers have shown on several memorable occa­sions. The class war is a serious business because it is a matter of life or death for the proletariat.

As the crisis wipes away the last illusion that we are living in a consumer society whose abun­dant wealth could fall into our hands at the drop of a situationist hat, it becomes clear that the choice capitalism is offering us isn't socialism or boredom, but socialism or barbarism. Tomorrow's revolutionary struggle will, in its methods and its goals, go far beyond the revolutionary movements of 1917-23; but it will lose none of the seriousness and heroism of those days. On the contrary, with the threat of nuclear annihilation hanging over us, even more will be at stake. All this leads us to the con­clusion that today's revolutionaries must have a sense of their own responsibilities. As the class war hots up, it will become apparent that the only ‘authentic' way to live your life today is to declare total war on capitalism, and that this individual need corresponds to the pro­letariat's collective need for its revolutionary elements to organize themselves and intervene in the most effective manner possible. And as more and more revolutionaries are generated directly from the class struggle, from the heart of the industrial proletariat, this link between individual and collective needs will not be such a mystery as it is to many of today's libertarians and spontaneists.

As a matter of fact, the bankruptcy of the spontaneists was already apparent during the reflux which followed the first wave of international class struggle. The majority of the councilist and modernist currents that flourished at the beginning of the decade -- ICO, the Situationist International, GLAT, Combate, Mouvement Commu­niste, and many others -- simply disappeared: this after all was the logical consequence of their anti-organizational theories. Among the groups that were able to survive the period of reflux the majority have been those who, even if from differing standpoints, took the question of organization seriously: The ICC, CWO, Bat­taglia, the Bordigists, etc. In today's condi­tions, it is a major accomplishment for a revo­lutionary group simply to survive, so great are the pressures of isolation and of the dominant ideology. In fact, it is absolutely crucial that revolutionary groups show a capacity to keep going through difficult periods; otherwise they will never be able to act as a pole of reference and regroupment when the conditions of the class struggle become more favorable.

But if the reflux already reveals the inade­quacy of the spontaneists' ideas and practice, then the resurgence of class struggle is going to complete the rout. The Polish events are the most eloquent example of this so far.

The necessity for a revolutionary organization

No one could look at the recent mass strikes in Poland without being struck by the profoundly contradictory elements in the class conscious­ness of the workers. On the one hand, the Po­lish workers showed that they saw themselves as a class because they put class solidarity above the immediate concerns of this or that group of workers and because they saw their employer, the Polish state, as a force completely alien to them and not worthy of one iota of trust or res­pect. They showed that they had a clear grasp of the basic principles of workers' democracy in the way they organized their assemblies and strike committees. They showed that they under­stood the need to move from the economic terrain to the political terrain by raising political demands and by facing up to the whole state ap­paratus. And yet at the same time their aware­ness of themselves as a class was severely ham­pered by their tendency to define themselves as Poles or as Catholics; their rejection of the state was compromised by their illusions in re­forming it; their capacity for self-organization was diverted into the dangerous illusion of the ‘independent' trade unions. These ideological weaknesses are, of course, no justification for underestimating the strength and significance of the strikes. As we pointed out in IR 23, in the 1905 revolution workers who one minute were marching behind Father Gapon and carrying pictures of the Tsar were the next minute bran­dishing the red flags of the social democracy. But we mustn't forget that one of the factors which enabled the workers to make this transi­tion so quickly in 1905 was precisely the pre­sence of a revolutionary Marxist party within the working class. Such sudden leaps in poli­tical consciousness will be harder for the wor­king class today, above all in the Russian bloc, because the Stalinist counter-revolution has virtually annihilated the communist movement.

Nevertheless, the movement in Poland has inevitably given rise to groups of workers who are more intransigent in their hostility to the state, less impressed by appeals to patriotism and the national interest, more prepared to raise the stakes of the whole movement. It's workers like these who booed Walesa when he announced the agreements at the end of the August strike, shouting ‘Walesa, you've sold us out'. It's workers like these who, even after the ‘great victory' of the establishment of the Solidarity union -- which was supposedly enough to make everyone return contentedly to work for the national economy -- have been pres­sing for the new union structures to detach themselves completely from the state (a mark of combativity, even if the goal itself is il­lusory). It's workers like these who, with or without the ‘blessing' of Solidarity, have con­tinued to shake the national economy with wild­cat strike actions. No doubt these are the sort of workers referred to recently by a Catholic deputy to the Polish Diet as "extremists of one kind or the other, who are objectively forming a sort of alliance against the forces of dia­logue" (Le Monde, 23 November).

It's from the ranks of workers like these that we will see, with equal inevitability, the appearance of workers' groups, ‘extremist' publi­cations, political discussion circles, and organizations which, in however confused a manner, attempt to reappropriate the genuine acquisitions of revolutionary Marxism. And, unless you are a spontaneist of the most rigid and dogmatic kind, it's not hard to see what function this proletarian avant-garde will be called on to play: It will have to try to point out, to the rest of the workers, the contradictions between the radical things that they are doing in prac­tice, and the conservative ideas which they still have in their heads, ideas which can only hold back the future development of their movement.

If this avant-garde is able to become clearer and clearer about the real meaning of the Polish workers' struggle; if it is able to understand the necessity to wage a political combat against the nationalist, trade unionist, religious, and other illusions which exist in the class; if it sees why the struggle has to became internatio­nal and revolutionary in scope; and, if, at the same time, it is able to effectively organize itself and disseminate its positions, then the entire movement will be able to make gigantic steps towards the revolutionary future. On the other hand, without the intervention of such a political minority, the Polish workers will be dangerously vulnerable to the pressures of bour­geois ideology, politically disarmed in the face of a merciless opponent.

In other words: the development of the struggle itself demonstrates that there is a crying need for an organization of revolutionaries based on a clear communist platform. The working class will not be able to achieve the level of poli­tical maturity required by the sheer scale of the struggle unless it gives birth to prole­tarian political organizations. The spontaneists who claim that the workers will develop a revo­lutionary consciousness without revolutionary organizations forget the simple fact that revo­lutionary organizations are a ‘spontaneous' pro­duct of the proletariat's efforts to break the stranglehold of bourgeois ideology and work out a revolutionary alternative.

Neither can the spontaneists get away with ma­king a facile contrast between ‘autonomous struggles' and the intervention of a political organization. The fact is that the movement can only remain autonomous -- ie independent of the bourgeoisie and its state -- if it is politically clear about what it wants and where it's going. As the events at the end of the August strike showed, the best organized, most democratic forms of working class organization will not be able to sustain themselves if they are confused about such vital issues as trade unionism: The more the MKS became dominated by trade unionist conceptions, the more it be­gan to slip out of the workers' hands. And the mass organizations of the class won't be able to transcend such confusions if there is no communist minority fighting inside them, exposing the maneuvers of the bourgeoisie and all its agents, and tracing a clear perspective for the movement. The revolutionary organization is the best defender of workers' autonomy.

The structure of the revolutionary organization

If the Polish events emphasize that the revolu­tionary organization is an indispensable element of proletarian autonomy, they also help to cla­rify what form such an organization must take. The workers in Poland, like many other sectors of the class in capital's weakest links (Peru, Korea, Egypt, etc.) have been compelled to launch themselves into mass struggles against the state whilst cruelly isolated from the revolutionary currents that do at least have a limited exis­tence in the main countries of the industrialized west. The political isolation of such major class movements surely proves the utter folly of trying to limit revolutionary organizations to a local level -- to the scale of a particular city or country. And yet many libertarian and spontaneist groups actually theorize such local limitations in the name of federalism or ‘auto­nomous' organization. Thus, while the Polish workers were confronting the Stalinist monolith, and the revolutionary organizations, which exist mainly in western Europe and North America, were forced to accept the role of supporters from afar, unable to participate directly in the movement, the up-holders of federalism could, logically, only consider this mutual isolation to be a good thing! We can thus see how loca­lism is a barrier to the development of workers' autonomy: Because if the revolutionary move­ment where it is strongest doesn't understand the necessity to create an international pole of regroupment, of political clarity, how is it going to be any use to groups of radicalized workers in the eastern bloc or the third world, to those who are seeking to overcome the present ideological weaknesses of the class struggle in these regions? Are we to condemn those workers to ‘find it all out for themselves', to repeat all the past mistakes of our class, without trying to help them, without seeking to accelerate their political development? What would be the meaning of class solidarity if we made no effort to help revolutionary ideas break through capitalism's innumerable iron curtains?

And if the organization of revolutionaries is to be created on an international scale, it must also be centralized. By creating the Inter‑Factory Strike Committee, the Polish workers have shown that not only is centralization the only way to effectively organize and unite the class struggle, it's also entirely compatible with the most thorough-going workers' democracy. If the Polish workers understand this, why is it such a problem for many of today's revolutionaries, for those comrades who run away in ter­ror from the very word centralization, and think that federalism or an aggregate of ‘autonomous' grouplets is the true proletarian manner of organizing? How strange that ‘councilists' should be so scared of centralization, when the workers' councils, as well as the MKS, simply express the workers' understanding that you've got to centralize all the local factory assemblies and com­mittees into a single, unified body! While it's true that a revolutionary organization can't be an exact model of the councils, its basic prin­ciples of organization -- centralization, elec­tion and revocability of central organs, etc -- are the same.

Some councilists or semi-councilists might put up a last ditch defense here. They might agree that you need a revolutionary organization; that it must be international; even that it must be centralized. But they draw the line at ever wanting to describe such a body as a party. In the latest issue of Jeune Taupe! (n.33, p.19), the PIC for example informs us that they've written a 100-150 page pamphlet which shows that "the concept of the party is connected to the process of the bourgeois revolution and must therefore be rejected by revolutionaries". But, in the same issue (p.4), they say that revolutionary intervention "isn't simply being ‘among the workers'; it means making known one's positions and proposing actions which will advance the political clarification of the whole movement". As far as we're concerned, if one day we're fortunate enough to have an interna­tional communist organization that can ‘make our positions known' to millions of workers in all the major centers of capitalism; an organization that can ‘propose actions' that will actually be taken up and carried out by large numbers of workers -- then, in our vocabulary, which is perhaps more modest than 150 pages on this particular point, we will be talking about an international communist party. The PIC might prefer to call it something else, but who will be interested in such semantic discussions in the middle of the revolutionary civil war?

The contradictions of substitutionism

Thus far, various currents in the revolutionary movement might agree with our criticisms of the spontaneists. But this won't be enough to con­vince them that they have much in common with the ICC. For groups like the CWO, GCI, Battaglia, etc, the ICC is in no position to attack the councilists because it too is fundamentally councilist; because, while ‘formally' admitting the need for a party, we reduce the role of the party to a purely propagandist role. Thus, the GCI says that "While communists have from the very beginning always tried to assume all the tasks of the struggle, to take an active part in all areas of political combat... the ICC considers that it has only one task for itself: propaganda" (Rupture Avec le CCI, p.5).

And, later on (p.11), the GCI quotes Marx against us, when he said that "the task of the Interna­tional is to organize and co-ordinate the wor­kers' forces for the combats which await them". The International, said Marx, is the "central organ" for the international action of the wor­kers. Thus, the GCI and other groups consider that we really are councilists underneath, be­cause we insist that the task of the revolutio­nary organization in not to organize the working class.

It's not accidental that the GCI should try to confront our position on the party with that of Marx. For them, little has changed since the 19th century. For us, the onset of capita­list decadence has not only altered communists' approach to ‘strategic' questions like the trade unions or national liberation struggles; it has also made it necessary to reappraise the whole relationship between party and class. The chan­ging conditions of the class struggle have made it impossible to hold onto many of the previous conceptions that revolutionaries had about their own role and function. In the 19th century, the working class could be permanently organized in mass organizations like trade unions and social democratic parties. The political parties acted as the ‘organizers' of the class to the extent that they could, on a day-to-day basis, impulse the formation of trade unions and other broad workers' organizations (the First International was in fact partly made up of trade union bodies). Because of their close links to these organizations, they could plan, prepare, and initiate strikes and other mass actions. Because the parties of the class still operated within the logic of parliamentarism, and because they saw themselves as the only specifically political organs of the working class, it was also under­standable that these parties should conceive of themselves as the organizations through which the working class would eventually seize political power. According to this conception, the party was indeed the "central organ", the military headquarters of the entire proletarian movement.

This is not the place to go into a detailed des­cription of how the new conditions of class struggle which emerged in the 20th century showed these views to be obsolete. In her pamphlet The Mass Strike, Rosa Luxemburg showed that, in the new period, class movements could not be switched on and off through directives from the party central committee. In decadence, the class struggle exploded in an unforeseen, unpredicta­ble manner:

"If the Russian revolution (of 1905) teaches us anything, it teaches above all that the mass strike is not artificially ‘made', not ‘decided' at random, not ‘propagated' but that it is a historical phenomenon which, at a given moment, results from social con­ditions with historical inevitability... If anyone were to undertake to make the mass strike generally, as a form of prole­tarian action, the object of methodical agitation, and go house-to-house canvassing with this ‘idea' in order to gradually win the working class to it, it would be as idle and profitless and absurd an occupation as it would be to seek to make the idea of the revolution or of the fight at the bar­ricades the object of special agitation". (Mass Strike)

Other revolutionaries noted the significance of the soviets that emerged in the revolutions of 1905 and 1917: as organs of working class poli­tical power, they effectively made redundant the idea of the party taking and holding power.

Of course, this understanding did not develop among revolutionaries in a homogeneous manner: on the contrary, the Communist Parties that were built during the 1917-23 revolutionary wave still retained many of the old social democratic con­ceptions of the party as the organizer of the class struggle and of the proletarian dictator­ship. And the more the revolutionary wave lost its momentum, the more the life of the class ceased to express itself in the soviets, the more these social democratic hangovers infested the revolutionary vanguard. In Russia in par­ticular, the identification of the party with the proletarian dictatorship became an added factor in the degeneration of the revolution.

Today, as we emerge from a long period of coun­ter-revolution, the communist movement still has an extremely uneven understanding of these problems. One of the reasons for this is that, while we've had fifty years or more to under­stand the nature of the trade unions or of national liberation struggles, the whole of this century doesn't provide us with anything like the same amount of experience concerning the relationship between party and class. For most of this century, the working class has not had a political party at all. Thus, when the ICC tries to convince the ‘partyist' groups that it's necessary to examine the role of the party in the light of new historical circums­tances, when we tell them that revolutionaries can no longer see themselves as the organizers of the class, they put this down to some lack of will on our part, some neurotic fear of vio­lating the pure, virginal spontaneity of the proletariat. The real issue we are posing is invariably missed in their polemics: That it is not the mere will of revolutionaries, which make it impossible for them to be the "cen­tral organ" of the working class, but the his­torical, structural, and irreversible changes that have taken place in the life of capitalism. But rather than trying to show this on an ab­stract level, let's see how the events in Po­land have demonstrated in practice what a revo­lutionary organization cannot do, as well as what it can and must do if it is to live up to its responsibilities.

Poland: A classic example of the mass strike

Perhaps more than any struggle since the last revolutionary wave, the recent strikes in Poland provide an exemplary model of the phenomenon of the mass strike. They blew up suddenly, unex­pectedly; they spread like wildfire; they gave rise to autonomous forms of class organization; they soon compelled the workers to deal with the political consequences of their economic strug­gle; they tended to unite the workers as a class, across all corporatist divisions, and against the whole bourgeois order. How does this enable us to understand the role of revolutionaries in today's struggle?

To begin with, it shows that the great class mo­vements of today can no longer be planned and prepared in advance (at least not until the class is already beginning to organize itself in an explicitly revolutionary manner). The condi­tions for mass strikes mature almost imperceptibly in the depths of society: Although they generally arise in response to a particular at­tack by the ruling class, it is impossible to predict with any accuracy which attack is like­ly to provide a mass response.

Most revolutionary groups today would agree that the class no longer has any permanent mass organizations to prepare the struggle in advance, but they still talk about the material, techni­cal or organizational preparation of struggles being carried out by a combative minority, or by groups of communists in the factories. This is a favorite theme of the GCI, for example.

But what kind of material preparations could a handful of communists or workers' groups make for a movement on the scale of the summer strike wave in Poland? It would be ridiculous to ima­gine them collecting a few tins of cash for a strike fund, or drawing maps to show the workers the quickest routes across town when they want to call the other factories out on strike. It would be equally absurd to envisage groups of revolutionaries thinking up precise lists of economic demands that might prove attractive to the workers and encourage them to enter into a mass strike: As Luxemburg said, you can't win the workers to the ‘idea' of the mass strike through "methodical agitation".

Without organizations that already involve mas­ses of workers, all such ‘material' preparations will have the same farcical character. But, as the Polish events show, these organizations can only be created by the struggle itself. This doesn't mean that revolutionaries, in the fac­tories or outside, can do nothing until the struggle breaks out on a massive scale. But it does mean that the only serious preparation they can undertake is essentially a political prepa­ration: Encouraging the most combative workers from different factories to come together and discuss the lessons of the past struggle and the perspective for the next one; propagating the most effective forms and methods of the struggle, demonstrating the need to see the struggle in one factory or city as part of a historic, world-wide struggle, and so on.

On the specific question of economic demands, of the immediate goals of the struggle, the Polish strikes demonstrate that, like the organizational forms of the struggle, immediate demands are also the product of the struggle itself, and closely follow its general evolution. The Polish workers showed that they were quite capable of deciding what economic demands to raise, what sort of demands would be an effec­tive response to the bourgeoisie's offensive, what demands would best serve to unify and extend the movement. Faced with the government's price rises, they simply assembled together and drew up lists of demands based on very elementa­ry class principles: Withdraw the price rises, or give us wage increases to compensate for them. As the struggles developed, the demands were posed in a more systematic manner: The MKS in Gdansk published articles advising wor­kers on what demands to raise and how to con­duct strikes. For example, they advised wor­kers to demand flat-rate wage increases rather than percentage increases and to insist that "the rate should be made uniform, simple and easily understood by all" (Solidarnosc n.3, quoted in Solidarity n.14). But at the same time, the more the struggle broadened out, the more it took on a social and political dimen­sion, the less important became the immediate demands themselves. Thus, the Silesian miners simply announced that they would be fighting for "the demands of Gdansk" without further ado. At such moments, the struggle itself be­gins to go beyond the goals which it has con­sciously posed. This only emphasizes the fact that it would be ridiculous for revolutionaries in such circumstances to try to limit the aims of the struggle in advance by presenting a fixed list of economic demands for the workers to take up. Revolutionaries will certainly take part in the formulation of economic demands by workers' assemblies, but they also have to in­sist on the sovereignty of the assemblies in finally deciding what demands to make. This is not out of any abstract respect for democracy, but because the whole process of raising demands -- and going beyond them -- is nothing but the self-education of the workers in struggle.

The demands raised during the Polish strikes il­lustrate another feature of the class struggle in this epoch: The way it passes very quickly from the economic to the political terrain. Contrary to what many of our ‘partyists' claim, the immediate struggles of the class aren't ‘merely economic', only assuming a political character thanks to the mediation of the party. In Workers' Voice n.1 (new series) the CWO chide Rosa Luxemburg for her alleged underestimation of the role of the party, which, they say, was based on a misunderstanding of the relationship between political and economic struggles:

"Her worship of this ‘spontaneity' led her to say that the economic and the political strike were the same thing. She did not realize that, though the economic strike is the breeding ground of the political strike, this does not lead automatically to the overthrow of capitalism without a conscious decision by the workers".

Rosa Luxemburg had a better grasp of dialectics than the CWO, it seems. She did not say that the economic strike and the political strike were the same thing, nor that the political strike meant the automatic overthrow of capitalism, nor that capitalism could be overthrown "without a conscious decision by the workers", or, for that matter, without the intervention of a revolutio­nary party, as the CWO themselves admit when they quote Luxemburg's position on the role of revolutionaries on the very same page as the above quotation. What Luxemburg did say was that the class struggle, especially in this epoch, is not a rigid series of ‘stages', but a single, dynamic, dialectical movement:

"Political and economic strikes, mass stri­kes and partial strikes, demonstrative stri­kes and fighting strikes, general strikes of individual branches and general strikes of individual towns, peaceful wage struggles and street massacres, barricades fighting -- all these run through one another, run side by side, cross one another, flow in and over one another -- it is a ceaselessly moving, changing sea of phenomena" (Mass Strike)

What's more, it is pointless to try to separate out each phase of this process:

"If the sophisticated theory proposes to make a clever logical dissection of the mass strike for the purpose of getting at the ‘purely political mass strike', it will by this dissection, as with any other, not perceive the phenomenon in its living es­sence, but will kill it all together" (ibid)

The class struggle, as Marx pointed out, is al­ways a political struggle; but, under the conditions of decadence, of state capitalism, the movement from economic to political strikes is far more rapid, since every serious workers' struggle is compelled to confront the state. In Poland, the workers were clearly aware of the political character of their struggle, both because they insisted on going over the heads of local managers and negotiating with the real manager of the economy, the state; and because they more and more realized that their struggle could only advance by raising political demands and challenging the existing organization of political power.

It's true that most -- though not all -- of the political demands raised by the Polish workers were extremely confused, based on illusions about reforming the capitalist state. It's true that this underlines the necessity for the intervention of a communist minority that can explain the difference between proletarian demands (whether economic or political) and demands that can only lead the struggle off the rails. But none of this alters the fact that even without the intervention of the party, the working class can raise its struggles to the political level. It is this very fact which will make workers more and more receptive to revolutionary ideas. Only when the workers are already talking and thinking politically can the revolutionary minority hope to have a direct impact on the struggle.

Workers' self-organization or ‘organizing the class'?

"The rigid, mechanical-bureaucratic con­ception cannot conceive of the struggle save as the product of organization at a certain stage of its strength. On the con­trary the living dialectical explanation makes the organization arise as a product of the struggle. We have already seen a grandiose example of this phenomenon in Russia, where a proletariat almost wholly unorganized created a comprehensive network of organizational appendages in a year and a half of stormy revolutionary struggle". (The Mass Strike)

Again Luxemburg's words apply almost perfectly to the recent strikes in Poland. Just as in Russia in 1905 -- where the ‘unorganized' character of the proletariat was less an expression of the backwardness of Russian conditions than a harbinger of the situation that awaited the entire proletariat in the emerging epoch of sta­te capitalism -- the Polish workers entered into struggle without any prior organization. But, without any revolutionary vanguard telling them what to do or providing them with ready-made organizational structures, they showed a formida­ble capacity to organize themselves in mass as­semblies, factory strike committees, inter-fac­tory strike committees, workers' defense guards...

As a matter of fact, the self-organization of the Polish workers showed that, in many respects, they have assimilated the lessons of decadence in a more thorough-going way than many of our super-partyists. The GCI, for example, while acknowledging that the inter-factory strike committees were a real gain of the movement, refrained from drawing the logical conclusion from this. When the ICC says that mass assem­blies, strike committees and councils are the form of unitary organization for the proletariat in this epoch, the GCI accuses us of formalism -- and, as we have seen, it takes its ‘anti-for­malism' to the point of flirting with the idea that, maybe, ‘free trade unions' could be real workers' organs. Why then doesn't the GCI criticize the Polish workers for ‘formalistically' creating mass assemblies, elected and revocable delegates, centralized strike committees? The fact is that, while the GCI might want to leave room for some new, mysterious form of class organization, the Polish workers have shown that the form of the assemblies, strike committees, and councils is the most simple, effective, uni­fying, democratic form for the organization of the class struggle in this epoch. There's no mystery here, only the admirable simplicity of a class that requires practical answers to practical problems.

Unlike the GCI, the CWO hasn't forgotten that capitalism is a decadent system and that the old forms of ‘workers associationism' are no longer useful. In WV n.1 they show that they have certainly understood the importance of the mass assemblies, the strike committees, and the soviet form. In their article on Poland, they say that "The way in which they linked up strike committees in Gdansk to form one unifying body representing over 200 factories, and their re­fusal to go on accepting the costs of the capi­talist crisis makes the Polish workers the van­guard of the world working class". And they also include a long article celebrating the 75th anniversary of the first soviet, pointing out that the workers' democracy of the soviet form is qualitatively superior to the ‘demo­cracy' of bourgeois parliamentary institutions:

"There is no doubt that the most important difference with capitalist democracy is the idea of ‘delegation'. This idea was first used by the class in the Paris Commune of 1871 and allows workers to recall their re­presentatives at any time (Instead of wai­ting 5 years before the next election). Also the delegate is not a free agent as MPs are. When a workers' delegate speaks and votes on any issue he cannot say just what he feels like at that time. He votes on the basis of the orders of the workers who elected him. If he fails to carry out their wishes he can be instantly removed..."

The CWO concludes that the soviet system "proved in practice to all doubters that workers can rule for themselves". Later on they even attack ‘partyism', the social democratic (and, accor­ding to them, Bordigist) idea that "all the re­volution needs is a general to plan the campaign and the working class will follow the lead". They insist that "revolutions cannot be neatly organized just when and where the ‘partyists' wish it and first of all there must exist a political situation and living conditions which bring masses of people into open revolt".

As a matter of fact, the CWO exaggerates when it attributes views as crude as this to the Bordigists. But it is nevertheless a positive sign that they should be so enthusiastic about defending the forms of workers' democracy crea­ted by the class both in the past and the present. But when they try to combine this enthusiasm with their firmly-held idea that the party must organize the class and take power on its behalf, they get themselves into all kinds of contradictions. Thus, on the one hand they clearly show how the Polish workers ‘spontaneously' created the inter-factory strike committees (ie, without the intervention of a revolutionary party). But at the same time, they feel compelled to argue that the 1905 Soviet -- which was at its inception an inter-factory strike committee - wasn't created spon­taneously but was actually "produced" by the party. How do they attempt to show this, when elsewhere they admit that the Bolsheviks ini­tially "dismissed the Soviet as a mere trade union body"? Mainly by carefully editing a quo­te from Trotsky and taking it out of context. According to the CWO, Trotsky argued that the soviet didn't emerge spontaneously but "was in fact a product of the existing divisions in the Social Democratic Party, between Bolshe­vik and Menshevik factions. As Trotsky tells us in 1905, the Party produced the Soviet".

What Trotsky does in fact say was that the divi­sions between the social democratic factions "rendered the creation of a non-party organization absolutely essential". But Trotsky doesn't say that, because such a body was essential, it could be produced by the party at will. In fact the divided nature of the party made it less able to play a vanguard role in these events; and in any case, if there had not been hundreds of thousands of workers already forming factory committees, already tending towards the centralization of their various strike movements, the party wouldn't have been able to contribute any­thing to the creation of the soviets. The CWO also forget this when they point out that the "Mensheviks took the initiative to call the Soviet which began with only 30 or 40 delegates representing no more than a few thousand workers". ‘Calling for' a soviet isn't the same as ‘pro­ducing' it. The Mensheviks and other revolu­tionaries certainly took an admirable initia­tive when they actively called for the formation of a central strike committee, but no one would have listened to them if they hadn't been rela­ting to a powerful class movement that was al­ready surging forward.

"When the strike wave spread from Moscow to St Petersburg on October 11, the workers spontaneously reached out for concerted action. Deputies (starosti) were elected in several factories, including the Putilov and Obukhov works; a number of deputies had earlier been members of strike committees... On October 10 a session of the Menshevik ‘Group' (of St Petersburg) proposed founding a city-wide ‘workers committee' to lead the general strike, and to begin propaganda for its election. Next day about fifty agi­tators began circulating among workers an appeal proposing election of one deputy for each 500 workers..." (O. Anweiler, The Soviets, p.45)

The Mensheviks' intervention -- in this case the Mensheviks were well in advance of the Bolshe­viks -- is a good example of how a revolutionary organization can accelerate and push forward the self-organization of the class. But it al­so shows that soviet organizations aren't ‘pro­duced' by parties in any meaningful sense of the term. In claiming this the CWO ignore their own insistence that "first of all there must exist a political situation and living conditions which bring masses of people into open revolt". If the workers aren't already tending to create their own organizations in the heat of the strug­gle, then the revolutionaries' appeals for au­tonomous and centralized forms of organization will fall on deaf ears; and if the revolutiona­ries try to substitute themselves for the real movement by artificially setting up alternative structures of various kinds (eg party combat units or self-proclaimed workers' committees) they will either make fools of themselves or turn themselves into a dangerous obstacle to the development of class consciousness.

The contradictions of the CWO's position can also be seen when we dig below the surface of their distinctions between delegation and re­presentation. We agree that proletarian dele­gation is quite different from capitalist ‘re­presentation'. But why don't the CWO draw the logical conclusion from this: That in the so­viet system, where all delegates are subject to instant recall, there can be no question of the workers electing the party to power, because this is precisely the manner in which bourgeois parliaments operate? As yet we've seen no statements by the CWO that they've changed their position on the party taking power. Instead, writing about the Polish strikes, they say that we can learn a lot from Walesa and other free trade union activists (ie, militants who defen­ded a bourgeois political orientation) because they knew how to implant themselves in the class and ‘control' the struggle.

"Walesa's political friends controlled the struggle until its ‘victory' because they had the confidence and support of the wor­kers -- a confidence which had been built up in ten years of sacrifice and struggle. This minority achieved a presence in the working class. In its actions (though clear­ly not in its politics) there are lessons for communists to follow."

This is an extremely dangerous argument, and it smacks of the Trotskyist idea that the problem facing the working class is that it has a ‘bour­geois leadership', and that all that's needed is to put a proletarian leadership in its place. In fact, for the proletariat, there can be no separation between means and ends, "actions" and "politics". In the case of Walesa, there is a clear connection between his political ideas and a tendency to separate himself off from the mass of the workers and become an ‘idol' of the movement (a process that the western press did everything they could to accelerate, of course). Similarly, one of the expressions of the politi­cal immaturity of the Polish workers was a cer­tain tendency, especially towards the end of the strike, to hand over decision-making to ‘experts' and to individual personalities like Walesa. The ‘leadership' given by a communist minority, on the other hand, cannot obey the same logic. Communist intervention doesn't aim at ‘control­ling' the mass organs of the class, but at en­couraging the workers to take all power into their own hands, to abandon any idea of putting their faith in "saviors from on high" (to quote the ‘Internationale'). There is no contradic­tion between this and ‘winning the workers to the communist program', because the communist program, in its essence, means the working class assuming conscious mastery over the so­cial forces it has itself created.

Class consciousness and the role of revolutionaries

"The materialist doctrine that men are pro­ducts of circumstance and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of other circumstances and changed upbrin­ging, forgets that it is men that change circumstances and that the educator him­self needs educating. Hence this doctrine necessarily arrives at dividing society into two parts, of which one is superior to society (in Robert Owen, for example). The coincidence of the changing of circum­stances and of human activity can be con­ceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice." (Marx, Theses on Feuerbach)

The Kautskyist theory that socialist class con­sciousness is not produced by the class struggle, but is imported into the class from ‘outside', underlies all the substitutionist conceptions that we have criticized in this article. Although only some of the ‘partyist' groups, like Batta­glia Communista, explicitly defend this thesis, the others are constantly slipping into it be­cause they don't have a clear theory of class consciousness to set against it. All those who argue that the working class is too alienated to become aware of itself without the ‘external' mediation of the party forget that "the educators need educating" -- that revolutionaries are part of the class and therefore subject to the same alienations. They forget too that it is precisely because the proletariat suffers from alie­nation in its capitalist form that it is a communist class, a class capable of giving birth to a communist party and of moving towards a clear, unmystified, and unified view of the world. We cannot enter here into a long discussion of these difficult questions. But one re­levant example of how the latter-day heirs of Kautsky "arrive at dividing society into two parts, of which one is superior to society" is the way in which they see the ‘spontaneous' movement of the class, that is to say any move­ment not led by the party, as an essentially unconscious movement.

Battaglia once expressed this clearly when they said that, without the party, you can talk about "class instinct", but not "class consciousness" (cf ‘Class and Consciousness', Prometeo n.1, 1978). Thus, the spontaneous movement of the class is no more than brute instinct; a blind natural force that needs the party to be its brain; and without an ego. Such conceptions allow for the class to be prodded into action by material circumstances, like the salivating dog in Pavlov's experiments. They may even admit that such spontaneous reactions can give rise to a certain level of self-organization. But without the party, they insist, such move­ments cannot become truly self-aware: Like animals, the workers cannot have a memory or a vision of the future. They are condemned to live in the immediate present because the par­ty is their memory, their consciousness.

Once again, the Polish workers have given the lie to such theories. As we wrote in IR 23, "The party is not the sole repository of class consciousness as all the self-pro­claimed Leninist epigones claim. It's neither infallible, nor invulnerable. The whole history of the workers' movement is there to prove it. And history also proves that the class as a whole accumula­tes experiences and assimilates them di­rectly. The recent formidable movement of the working class in Poland showed its remarkable capacity to accumulate and as­similate its experience of ‘70 and ‘76 and to go beyond them, and this despite the cruelly-felt absence of a party" (‘The Party Disfigured; The Bordigist Conception').

The Polish workers showed that the class does indeed have a memory. They remembered the expe­rience of past struggles and drew the appropri­ate lessons. The workers of Lublin, like the URSUS tractor-plant workers in 1976, tore up the railway tracks because they remembered that, in 1970, troops had been sent by rail to crush the workers' uprising. The workers remembered that the 1970 and ‘76 movements had been vulnerable to repression because they were isolated from each other, so they spread their strikes as wi­dely as possible and coordinated them by linking up strike committees. They remembered that, each time they rose up against the state, the government had tried to placate them by dumping the current ruling clique and replacing it with a more ‘popular' and ‘liberal' set of bureau­crats. But having seen how the ‘liberal' Gomulka of 1956 became the ‘hardline' Gomulka of 1970, and how the ‘liberal' Gierek of 1970 became the ‘hardline' Gierek of 1980, the workers were not for one minute fooled by the latest series of purges in the government. Already in 1970, the Polish workers had been telling themselves the following joke:

Question: "What's the difference between Gomul­ka and Gierek?"

Answer: "Nothing, but Gierek doesn't know it yet".

In 1980, the workers' cynicism about everything the government does or says is even more deeply entrenched: Hence their attempts to ensure that the gains they made in the struggle would be imposed and safeguarded by force and not by putting any trust in the government.

But perhaps the surest proof of the workers' ability to assimilate the lessons of the past was shown in their attitude to the question of violence. They did not forget the experience of 1970, when hundreds of workers were killed while engaging in unplanned, uncoordinated con­frontations with the state. This didn't make them pacifists: They quickly organized workers' defense guards in the occupied factories. But they understood that the real strength of the class, its real self-defense, lies in its ca­pacity to organize and extend its struggle on a more massive scale. Here again the workers showed themselves to be more advanced than those ‘vanguard' groups who prattle on about workers' terrorism and condemn as ‘Kautskyist' the idea that class violence has to be under the control and direction of the mass organs of the class. The workers were prepared for violence, but they were not willing to be provoked into premature military confrontations, or allow isolated groups of workers to engage in desperate sorties against the police or the army. The fact that the Po­lish workers began to deal with the ‘military question' as an aspect of the general organization of the struggle augers well for the future: Because when the time does come to take on the state directly, the workers will be better pla­ced to so as a united, organized, conscious force.

This ‘proletarian memory' isn't transmitted genetically. The Polish workers were able to assimilate the experiences of the past because even in the absence of a revolutionary organization, there is still discussion and debate going on in the class, through hundreds of chan­nels, some more formal -- mass assemblies, wor­kers' discussion circles etc, others less for­mal -- discussions in factory canteens, in bars, in buses... And just as these channels ensure that the working class has a collective memory, they also allow the workers to develop a vision of the future -- and not only the future of a particular factory or industry, but the future of the entire country and even the entire pla­net. Thus the Polish workers simply couldn't avoid trying to understand the effect their strike would have on the national economy, on the future government of the country; they were compelled to discuss what Russia would do about the strikes, how Russia's reaction would be af­fected by their intervention in Afghanistan, how the west would respond, and so on. It's not the intervention of the party which obliges workers to look further afield than the factory gate and further ahead than the day after tomorrow: It's the historical movement of capitalist so­ciety as a whole.

But wait, cry our party-worshippers, if the working class is its own brain, what use is the party? This is only a real question for those whose thought is locked into dusty schemas, who see the class struggle as a series of fragmented stages that have no underlying connections.

Yes, the working class as a whole has its own memory. But the revolutionary organization constitutes a particular and crucial part of that memory. Only the revolutionary organization can offer a viewpoint which spans the whole of working class history, which makes it possible not just to link the Polish experien­ce of 1980 with the Polish experiences of 1956, ‘70 and ‘76, but to link all these experiences to the lessons of the 1917 revolution in Russia, to the experience that workers in the west have had of the so-called free trade union since 1914, to what Marx, Lenin, Bordiga, Pannekoek and other revolutionaries wrote about the facade of bour­geois democracy, and so on. Because revolutio­naries can offer a global view of the whole ca­pitalist system, they can also provide a realis­tic assessment of the balance of class forces at any time. Even more important, such a global view can help the workers to see that there can be no ‘national' solutions to the crisis, that the struggle must extend beyond national bor­ders if it is to survive and grow. In brief, revolutionaries alone can clearly point out the connection between today's struggle and tomor­row's revolution. Revolutionaries can't ‘in­ject' consciousness into the workers but they can offer answers to questions workers are al­ready beginning to pose, they can draw together all the different strands in the collective thought of the class and present the workers with a clear overall picture of the significan­ce and direction of their struggle.

The super-partyists will probably object: That sounds like mere ‘propagandism'. What are the ‘practical' tasks of the party? In posing such questions they forget Marx's dictum that "theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses" (Contribution to the Criti­que of Hegel's Philosophy of Right). In the heat of the class war, the workers become theo­reticians, and in doing so, they transform theo­ry into propaganda, propaganda into agitation, and agitation into action. In other words, the more the ideas of revolutionaries correspond to what the working class is doing in practice, the less abstract they become: What was yesterday a theoretical critique of bourgeois democracy can, in a revolutionary situation, become a prac­tical agitational slogan like ‘all power to the soviets'. And for the revolutionary organization, this is no ‘merely propagandist' activity in the sense of a pedantic repetition of general truths, issued from the sidelines of the strug­gle. The revolutionary organization must cons­tantly seek to make its general analyses more and more concrete, more and more connected to practical proposals for action; and it can on­ly do this if it is inside the struggle, if its members are in the frontline of the class move­ment, if they intervene in every expression of the proletariat's struggle, from the picket line to the central soviet.

And yet it is ironic that those who continually emphasize the fact that the class cannot be conscious without the party are the same ones who nearly always sneer at the idea that the central and specific task of the party is to deepen and extend the consciousness of the class. For them all this talk about the generalization of class consciousness is just mere ‘propagandism': For them what distinguish the revo­lutionary organization are its ‘practical, organizational' tasks.

When you ask them to be more specific about what this really means, they either answer with more generalities which no one could disagree with (‘the party must play a vanguard role in the soviets', ‘revolutionaries must be prepared to put themselves at the head of strikes', etc), or they come up with semi-terrorist fantasies about party combat groups stimulating the workers to fight back (when has this ever been the case in the history of the working class?). Or, even more ridiculous, they'll start telling you how one day the party is going to ‘have power' over the whole world.

The truth is that the working class doesn't need revolutionaries because they are good adminis­trators or specialists in blowing up bridges. Certainly, revolutionaries will have administra­tive and military tasks, but they can only carry out such tasks effectively if they do so as part of a vast proletarian movement, as members of the workers' councils or the workers' militia. The really precious, irreplaceable thing that revolutionaries have is their political clari­ty, their ability to synthesize the collective, historical experience of the class and return it to the proletariat in a form that can be rea­dily understood and used as a guide to action. Without this synthesis, there just won't be time for the working class to assimilate all the les­sons of past experience: It will be doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past, and thus to be defeated once again. Some revolutionaries may see this as a paltry task for the mighty revo­lutionary party: But the success or failure of the revolution will depend on the party's capacity to carry it out.

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

The struggle of the Polish workers is a foretaste of what lies in store for capitalism everywhere. Because the bourgeoisie will be compelled by the logic of the crisis to make increa­singly savage attack on the working class, and because the working class remains undefeated, there will be more Polands, not just in the third world and the eastern bloc but in the ma­jor countries of western imperialism. The out­come of such confrontations will determine the fate of humanity. If the working class is able to develop its organizational and political au­tonomy through these battles, if these struggles provide an opening for the intervention of revolutionaries, and an impetus towards the for­mation of an international communist party, then they will be rehearsals for the second proleta­rian revolution of the 20th century. If, on the other hand, the nightmares of the past weigh too heavily on the brains of the living, if the wor­kers are unable to see through the lies of the class enemy, if the proletariat remains isolated from its revolutionary vanguard, then these bat­tles will end in defeats that could open the door to the third world war. The one sure thing is that the working class cannot cut through the chains of alienation and oppression by appealing to any force outside itself. The revolutionary minority, as part of the class, will share the fate of the class, in defeat or in victory. And yet, because what they do now will be one of the factors determining whether our class wins or loses, an immense responsibility lies on the shoulders of today's revolutionaries. They can only live up to this responsibility if they free themselves both from dilettantism and megalomania, and learn to look reality in the face without illusions.

C.D.Ward

November 1980

The proletarian currents which escaped from the degeneration of the Communist International (CI) found themselves confronted with the enormous task of resisting the counter-rev­olutionary offensive on all levels -- political, theoretical, and organizational. This resist­ance had to take place in an atmosphere of almost total disorientation, one of the main sources of which was the errors of the CI itself, notably on the parliamentary and union questions. The working class' retreat from revolutionary activity didn't allow the debates on these questions to unfold in a positive manner. The critiques which the Italian, German and Dutch left communists made of the politics of the CI couldn't be really deepened. At the end of the 1920's, with Stalinism triumphant, the debate had to continue in the most difficult and complex conditions. Thus, concerning the union question, the evolution of the various branches of the internationalist communist opposition (the Italian left, council communists, the left opposition animated by Trotsky, etc) took place in a groping, uneven manner. In fact, the revolutionary movement faced a two-pronged problem as far as the evolution of the unions was concerned. On the one hand, it had to pose the union question in relation to the per­iod of decadence. On the other hand, it had to understand the effects of the counter-revolution on this question. It had to draw out all the political implications of the integration of the unions into the bourgeois order, while at the same time elaborating a critique of the CI's tactic of entering into the ‘reformist' unions in order to provoke splits that would lead to the emergence of real class unions controlled and led by revolutionaries.

The orientation within the Communist International

Ever since the formation of the Third Inter­national, the union question had been at the centre of a whole series of discussions and polemics. It was within the German revol­utionary movement that the problem was posed in the most urgent way, and it was the German revolutionaries who understood most clearly the need for a break not only with the trade unions, but also with ‘trade unionism'. At the founding congress of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), in late December 1918, ie in a pre-revolutionary moment, a majority tendency declared itself to be in favor of leaving the trade unions. Thus Paul Frolich said:

"We say as a matter of principle that the separation of the workers into political organizations and union organizations, once necessary, must now be finished with. For us, there can only be one slogan: ‘Leave the unions!'"

Rosa Luxemburg rejected this slogan, but only for tactical reasons:

"The trade unions are no longer workers' organizations, but the most reliable protectors of the bourgeois state and bourgeois society. It therefore goes without saying that the struggle for socialism inevitably calls for a struggle for the liquidation of the unions. We're all agreed on that point. But I have a different opinion on the way to go forward. I think the Hamburg comrades are wrong to call for the formation of unitary economic-political organizations (einheits-organi­sation), because, in my opinion, the tasks of the unions must be taken up by the workers' and soldiers' councils"(Congress of the Spartacus League, Ed. Spartacus, no.83B).

Unfortunately the leadership of the CI didn't see things so clearly -- on the contrary. While the CI denounced the unions dominated by the Social Democracy, it still had all sorts of illusions about wresting leadership of the unions out of its hands. Despite the critiques of the left -- especially the German left, which split from the KPD to form the Communist Workers Party of Germany (KAPD) -- the CI main­tained its erroneous position. In March 1920, in an ‘Address to the Unions in all Countries', after a summary analysis of the degeneration of the ‘old' reformist unions, the CI expl­ained:

"Will the unions return to the old, worn-out, reformist ie effectively bourgeois-habits? That is the decisive question now being posed to the international workers' movement. We are firmly convin­ced that this won't happen. A current of fresh air is sweeping through the stuffy structures of the old unions. A process of decantation has already begun. In one or two years, the old unions will be unrecognizable. The old bureaucrats of the trade union movement will be like generals without an army. The new epoch will produce a new generation of proletarian leaders in the renovated trade unions".

In the same Address, which was in fact aimed against the KAPD and its position of calling on workers to leave the unions and set up unitary factory organizations, Zinoviev made a travesty of the real situation of the trade unions in Europe:

"In a whole number of countries a power­ful process of decantation is going on in the unions. The wheat is being separated from the chaff. In Germany, where the unions are led by Legren and Noske, the main pillars of the bourgeois yellow trade union movement, a large number of trade unions are turning their backs on the yellow social democrats and are going over to the proletarian revolution. ...In Italy, almost without exception, the unions stand for soviet power. In the Scandinavian trade unions, the prol­etarian revolutionary current gets bigger every day. In France, Britain, America, Holland and Spain, the mass of trade union members are detaching themselves from the bourgeoisie and demanding new revolutionary methods".

Far from helping the Communist Parties to break from Social Democracy, this orientation, based on the illusion of a real ‘class unionism' actually meant following the same practices as the counter-revolution, albeit from the stand­point of competing with Social Democracy to gain control over the masses.

This orientation was a major obstacle against the possibility of deepening the union question inside the different organizations that made up the CI. The analysis of the nature of trade unions and trade unionism was often confused and contradictory, and this was further complicated by the influence of a number of currents coming out of the tradition of revolutionary syndicalism.

In February 1920, the International Conference in Amsterdam adopted the theses presented by Fraina, secretary of the Communist Party of America and an IWW militant. According to the theses,

"...11) The agitation for the construction of industrial unions will provide an immed­iate and practical way of mobilizing the militant spirit of discontent which is developing in the old unions, of waging the struggle against the corrupt bureau­cracy of the ‘labor aristocracy'. Industrial unionism also makes it possible to issue a call to action to the unqual­ified, unorganized workers, and to lib­erate the unqualified workers who are organized in the trade unions from the tutelage of the reactionary strata of the working class. The struggle for revolu­tionary industrial unionism is a factor in the development of communist under­standing and in the conquest of power."

This analysis took up the ambiguous theory of the ‘labor aristocracy', which was seen to be one of the bases for the conservative chara­cter of trade unionism. This led to the idea that craft unions were the reactionary form of trade unionism, and should be replaced by industrial unions. Although it tried to relate the evolution of the unions to imperialism and the tendency towards state capitalism, and attempted to emphasize the limits of unionism, this orientation ended up opposing one form of unionism without calling unionism itself into question:

".....5) The development of imperialism has definitively integrated the craft unions into capitalism...

".....8) The governmental expression of lab­orism is state capitalism, the fusion into the state of the capitalists, the petty bourgeoisie, and the upper strata of the working class which dominate the trade unions..

".....10) ...The struggle against this form of trade unionism (craft unionism) is therefore a an inseparable phase of the struggle against laborism, through

a) in a general way, the agitation of the communist party to push the unions to act in a more resolute way;

b) the encouragement of any movement in the unions which tends to break the hold of the bureaucracy and give control to the masses through directly mandated and revocable dele­gates;

c) the formation of organizations such as shop stewards' committees, workers' committees, workers' economic councils and the direct organizations of the communist party in the workshops, factories and mines - organizations which will not only push the masses and the unions towards more revolut­ionary forms of action, but which will also, at a moment of crisis, develop into soviets;

d) the attempt to transform craft unions into industrial unions, ie a form of unionism which corresponds to the economic integration of modern capitalism and inspired by the spirit of struggle for political power and economic domination". (ibid).

Some of these ideas were very close to the positions held by the German and Dutch left. They attempted to criticize and go beyond economism, reformism, and ‘apolitical' unio­nism, but they remained on the level of the form of organization. It wasn't understood that you could no longer create new, mass unitary organizations of a permanent char­acter. The idea was that you had to find organizational forms that would preserve the independence of the class and prepare the way for the formation of workers' councils. But such a view could by no means guarantee the proletariat's independence from the bourgeoisie, since it reduced the break with trade unionism to a question of forms of organization.

It was perhaps the Italian revolutionary Gramsci who -- in the name of criticizing trade unionism -- went furthest in developing an erroneous political line that would greatly contribute to disorientating the Italian working class in the 1920's. In an article published in his paper L'Ordine Nuovo, November 1919, Gramsci seems to develop a promising critique of trade unionism:

" The syndicalist theory has failed completely in the concrete experience of the proletarian revolutions. The unions have shown their organic inability to em­body the dictatorship of the proletariat. The normal development of the unions has been to move away from the revolutionary spirit of the masses...The spirit of conquest has weakened or completely disappeared, the vital élan has been broken, the ‘bread and butter' practices of opportunism have replaced the old heroic intransigence....Trade unionism can only be called revolutionary because there is the grammatical possibility of putting the two expressions together. Trade unionism has shown itself to be none other than a form of capitalist society and not a potential form for socialist society."

But behind this critique lay an inability to draw the lessons of the Russian revolution and understand the basis for the emergence of workers' councils. Far from seeing it as an organ of political power, a place where the working class could develop its consciousness, Gramsci considered the workers' council to be an organ of economic management. It was on these foundations that he erected his critique of the trade unions, and this critique wasn't deep enough to allow the workers to develop a real understanding of the function of the unions.

"The craft or industrial union, by group­ing together those in a particular craft or industry who use the same instruments or transform the same raw materials, helps to reinforce this psychology, to further prevent the workers from seeing them­selves as producers." (Ordine Nuovo 8/11/19).

This analysis of Gramsci ignored the question of the destruction of the bourgeois state and turned the factory and the proletariat into purely economic categories:

"The place where one works, where the producers live and work together, will tomorrow be the centers of the social organism and will replace the directing organs of contemporary society." (Ordine Nuovo, 13/9/19).

By remaining on the terrain of production and economic management, Gramsci's propaganda ended up by calling on the workers to safe­guard the economy, and thus to defend capit­alism:

"The workers want to put an end to this situation of disorder, of chaos, and ind­ustrial waste. The national economy is going to rack and ruin, the rate of exchange is soaring, production is decl­ining, the whole national apparatus of industrial and agricultural production is moving towards paralysis.... If the industrialists are no longer capable of administering the productive apparatus and making it produce at maximum output (and every day shows more and more clearly that they're not capable of doing this), then, to save society from bankruptcy and ruin, the workers will assume this task, conscious of the grave responsibility they are assuming; and they will explain this with their communist methods and systems, through their production councils." (L'Avanti, 21/11/19).

The fraction animated by Bordiga denounced this analysis:

"It's a grave error to believe that, by introducing into the contemporary prol­etarian milieu, among capitalism's wage-earners, formal structures which are thought to be the basis for communist management, you are developing forces that are intrinsically revolutionary. This was the error of the syndicalists and it's also the error of the over-zealous enthusiasts for the factory councils." (I1 Soviet, 1 February 1920, quoted in Programme Communiste, no.72)

However, the Italian left didn't explain why the new forms of unitary class organization had arisen in opposition to trade unions and trade unionism. Their correct criticism of solutions that restricted themselves to forms of organization left the door open to the Bordigist error, caricatured today by the PCI (Programme  Communiste), which sees all forms of class organization as one and the same and insists only on the dominant role of the party. Thus, in Il Soviet 21/9/19 it was claimed that "the soviets of tomorrow must have their source in the local sections of the communist party" (cited in Programme Communiste no.74, p.64). Against ouvrierism and factoryism, you had a party-fetishism which failed to make a materialist analysis of the declining phase of capitalism and its effects on the mode of class organization. Only such an analysis would have made it possible to understand the failure of the unions as proletarian organs and to see why the content of the ‘classical' trade unionism of the ascendant period had become obsolete in the epoch of "wars and revolutions", ie in the period of capitalist decadence.

In the years that followed, the debate which had unfolded in all the sections of the CI got bogged down. The general retreat of the working class in Europe, the defeats suffered by the German proletariat, the isolation of Russia, the crystallization of the CI's errors, its accelerating degeneration -- all this would add weight to the theory of defending the proletarian bastion, which led to com­promises and stifled the voice of the commun­ist left. Then, open opportunism gave way to a period which saw the direct liquidation of every revolutionary position and the death of the CI as an international proletarian organization. The unions controlled by the CI were the first forces used by the Stalinists in Europe to isolate those communists who had remained faithful to internationalism and the revolution, and to drag the working class back into submission to the capitalist state and nation.

Contradictions and limits of the analysis of the revolutionary milieu

Although he was expelled from the Bolshevik party by the Stalinist clique and exiled from Russia, Trotsky himself had a heavy respons­ibility for the orientations of the CI and the policies adopted by the Russian state, notably the repression of the Kronstadt strikes. Trotsky had supported Lenin against the "infantile disorder" of left communism. Faced with the degeneration of the CI and the counter-revolutionary policies of the Russian state, Trotsky didn't question the basis of the CI's policies. He didn't connect his struggle to the struggle of the left communists. This attitude expressed all the limits of Trotsky's opposition to the counter-revolutionary Stalinism. The whole orientation of the left opposition which gyrated around his personality was marked by the same weakness, ie an inability to under­stand and recognize the counter-revolutionary process in Russia itself.

1. Trotsky

Paradoxically, Trotsky approached the union question on two levels. In the early 1920's within the Bolshevik party in power, Trotsky defended the idea that the unions had to be integrated into the state, in contrast to Lenin who insisted that "our present State is such that the whole organized proletariat must defend itself against it. We must use these workers' organizations for defending the workers against their state".

What a clear confession by Lenin about the conservative character of the transitional state and about the need for the working class to preserve its independence vis-a-vis the state: But Lenin's position, like that of Kollantai's workers Opposition which called for a strengthening of the trade unions, was an illusory one and couldn't lead to a real understanding of the nature of the unions. The ultra-statist position was more ‘logical'. For Trotsky, the trade union was a state instrument par excellence and there he wasn't mistaken: Trotsky's error was on the question of the ‘proletarian' character of the state:

Concerning the intervention of revolutionaries in the unions, Trotsky defended the ‘official' analyses within the CI:

"The importance of the trade unions consists in the fact that they are mainly composed of elements who are not yet under the influence of the party. But it's obvious that there are different layers in the unions: layers that are quite conscious, layers that are conscious but retain various prejudices, layers that are still seeking to form their revolutionary consciousness. Who then is going to assume the task of leadership? ...Yes, we want to subordinate the consciousness of the working class to revolutionary ideas. That is our aim". (Report to the 4th World Congress, December 1922).

Once he was in the opposition and faced with the counter-revolution, Trotsky nuanced his analyses, or rather went beyond the simplistic propaganda of the early years of the CI. In a text written in September 1933, Trotsky put forward a much more lucid position on the union question:

"The trade unions appeared in the period of growing, ascendant capitalism. Their task was to raise the material and cult­ural level of the proletariat and extend its political rights. This work, which has been going on in Britain for over a century, has given the trade unions an immense authority within the proletariat. The decadence of British capitalism, in the context of the decline of the world capitalist system, has undermined the very basis for the reformist work of the trade unions... The role of the unions, as we said above, is no longer a progressive role but a reactionary one." (Trotsky, Oeuvres, T.11 EDI, p.178).

However, Trotsky stuck to the illusion that it was possible and necessary to work in these organs:

"It's precisely in the present period, when the reformist bureaucracy of the proletariat has been transformed into the economic police force of capital, that revolutionary work in the unions, carried out with intelligence and perseverance, can give decisive results in a relatively  short span of time." (ibid, our emphasis)

But at the same time, Trotsky advanced the perspective of a break with the unions:

"It is absolutely necessary right away to prepare the advanced workers with the idea of creating workshop committees and workers' councils at a moment of sudden crisis." (ibid).

But this vision remained abstract and didn't correspond to the experience of the workers' movement. In fact Trotsky reduced the question of the appearance of real organs of proletarian struggle to a simple matter of tactics, to be decided upon by the organization of revolut­ionaries. Trotsky's voluntarism hardly concealed a lack of confidence in the capac­ities of the class. Certainly, these capac­ities had begun to diminish by the end of the 1920's, but, just as with the question of the defense of Russia, Trotsky like many other revolutionaries was unable to see that the class had been defeated and the draw the necessary conclusions, both on the theoreti­cal and the organizational level.

2. The Italian Left: Bilan

The fraction of the Italian left grouped around the review Bilan put forward a very different perspective:

"To affirm that you're aiming to found new parties on the basis of the first four Congresses of the CI, is to tell history to march backwards for ten years; it will prevent you from understanding the events that took place after these Congresses; it means trying to place these new parties in a narrow historic framework that isn't their own. The framework for the new parties is already molded by the experience that has come from the exercise of proletarian power and by the whole experience of the world communist movement. In this work the first four Congresses are an element for study which must be subjected to the most intense critique." (Bilan, no.1, November 1933).

Understanding that the proletariat had suffered a political defeat, the Italian left envisaged the problem of the presence of revolutionaries in the trade unions solely from the standpoint of the defensive struggle. Since they considered that, for a whole period, there was no possibility of the emergence of revolutionary class organs of the council-type, Bilan saw that there was no room for the kind of activity that counted on such developments. Similarly, the collapse of the CI excluded the possibility of the reconstruct­ion of the international class party in the short term. For Bilan, therefore, it wasn't a question of elaborating a union strategy that would continue the orientation of ‘Lenin's' Comintern, but of preserving the capacity of the class to defend itself. But Bilan retained many illusions about the historic continuity of the unions:

"Even in the hands of the reformists, the unions remain, for us, the place where the workers must gather together, the soil for the upsurge of proletarian consciousness that will sweep aside the current rotten­ness.... If movements take place outside the unions, they must obviously be supp­orted." (Bilan, no.25, Nov-Dec. 1935)[1].

The Italian left, like Trotsky, remained prisoners of the erroneous analysis of the CI, and above all of a period in which it was difficult to draw all the conclusions from a revolutionary wave that had not reached its goals and had not clarified with sufficient sharpness the issue of breaking from trade unionism. Moreover, the triumph of the fascist, democratic and Stalinist counter­revolution didn't favor the development of theories based on the spontaneous capacity of the working class to organize itself, as shown by the appearance of workers' councils. The period served mainly to give evidence of the insufficiencies of revolutionaries, both in Germany during the revolutionary wave and in Russia where the proletariat had taken power. The decisive question of the party, its nature and function, was discussed much more and acted as a sort of screen which prevented the revolutionary fractions from taking a step back and having a more global view of what the revolutionary process had meant from the standpoint of the activity and consciousness of the proletariat as a whole. Without this overall view of how the class movement had begun to confront a decadent capitalism, it wasn't possible to clarify the union question.

3. The Council Communists

The council communists came up against the same barriers in their critique of trade unionism. This current, partly descended from the German and Dutch left, developed a scathing critique of ‘Leninism' which ended up questioning the class nature of the Russian revolution and calling it bourgeois. In fact, the councilist current returned to a series of ‘anti-party' prejudices borrowed from the anarchist and revolutionary syndic­alist tradition. Against parties and unions, the councilists advocated the power of the workers' councils, the only form of organization that could enable the class to acquire, by itself, a consciousness of its historic tasks and the capacity to carry them out. The critique of trade unionism thus consisted essentially of a critique of the union struct­ures, which didn't allow the working class to have a real life and autonomous activity:

"The unions grew as capitalism and heavy industry developed, becoming gigantic organizations with thousands of members throughout entire countries, with bran­ches in every town and factory. Function­aries were nominated... these functionaries are the leaders of the unions. These are the ones who conduct negotiations with the capitalists, a task in which they've become past masters... such an organization is no longer just an assembly of workers; it is an organized body with a political outlook, a character, a mentality, traditions and functions of its own. It's interests are different from those of the working class and it will not hesitate to defend those interests." (A. Pannekoek, International Council Corr­espondence, January 1936).

All these criticisms were correct and still form an important part of the revolutionary position on the trade unions. But it's not enough to see the bureaucraticism, the retro­grade mentality of the unions, their inability to combat capitalism. This bureaucratic character appeared relatively quickly at the end of the 19th Century, and for a long time Marxism had pointed out the ‘narrow' character of trade unionism. In Wages, Price and Profit (1866) Marx defined these limits very clearly:

"Trade Unions work well as centers of res­istance against the encroachments of capital. They fail partially from an injudicious use of their power. They fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of simultaneously trying to change it, instead of using their organized forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class, that is to say, the ultimate aboli­tion of the wages system."

The Marxist movement had even developed the basis of an analysis of how the unions were ceasing to be the mode of organization of the class. In an article published in the British union paper Labor Standard, May-June 1881, Engels explained:

"More than this, there are plenty of symptoms that the working class of this country is awakening to the conscious­ness that it has for some time been moving in the wrong groove; that the present movements for higher wages and shorter hours exclusively, keep it in a vicious circle out of which there is no issue; that it is not the lowness of wages which forms the fundamental evil, but the wages system itself. This knowledge once gener­ally spread amongst the working class, the position of Trades Unions must change con­siderably. They will no longer enjoy the privilege of being the only organizations of the working class. At the side of, or above, the Unions of special trades there must spring up a general Union, a political organization of the working class as a whole."

The councilists' critique of the unions thus consisted of a revival of certain elements in the Marxist analysis of the unions -- one that was hardly deepened and which tended to look at the unions as if they had always belonged to the bourgeoisie (a position which certain of today's sects, like the PIC, have ended up with). The councilists didn't understand the material basis for the unions' movement into the bourgeois camp, their integration into the state, their counter-revolutionary function. What's more, in a critique of some of Grossmann's ideas about the necessity for the collapse of capitalism, Pannekoek expressed his incompre­hension and rejection of the concept of the decadence of capitalism:

"The impotence of trade union action, an impotence which appeared a long time ago, must not be attributed to any economic collapse but to a displacement of powers within society....Parliamentarism and union tactics didn't wait for the present crisis to prove themselves to be useless - they've already shown this for decades. It's not because of the economic collapse of capitalism, but because of the monstrous deployment of its power, its extension across the earth, the exacerbation of its political conflicts, the violent reinforce­ment of its internal strength, that the proletariat must resort to mass action, deploying the strength of the whole class." (Pannekoek, June 1934, in no.1 of Rate­korrespondenz, organ of the Group of International Communists in Holland).

This article was aimed at Rosa Luxemburg's theory, schematized by Grossmann. It was easy to criticize Grossmann's mechanistic approach to economics, but Pannekoek didn't respond to the basic question: had trade unionism always been useless, or hadn't the possibility of gaining economic and political reforms in the ascendant period been the basis of parliamentarism and trade unionism? It wasn't enough to understand the pernicious effects that this reality had had on the workers' movement (reformism, economism, opportunism within Social Democracy); it was also necessary to understand that this particular phase in the activity of the class was over once and for all; that Stalinism, for example, was not a ‘neo-reformist' or ‘neo-opportunist' deviation of the workers' movement, but an expression of decadent capitalism. To recognize that world capitalism had entered its period of decadence, of historic decline, didn't mean taking on a fatalistic, wait-and-see attitude to history. It meant a class ruptures with the old social democratic theories, with the polit­ical and organizational methods that had been appropriate to the ascendant phase of capit­alism.

The councilists had a vision of the need for this rupture, but it remained a partial one. On the one hand, this current was far from being homogenous (cf our articles on the Dutch left in IR 16, 17, and 21). On the other hand, the councilists looked for the causes of defeat solely in the politics of the CI and the Bolshevik party. This led them to underestimate the activity of commun­ists and to abandon the idea that it was necessary to prepare for the revolution through the reconstitution of the party. Pannekoek more and more gave up defending the need for the party and restricted himself to a role of pleading in favor of class autonomy.

But although these weaknesses led the counc­ilist current into profound errors on the question of the party, it would be a grave mistake to forget that the councilists really deepened the whole question of the self-organization of the class and thus raised a problem that was crucial to the period of decadence. From the moment that trade unions and trade unionism were seen to be opposed to the revolutionary activity of the working class, it was necessary to point out the new forms that the workers' struggle was adopting. Pannekoek dealt with this question in his text on the workers councils, written during World War II:

"Direct action means action of the workers themselves without the intermediary of trade union officials. Such a strike is called a wildcat as contrasted to the strike proclaimed by the union according to the rules and regulations... They are the harbingers of future greater fights, when great social emergencies, with heav­ier pressure and deeper distress, drive the masses into stronger action." (Pannekoek, The Workers Councils)

Pannekoek insisted on the ability of the workers to conduct their struggles themselves, to experience their own potential and coll­ective force, without falling into a crude ‘spontaneosm' or into a schematic, linear vision of the process of working class self-organization:

"The self-determination of the workers over their fighting action is not e demand put up by theory, by arguments of practibility, but the statement of a fact evolving from practice. Often in great social movements it occurred -- and doubtless will occur again -- that the actions did not comply with the decisions. Sometimes central committees made an appeal for a universal strike, and only small groups here and there followed; elsewhere the committees weighed scrupulously, without venturing a decision, and the workers broke loose in mass struggle. It may be possible even that the same workers who enthusiastically resolved to strike shrink back when standing before the deed. Or, conversely, that prudent hesitation governs the decisions and yet, driven by inner forces, a non-resolved strike irresistibly breaks out. Whereas in their conscious thinking old watchwords and theories play a role and determine arguments and opinions, at the moment of decision on which weal and woe depend, strong intuition of real condit­ions breaks forth, determining the actions. This does not mean that such intuition always guides right...

Thus the two forms of organization and fight stand in contrast, the old one of trade unions and the regulated strike, the new one of the spontaneous strike and workers' councils. This does not mean that the former at some time will be simply substituted by the latter as the only alternative. Intermediate forms may be conceived, attempts to correct the evils and weaknesses of trade unionism and preserve its right principles..." (ibid).

Pannekoek's defense of the autonomy of the proletariat in its struggles certainly contains ambiguities and weaknesses, but these were, in a more profound sense expressions of the general condition of the revolutionary milieu in a period of counter-revolution, a period in which the horrors of World War II had come along to make the activity of the class and of revolutionaries even more difficult. What was important and decisive in this text, as in those of other internationalist proletarian currents, was its confidence in the working class as a revolutionary force.

This is why it would be a mistake to pose the trajectory of the Italian left against that of the council communists and to see either one or the other of these currents as the ‘pure' expression of Marxist continuity. Neither is it a question of making an eclectic synthesis of the political positions developed by these currents in the 1930's or the imm­ediate post-war period. The merit of the Gauche Communiste de France, which published Internationalisme, was precisely its ability to avoid making a fetish out of ‘tradition', to reject the apologetic glorification of one current against the others -- a road that was unfortunately followed by a part of the Italian left, contrary to the whole spirit of Bilan. In order to do this, the Bordigists had to throw Bilan into the dustbin and allow Bordiga to start theoretical work from scratch -- which in fact meant a return to the old Leninist errors and a rejection of the gains made by the Italian left, notably on the national question and on the question of decadence.

Chenier

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[1] Very few texts in Bilan dealt with the union question directly, but although there was a sort of official position which remained attached to the Leninist viewpoint, the recognition of the decadence of capitalism led a tendency within Bilan to re-evaluate the union question.

1) In the International Review n.20, we defined the coming decade of the 80s as “the years of truth”, where the outcome of the historical al­ternative presented by the capitalist crisis would, in large measure, be determined: either world war or proletarian revolution.

This perspective could hardly have been more clearly continued by events during the first year of the decade. The first half of the year, despite important social movements like the steel strike in Great Britain, was dominated by the considerable aggravation of inter-imperia­list tension following the invasion of Afgha­nistan. But the second half of the year was marked by an unprecedented intensification of proletarian struggles, which in Poland reached their highest point since the beginning of the historical resurgence of working class strug­gle in 1968.

For six months, the bourgeoisie seemed to have a free hand to conduct its warlike campaigns and prepare for a third global holocaust. But today, the anxiety of the ruling class every­where about the workers’ struggle in Poland, and the unity displayed by the world bourgeoi­sie in its attempts to dampen down these strug­gles are another illustration of the fact that the proletariat is the only force in society which has the power to prevent capitalism from unleashing the war which is its only ‘answer’ to the economic crisis.

2) It is not yet the time to draw up a final balance sheet of the proletarian struggles in Poland, since the movement is still in progress and the potential of the current situation is not yet exhausted. However, five months after the start of the struggles, we can already draw out a number of important lessons. In addition it is important to understand how things stand in Poland today.

For the present we want to emphasise two points:

- the enormous importance of this movement, and the considerable step forward it represents for the proletariat of every country.

— the fact that the struggles in Poland, and the lessons of the struggle, can only be understood within an international context.

3) Everywhere, the bourgeoisie and its servants in the press have tried to show that the strug­gles in Poland are to be explained by specific conditions in Poland or, at best, by specific conditions in Eastern Europe. In Moscow, the line is that if there are ‘problems’ in Poland (which is a fact they can no longer hide), they are the result of the ‘mistakes’ of the old leadership. In any case, they have nothing to do with the situation in Russia! In Paris, Bonn, London and Washington, the favourite explanation is that workers in Eastern Europe are disconten­ted because they are tired of the queues outside the shops, and they want ‘freedom’ and democracy like in the West. In the West, of course, workers have nothing to complain about! That the workers in Poland are resisting the effects of the same crisis, and struggling against the same exploitation as workers in the West and every­where else... what an absurd idea!

When events in one part of the world give us a glimpse of the coming nightmare of the bourgeoi­sie — generalised proletarian struggle against capitalism — then the cry goes up that ‘this is an exceptional case!’. The bourgeoisie feverish­ly tries to discover what distinguishes this particular case from conditions everywhere else. And it’s true that they don’t have to invent all these differences: conditions are not identical in every country in the world. It is true that certain characteristics of the movement in Po­land are the product of specific economic, poli­tical and social conditions in Poland, as well as specific historical factors. Equally, the movement in Poland is the product of the gene­ral framework given by conditions in Eastern countries and in the Russian bloc. But at the same time revolutionaries and the working class must clearly understand that these particular characteristics have a purely circumstantial significance, and can themselves only be under­stood from a standpoint which takes in the entire capitalist world - even though it is also ne­cessary to take account of the different pace of the development of the crisis in different countries.

4) The general framework within which events in Poland have unfolded is made up of the fol­lowing elements:

a) the global and generalised character of the economic crisis

b) the inexorable deepening of the crisis, and the increasingly intolerable sacrifices which this imposes on the exploited class.

c) the historical resurgence of the proletarian struggle since the late sixties.

d) the nature of the problems and the difficul­ties confronted by the working class; the needs experienced by the working class:

- to confront the obstacle of trade unionism

- to organise its own struggles (the impor­tance of general assemblies)

— to extend the struggle through mass strikes

e) the means adopted by the bourgeoisie to op­pose proletarian struggle, and force the working class to accept the economic and military needs of the national capital:

— the increasingly systematic use of state repression

- the use of an armoury of mystifications aimed either at preventing explosions of class struggle, or, if this is impossible, at diverting them into blind alleys.

The different sections of the bourgeoisie in the advanced countries divide up the work be­tween them: at present, we generally find the right-wing in government and the left-wing in opposition.

5) The particular conditions which played a part in the development of events in Poland de­rive firstly from Poland’s membership of the Eastern bloc, and secondly from specific natio­nal characteristics.

In common with all countries in the Eastern bloc, the situation in Poland is characterised by:

a) the extreme gravity of the crisis which today has plunged millions of workers into a state of poverty verging on famine;

b) the extreme rigidity of the social structure which make it practically impossible for oppo­sitional forces to emerge within the bourgeoi­sie, forces capable of defusing social discontent: in Russia and its satellites every protest mo­vement threatens to act as a focus for massive discontent simmering within the proletariat. This discontent is building up within a popula­tion which has been subjected to decades of the most violent counter—revolution. The intensity of this counter-revolution corresponds to the scale of the formidable class movement which it had to crush: the Russian revolution of 1917.

c) the central importance of state terror as practically the only means to maintain order.

In addition, Poland is distinguished by:

a) the national oppression, above all by Russia, which has lasted for more than 100 years. This continues today in another form and accounts for the strength of nationalist mystifications within the working class;

b) the importance of Catholicism which has, for centuries, been seen as a centre of resistance to this oppression and has become a symbol of the Polish national identity (Poland is the on­ly Catholic country among the Slavic nations). Much of the resistance to Stalinism during the past thirty years has been channelled through the Catholic church.

6) The specificities of the situation in Poland can account for some of the mystifications which capitalism is able to implant in the minds of the proletariat:

— the democratic illusions which are a direct product of the totalitarian nature of the re­gimes in Eastern Europe;

- nationalist and religious mystifications which are largely the product of the history of the Polish nation.

In fact the aspects of the workers’ movement in Poland which can be attributed to specifically Polish conditions are precisely those which ex­press the weaknesses of the movement.

The continuing influence of bourgeois ideas and the weight of the past upon the proletariat is due in large measure to these national specifi­cities, since they are a clear expression of a world divided into nations, classes and various other categories. Above all, they are an ex­pression of the class which can only survive by perpetuating these divisions - the bourgeoi­sie.

By contrast the real strength of the proleta­riat in Poland was not expressed in any speci­fic characteristics of the struggles there. The strength of the proletariat is the product of everything which expresses its class auto­nomy, its break with the atomisation and divi­sions of the past, everything which expresses the general objectives and ultimate goals of the movement, rejects all local and inherited forms of alienation, and dares to turn towards the only possible future for the whole of huma­nity: communism, which will abolish all antago­nism between human beings through the creation of the human community.

In this context the most important result of the specific conditions in Poland was that they allowed all the most fundamental and general characteristics of the proletarian struggle in the present epoch to emerge clearly, while at the same time generating the classic conditions for a crisis within the ruling class. In Poland the future of the class struggle everywhere was illustrated with a clarity which seemed at times to verge on a caricature.

The extreme gravity of the economic situation, the brutality of the attacks against the wor­king class, increasing rejection of trade unio­nism by the working class, self—organisation of the working class, mass strikes, the political convulsions of the bourgeoisie... none of these are specific to the situation in Poland. They are ‘specific’ characteristics of the present epoch and they concern the whole of society.

7) The catastrophic economic situation in the countries in the Eastern bloc, and notably in Poland, can only be explained within the frame­work of the general crisis of capitalism (this is becoming clear even to those cretins who call themselves economists, both in the East and in the West). Furthermore many aspects of the situation in the Eastern bloc illustrate what the development of the crisis has in store for every country, including the great industri­al powers which have until now been shielded from the worst effects of the crisis. The increasingly intolerable conditions of the prole­tariat in Poland today show us what lies in store for the proletariat in the great indus­trial centres. Even though in the short term the immiseration of the working class takes a different form (low wages and shortages in the East, unemployment in the West) according to whether the regime is capable of throwing whole sectors of the working class, or is prevented from doing this by the threat that it will lead to further economic collapse and a loss of con­trol over the workers once they’ve been ejected from the industrial barracks.

In the end, just as the deterioration of the con­dition of the working class in Poland (notably through a sharp increase in the price of food) was a decisive factor in pushing the proletariat towards revolt, despite a level of police terror comparable to a war-time state of siege — so the aggravation of the conditions of the proleta­riat in other countries will force the proleta­riat to throw off the yoke of repression and bourgeois mystification.

8) Similarly, while it was the complete and obvious integration of the unions into the state apparatus, typical of Stalinist regimes, which initially led the Polish workers to recognise the need to reject these organisations, the Po­lish workers have shown the way forward for wor­kers in countries where the unions have not yet so clearly revealed their capitalist nature. But the movement in Poland went beyond the de­nunciation of the official unions. It has in­creasingly tended to go beyond the “free” trade unions, the idea of which has been attractive to Polish workers because they saw the need for organisations which were independent of the state and capable of defending them against the inevitable counter—attack by the bourgeoisie. In a few months the living experience of the workers in Poland showed the impossibility for the working class in decadent capitalism to cre­ate permanent, trade union type organisations without them becoming an obstacle to the strug­gle. Here again the proletariat in Poland has shown the way forward for the rest of the wor­king class which will on turn be forced, in its struggle against capital, to reject the seductive charms of all types of ‘radical’, ‘militant’ or ‘rank and file’ unionism.

9) Poland is another illustration of the fact that when there is an acute crisis in society, history accelerates. Concerning the need to denounce the unions, the Polish workers have travelled further in a few weeks than the pro­letariat in other countries has done over a period of several generations. But this ac­celeration is not limited to the question of the trade unions. In relation to two other questions - the self—organisation of the wor­king class, and the generalisation of the strug­gle (both clearly linked to the question of the trade unions) - the working class in Po­land is now at the vanguard of the world pro­letariat.

Here again, the ‘specificities’ of the situation in Poland and Eastern Europe (which are merely the general characteristics of decadent capitalism in a more advanced form than elsewhere) have forced Polish workers to discover the paths which will have to be followed by the proletariat of the whole world.

Thus, the authorities’ habitual use of propa­ganda based on a massive and systematic distortion of reality, as well as the state’s to­talitarian control over every aspect of social life, pushed the Polish workers to develop a degree of self-organisation which represents an immense step forward in comparison to what has been achieved in any previous struggle. The successful use of modern technology (e.g. the loudspeakers connected to the negotiating rooms, and the cassette recorders which allowed all the workers to hear the discussions in the cen­tral assembly) to facilitate control by the ge­neral assemblies over the organisation which they had created, and to allow all the workers to participate in their own struggle, is an example to be followed by workers in all coun­tries.

In the same way, faced with a state with a strong propensity to resort to violent repres­sion, a state which rules through terror and the extreme atomisation of individuals, the Polish proletariat, despite the attempts of the government to divide the movement, knew how to make effective use of that weapon which is so important for struggles in the present pe­riod, and is the only way to paralyse the ap­paratus of repression and overcome atomisation: the mass strike, the generalisation of the strug­gle. The ability of the Polish working class to mobilise on a massive scale not only for the defence of specific demands but also in solidarity with the struggle of other sectors of the class is an expression of the true nature of the working class - of the class that contains the seeds of communism within itself, and which will have to display the same unity all over the world if it is to rise to meet the challenge of its historic tasks.

10) It is not only in the struggles of the pro­letariat that the events in Poland prefigure what will increasingly become the general situ­ation in all the industrialized countries. The internal convulsions of the bourgeoisie that we can see in Poland today, including their more exaggerated aspects, are an indication of sub­terranean developments going on throughout bourgeois society. Since August the ruling circles in Poland have been in a state of genuine panic. In government circles, for the past five months, ministerial portfolios have been constantly chan­ging hands. It has even got to the point that a government ministry has been entrusted to a Catholic. But the convulsions have been stron­gest in the most important force within the ruling class: the party. At the present time the United Workers’ Party of Poland looks like an immense fairground where the different cli­ques slog it out, settle old scores, take per­sonal revenge, and put their particular inte­rests above those of the party .and the natio­nal capital. Within the bureaucracy, purge follows purge. The supreme organ, the Politburo, is in disarray. The man ‘who knew how to talk to the workers’, Gierek, has suffered the same fate as Gomulka in 1971. He has even been swept out of the Central Committee, in vio­lation of party regulations. At all levels, so many scapegoats have been found, that they have had to call on the discredited old guard to re­place them - for example the virulent anti-Semite Moczar. Even the base of the party, which is normally servile, has been affected by these convulsions. More than half the worker mili­tants have left the official unions (which Prav­da describes as “healthy forces”) to join the independent unions. There have even been at­tempts at coordination between sections of the party at grass roots level, outside the official structures, and these efforts have been accom­panied by denunciations of “the bureaucracy of the leadership”.

The panic which has seized the party is an in­dication of the impasse in which the Polish bour­geoisie finds itself. In the face of the ex­plosion of workers’ discontent, it has been for­ced to allow oppositional forces - the indepen­dent unions - to appear and develop, The fun­ction of these unions corresponds to that of the left in opposition in most of the Western coun­tries. They have the same ‘radical’ and ‘workerist’ language, the function of which is to derail workers’ combativity, and the same basic solidarity with the ‘national interest’. But a Stalinist regime cannot tolerate the existence of such oppositional forces without profound danger to itself; this is just as true today as it was yesterday. The congenital fragility and rigidity of these regimes has not disappeared by magic, thanks to the explosion of workers’ struggles. Just the opposite! The regime is forced to tolerate a foreign body within its entrails, which it needs in order to survive. But this body is hardly able to perform its function and is rejected by all the fibres of the regime’s own organism. Thus, the regime is going through the worst convulsions in its history.

Antagonisms within the ruling class of a country are nothing new. It is these very real antago­nisms which are used in the West today to dis­orientate the working class - with a right in government which imposes more and more violent austerity measures, and a left which noisily denounces them in order to make them more ac­ceptable to the workers. In ‘normal times’ the­se divisions within the bourgeoisie, while they are a weakness in one sense, notably in inter­national competition, are also a factor which strengthens the bourgeois in face of the wor­king class, provided they are used correctly as a source of mystification. But when these divisions and the power of the working class grow to a certain point, they turn against the ruling class, itself. When the bourgeoisie is unable any longer to make the workers accept either of the false alternatives which they are offered, then the open conflict within the ru­ling class becomes the proof that it is no lon­ger capable of governing society. These anta­gonisms then cease to be a factor which para­lyses the proletariat and become a stimulant to the development of the class struggle.

Thus the reluctance of the leadership to ac­cept the principle of independent unions (at the end of August), before the registration of their statutes which finally took place at the end of October, allowed the bourgeoisie to weaken the workers’ economic struggle by di­verting their attention to this question. But the arrest of two militants of Solidarity (at the end of November) ended in a humiliating re­treat by the regime, even over such a thorny question as the control of the forces of repres­sion, because this time the state was faced with the threat of a new generalised strike wave.

The example of the convulsions of the Polish bourgeoisie gives us an idea of what a ruling class looks like when it is being driven back by the working class. In the last few years there has been no shortage of political crises (like the one in Portugal in 1974—75), but, un­til now, nowhere else has the proletariat been such an important factor in the internal con­vulsions of the bourgeoisie. Political crises within the bourgeoisie provoked directly by the class struggle: this is another phenomenon which will become generalised in the years to come!

11) The scale of the convulsions of the Polish bourgeoisie is shown, not only by the fragility of the regime, but in a much more fundamental way by the force of the workers’ movement in Poland, which ravaged the country for five months, and gripped the attention of Europe and the whole world.

We have already drawn attention to the strength of this movement — to its capacity to break out of a trade unionist framework, to go beyond the alternative unions, to develop forms of real working class self—organisation, and to succes­sfully and effectively generalise the struggle.

But the strength of the movement is also shown by its duration: five months of more or less permanent mobilisation, of incessant discussion and reflection on the problems confronted by the working class.

During these five months, the movement, far from dying down, has become stronger. From being a simple reaction to the rise of meat prices, the struggle became a series of open trials of stren­gth with the state, and culminated with the mobilisation of the sector of the working class whose weight is most decisive — that is, the workers in the capital city — to force the au­thorities to capitulate by releasing workers who had been arrested.

During these five months the struggle has ac­quired an increasingly political significance: economic demands have grown in scope and depth, while political demands have become increasing­ly radical. At first the workers’ political demands still reflected the influence of bour­geois ideology, in for example the demand for free trade unions or for television time to be given to the church. But the later demands for control and limitation of the repressive apparatus clearly could not be tolerated by any government in the world, because they amounted to a demand for dual power.

During these five months, figures like Walesa who at first seemed to be ‘radical’ and ‘extremist’, have assumed the role of firemen dis­patched by the authorities to deal with each new flare-up, whereas the small minority who had argued against the acceptance of the agreement at Gdansk became a large majority which could no longer be counted upon to support all the Kurons and the Walesas put together. Even the ‘leaders’ retained their popularity, the dynamic of the movement was not towards a stren­gthening of their authority, but towards a grow­ing questioning of the ‘responsible’ attitude that they advised the workers’ assemblies to adopt. These assemblies no longer allowed themselves to be convinced in a few minutes of the ‘need for compromise’ as they had in Gdansk on 30 August. Instead, for hours and hours they turned a deaf ear towards all the siren calls for ‘realism’, as at the Huta Warszawa plant on 27 November.

These were five months, finally, in which the proletariat retained the initiative against all the bumbling and incoherent reactions of the bourgeoisie.

12) There are those who make great play of the — real — weaknesses of the workers’ movement in Poland, such as the democratic and neo-trade unionist illusions, the influence of religion and nationalism, and conclude that there was no great depth or importance to the movement. It is clear that If one is waiting until the working class, whenever and wherever It begins to struggle, has broken completely with all the mystifications that capitalism has imposed on it over the centuries, until it has a clear vision of the ultimate goals of the struggle and how to achieve them - until it has, in other words, a communist consciousness, then it is unlikely that one will understand what is hap­pening in Poland or anywhere else until the triumph of the revolution. The trouble with this vision, which in general has a very ‘radical’ tinge, is that, as well as expressing an impatience and scepticism typical of the petty bourgeoisie, it turns the living move­ment of the class completely on its head. The proletarian movement is a process which pain­fully disengages itself from the grip of the capitalist order in which it is born. As re­volutionaries, and Marx in particular, have often pointed out, the mantles of the old world stick to the skin, and it is only after a hard struggle, and several attempts, that they begin to fall away to reveal the true character of the movement underneath. The armchair ‘revolutiona­ry’ confuses the beginning and the end of the movement. He wants to arrive before he has set off. He has taken a photograph, and having con­fused the image with the model, accuses the latter of being immobile. In the case of Poland, instead of seeing the speed with which the movement progressed from one stage to the next the conquest of fear and atomisation, the growth of solidarity and self—organisation, the emergence of the mass strike — he only sees the nationalism and the religion which the workers’ experience has not yet enabled them to overcome. Instead of seeing the dynamic which leads wor­kers to reject and go beyond the trade union form of organisation, he only sees the trade union illusions which still remain. Instead of understanding the considerable distance tra­velled by the movement he only sees how far it has still to go, and this discourages him.

Revolutionaries never hide from their class how long and difficult is the road that lies before us. They don’t ‘always look on the bright side’ But because the role of revolutionaries is to stimulate the class struggle, and to make a real contribution to the growth of the prole­tariat’s consciousness of its own power, they don’t ‘always look on the dark side’ either.

Those people who belittle the achievements of the Polish workers, could also have said in March 1871: “Oh, the Parisian workers are all nationalists!”... and in January 1905: “Well, all the Russian workers do is march behind icons!”.., and the two most important revolutionary experiences before 1917 would have pas­sed them by.

13) Another way of underestimating the impor­tance of the movement in Poland today, is to say that it is less advanced then the struggles in 1970 and 1976, because it has not led to a violent confrontation with the forces of state repression. But this conception ignores the fact that:

- the number of workers who are killed in a strug­gle has never been a measurement of its strength

- what made the Polish bourgeoisie give way in 1970 and 1976 was not the fact that a few party headquarters were burned down, but the threat of a generalisation of the movement, especially after the massacres.

- in 1980 the bourgeoisie was prevented from using violent repression because this would have been the quickest way to accelerate the upward course of the movement.

— on the basis of their past experience the workers knew that their true strength did not derive from sporadic confrontations with the police, but from the organisation and the growth of the strike movement.

- while the armed insurrection is an inevitable stage for the proletariat on the road to the sei­zure of power and emancipation, the insurrection

is quite different from the riots which have always been part of its struggle against exploi­tation.

Riots, like those in 1970 and 1976 at Gdansk, Gdynia and Radom, are an elementary reaction by the working class. They are sporadic and rela­tively unorganised. They are an expression of anger or despair. On a military level they al­ways end in defeat, even if they can force a momentary retreat by the bourgeoisie. The in­surrection~ on the other hand, occurs at the culminating point of a revolutionary process like in 1917. It is a deliberate, considered, organised and conscious act by the working class. Because its objective is the seizure of power, its aim is not to force the bourgeoi­sie to retreat or grant concessions, but to inflict a military defeat and completely des­troy the bourgeoisie and the whole apparatus of bourgeois power and repression. However, much more than a military or technical problem, the insurrection is a political problem: its essential weapons are the organisation and con­sciousness of the working class. This is why, however it may appear on the surface, and how­ever far there is still to go before this point is reached, the proletariat in Poland, because it is more organised, more experienced and more conscious, is closer to the insurrection today than it was in 1970 or in 1976.

14) The thesis that the struggles in 1980 are less important then those of 1970, while it might have appeared to be true in July, or at the start of the movement, was completely inde­fensible 5 months later. Whether one judges the present movement by its duration, its de­mands, its extent, its organisation, its dy­namic, or by the nature of the concessions made by the bourgeoisie and the gravity of its poli­tical crisis, it can easily be seen that the movement has been much more powerful then in 1970.

The difference between the two movements can be explained by the experience gained by the Polish workers since 1970. But this is only a partial and in itself insufficient explana­tion. In fact one can only understand the size of the present movement within the general con­text of the historical resurgence of the world proletariat since the end of the sixties, and by taking account of the different phases of this resurgence.

The Polish winter of 1970 was part of the first wave of struggles — a wave which marked the start of the historical resurgence, and lasted from May ‘68 in France to the strikes in Britain in the Winter of 1973—74, and included the “hot autumn” of 1969 in Italy, the “Cordobazo” in Argentina, the wildcat strikes in Germany in the same year, and many other struggles which af­fected ALL the industrialised countries. Emer­ging at a time when the effects of the crisis had hardly begun to be felt (although in Poland the situation was already catastrophic), this working class offensive surprised tile bourgeoi­sie (as it surprised the proletariat itself). Thus the bourgeoisie, more or less everywhere, found itself momentarily disarmed. But the bour­geoisie recovered itself rapidly and, through all kinds of mystifications, succeeded in hol­ding back the second wave of struggle until 1978. This second wave was led by the Ameri­can miners in 1978, the French steelworkers at the start of 1979, the Rotterdam dockworkers in autumn ‘79, the British steelworkers at the start of 1980, as well as the Brazilian metal workers throughout this period. The present movement of the Polish proletariat belongs to this second wave of struggles.

These movements were distinguished from the start by:

— a much more catastrophic development of the crisis of capitalism;

— the fact that the bourgeoisie was better pre­pared to respond to the class struggle;

— the greater experience of the working class, particularly in relation to the problem of the trade unions. Proof of this, experience has been demonstrated in the past few years by the explicit denunciation of the unions by signi­ficant minorities of workers, as well as by a clarification of class positions on this ques­tion by some revolutionary groups.

In these conditions, the second wave of strug­gles has assumed far greater proportions than the preceding wave, despite all the traps laid for it by an alerted bourgeoisie. This is con­firmed today by the workers’ struggles in Po­land.

15) The unprecedented scope of the struggles in Poland, the gravity of the political crisis of the bourgeoisie, and the depth of the world economic crisis, might suggest that a revolutionary situation has arisen in Poland. But this is not the case.

Lenin defined the revolutionary crisis by the fact that “those at the top are no longer able to govern as before” and “those at the bottom no longer want to live as before’. At first sight, this is the situation in Poland. How­ever, in the present period, given the histo­rical experience accumulated by the bourgeoi­sie, notably in October 1917, it would be il­lusory to think that the bourgeoisie will al­low its weakest sectors to confront the pro­letariat alone. If we look at how the wise men of the Western bloc brought their gifts to the manger of the newborn ‘democracy’ In Spain in 1976, to help the Spanish bourgeoisie to confront what was at that time the most com­bative sector of the proletariat in the world, we can see that today, “those at the top” in­clude not only the rulers in Warsaw, but also and above all those in Moscow, as well as in all the other important capitals. The unity demonstrated by the bourgeoisie in the face of the proletarian threat, notably on the le­vel of the bloc, shows that a revolutionary period will not really be on the cards until the proletariat is on the verge of open class war in all the countries able to ‘lend a hand’ to other sections of the bourgeoisie when they are in trouble.

At another level as well, this international maturity of the movement is indispensable for the opening up of a revolutionary period. It is the only thing which will enable the Polish workers to break from the nationalism which still clouds their vision, and prevent them from at­taining the level of consciousness without which the revolution is impossible.

Finally such a level of consciousness will ne­cessarily be expressed by the appearance of communist political organisations within the working class. The terrible counter-revolu­tion which was imposed in Russia and the Eas­tern bloc countries led to the complete phy­sical liquidation of all the political expres­sions of the proletariat in these countries, and it is only when the proletariat begins to loosen the grip of the counter-revolution, as it is doing today, that it will be able to begin to recreate these organisations.

While the hour has not yet come for an insur­rection in Poland, nevertheless a first break has been opened up in the Eastern bloc, after half a century of counter-revolution. The process that will lead to the reconstitution of revolutionary political organisations has already begun.

16) In the same way as the characteristics of the present movement in Poland can only be understood within an international framework, the perspectives for the future can also only be drawn out within this framework.

Even before it has appeared clearly on the level of the class struggle, the international dimen­sion of events in Poland has been demonstrated by the current manoeuvres by the bourgeoisies of all the great powers. The bourgeoisie in these countries either stress their concern over the “threat to socialism” in Poland, or say that they are “prepared to respond to the preoccu­pations of the Polish authorities in the diffe­rent areas in which they arise” (Giscard d’ Es­taing receiving Jagielski on 21 November) and warn the USSR against any intervention in Po­land.

The concern of the bourgeoisie in all countries is real and profound. For while the bourgeoisie can tolerate events of this kind as long as they occur in a second rank country (just as they allow the crisis to decimate the peripheral coun­tries), a similar situation in one of the prin­cipal capitalist metropoles, like Russia, Fran­ce, Britain or Germany, would be intolerable to the bourgeoisie. Poland is like a lighted fuse which could lead to an explosion that would en­gulf the whole of Eastern Europe including Rus­sia, and set light to these major West European countries which are worst affected by the crisis. This is why the world bourgeoisie has taken char­ge of the development of the situation in Poland.

For this operation, the two blocs have divided up the work between them:

— the West has taken responsibility for giving aid to the Polish economy, which is on the verge of bankruptcy: there is no possibility of an economic return from the loans, amounting to 20 billion dollars, granted to Poland by the USA, France and Germany. Everyone knows that they are subsidies that will never be repaid and that their purpose is to provide food for the Polish workers during the winter and thus to prevent further revolts.

- Russia’s role is to make threats today, and later provide military ‘fraternal assistance’ to the Polish bourgeoisie if it can’t sort things out on its own.

Despite all the warnings from the West against any Russian ‘adventurism’, and despite Russia’s denunciation of the ‘intrigues of American im­perialism and its puppets in Bonn’, there is a basic solidarity between the two blocs, whose common aim is to silence the proletariat in Po­land as quickly as possible.

The Russian, Czech and East German diatribes are a classic example of the use of the propaganda weapon. They betray a certain anxiety that the West will use the financial hold that it has over Poland and the other Eastern bloc countries to its own advantage. But their principal function is to threaten the workers in Poland and to prepare the ground for a possible intervention, even though this ‘solution’ is only seen as a last resort (i.e., if the Po­lish state collapses), because the fear remains that such an action might spark off a social explosion in Eastern Europe.

As for the warning from the West, while they are also, in part, traditional anti-Russian propaganda, they also have another significance - which was not the case for previous warnings of this kind, for example in relation to the situation in the Persian Gulf or in response to the invasion of Afghanistan. Poland is an integral part of the Eastern bloc, and an in­tervention by Russian troops, however massive, (and any intervention would also involve the use of front—line detachments from East Ger­many) would not lead to a change in the balance of forces between the two blocs. In fact, the Secretary—General of NATO, Lung, has stated clearly that his organisation would not res­pond to a Russian invasion. In fact, the prin­cipal target of these repeated warnings is not the Russian government, although it is true that they are to some extent an attempt to dis­suade a bourgeoisie which is less subtle and experienced than the Western ruling class from embarking on an ‘adventure’ which would have unforeseeable social consequences not only for the East but also for the West. The warnings are essentially an ideological barrage aimed at the Western proletariat. They are an at­tempt to hide from the working class the true meaning of any Russian intervention in Poland - to hide the fact that, if it happens, an in­vasion would be a policy operation by capita­lism as a whole against the international working class. The Western bourgeoisie would pre­sent an invasion as a new example of ‘Soviet barbarism and totalitarianism’ against ‘human rights’. The bourgeoisie would attempt to di­vert the indignation and the anger that such an operation would not fail to provoke among workers in the West, so that it could be direc­ted against “wicked Russia”. It would use this anger to ‘build solidarity’ between all social classes in the ‘democratic camp’, and this to prevent the proletariat from displaying a class solidarity by taking up the struggle against the real enemy: capital.

Despite the dramatic tone of the Western warnings they are not a sign of a new aggravation of ten­sion between the imperialist blocs. In order to make things very clear, and to show the good faith and good intentions of the USA, Reagan sent his own personal ambassador Percy to Moscow at the end of November, to tell the leaders of the Eastern bloc that America was prepared to re-examine the SALT agreements in a more posi­tive sense. In reality, despite certain ap­pearances, the struggle of the Polish workers has served to warm up the East-West relations that were made extremely frosty by the invasion of Afghanistan.

Thus, once again we see an illustration of the fact that the proletariat is the only force in society which is capable, through its struggle, of preventing capitalism from unleashing a third imperialist holocaust.

17) The events in Poland highlight two dangers facing the proletariat:

- capitulation to the bourgeoisie: the workers could allow themselves to be intimidated, accept Walesa’s arguments about the ‘national interest’ agree to the terrible sacrifices needed to sal­vage the national economy (even though this can only be temporary), without in any way being spared from an ever—rising level of repression;

- bloody physical crushing: the troops of the Warsaw Pact (because the Polish police and mi­litary forces would neither be strong enough nor reliable enough to carry this out) would bring their “fraternal assistance to socialism and the working class in Poland” (i.e., to capi­talism and the bourgeoisie).

Against these two dangers, the proletariat in Poland will have to:

- remain mobilised against the attempts of the bourgeoisie to ‘normalise’ the situation; pre­serve the solidarity and unity which have been its strength up to now; take advantage of this mobilisation, not to launch itself immediately into a decisive military confrontation that would be premature as long as the workers of the other Eastern countries hadn’t developed their combativity, but to continue its attempts at self-organisation, to assimilate the expe­riences of its struggle, to draw the maximum number of political lessons from it, to prepare for the struggles of tomorrow and get on with the task of forming revolutionary political organisations;

- issue an appeal to the workers of Russia and the satellite countries, since their struggle alone can paralyse the murderous hands of their bourgeoisie and allow the workers of Poland to put paid to the manoeuvres of false friends like Walesa, who is preparing the way for a ‘normalisation’ under Kania.

The proletariat of Poland is not alone. All over the world the conditions are emerging that will impel its class brothers in other countries to join the fight. It is the duty of revolutiona­ries, of all class-conscious workers, to match the solidarity shown by the bourgeoisie of all countries in its attempts to silence the Polish workers with the solidarity of the world prole­tariat.

The proletariat must do exactly what the bour­geoisie is desperately trying to avoid: the battles in Poland mustn’t remain isolated and futureless, but on the contrary must be the har­binger of a new leap in the combativity and consciousness of workers in all countries.

If the movement in Poland has now reached a certain plateau, this is in no way a sign of its weakness. On the contrary, this plateau is already situated at a high altitude and, in this sense, the working class in Poland has already responded to the need of the world pro­letariat to push back the threat of war by “ta­king its struggle onto a higher level”, as the ICC said in its statement on the invasion of Afghanistan (20 January 1980). What’s more, the movement in Poland will only be condemned to remain at this level if it remains isolated, but there is no reason why it should be condemned to such isolation. That is why, paraphrasing what Rosa Luxemburg said about the Russian re­volution in 1918, we can say with hope: “In Poland the problem could only be posed: it’s up to the world proletariat to resolve it”

ICC, 4/12/80.